Winterreise Past — Aspect Chamber Music Series

PROGRAM NOTES

Franz Schubert

(1977–1828)

Winterreise

‘I like these songs better than all the others, and you will come to like them too.’ Such was Schubert’s response when some friends criticized the grim character of Winterreise (Winter Journey), according to Josef von Spaun, who had been a close friend since their days together in school. Spaun recounts that Schubert’s mood had become more melancholy and agitated in early 1827, the year the composer turned thirty. (He died the next year.) After inquiring as to the cause, Schubert responded, ‘Well, you will soon hear it and understand.’ Not long afterward he told Spaun, ‘Come to [Franz von] Schober’s house today, I will sing you a cycle of awe-inspiring songs. I am anxious to know what you think about them. They have affected me more than has been the case with any other songs.’

Schubert sang Winterreise in his light tenor voice for his friends who, Spaun reports, were ‘quite dumbfounded by the gloomy mood, and Schober said that he liked only one of them, “Der Lindenbaum”.’ It was then that Schubert declared their worth and predicted that his friends would eventually agree. Spaun concludes: ‘He was quite right. Soon we were enthusiastic over the effect of these melancholy songs … More beautiful German ones probably do not exist and they were his real swan song.’ (The publisher Tobias Haslinger gave the title ‘Swan Song’ [Schwanengesang] to Schubert’s last fourteen songs when he released them posthumously. Although often presented on recordings and in concert as an integral set, this was not Schubert’s intent and there is no narrative thread running through the collection.)

While Schubert may have convinced friends about the power of Winterreise, audiences took longer to win over, and yet his prediction concerning the future of these twenty-four remarkable songs was realized over time. During the nineteenth century, and indeed for much of the twentieth, his first song cycle, Die schöne Müllerin (The Beautiful Maid of the Mill), attracted greater public attention and affection. That work, which like Winterreise uses texts by the north German poet Wilhelm Müller (1794–1827), more easily corresponded to the popular image of Schubert. Carefree songs mix with others telling of frustrated love and, ultimately, of early death in a relatively straightforward narrative of a young man’s quest for a miller’s beautiful daughter.

Winterreise speaks more directly to modern times, to the human condition after the Holocaust, gulags, and other twentieth-century horrors. As audiences gradually came to appreciate and value the music of a ‘darker’ Schubert, his image changed as well. He is no longer the bittersweet ‘Prince of Song’ who was sentimentalized a century ago. The greater philosophical sophistication and existential inquiry in Schubert’s stark portrait of a winter’s journey mirror shifts in his life. The poet Johann Mayrhofer remarked the changes in musical style that he perceived in his friend’s cycles: ‘[Die schöne Müllerin] opens with a joyous song of roaming, the mill songs depict love in its awakening, its deceptions and hopes, its delights and sorrows … Not so with Winterreise, the very choice of which shows how much more serious the composer had become. He had been long and seriously ill, had gone through shattering experiences, and life for him had shed its rosy color; winter had come for him. The poet’s irony, rooted in despair, appealed to him; he expressed it in cutting tones.’

Schubert wrote parts of Die schöne Müllerin in 1823, while in Vienna’s General Hospital suffering from the early stages of syphilis, and that cycle of twenty songs was published the following year. In February 1827 he encountered twelve more Müller poems about ‘wandering’ (Wanderlieder), printed in a Leipzig almanac, which became what we now know as the first half of Winterreise. As Schubert initially did not envision a second part, he wrote Fine after the last song, ‘Einsamkeit’ (Loneliness). Only later that year did he learn of twelve further poems making up Müller’s complete Die Winterreise. (Schubert’s title, unlike the poet’s, omits the definite article.) He composed the remaining songs, although this entailed a different ordering from Müller’s. Winterreise was published in two parts in 1828 and Schubert was allegedly correcting the proofs of the second set on his deathbed in November. Müller had died the previous year at thirty-two.

The poems in Winterreise trace the stark psychological journey of a solitary protagonist, someone isolated and alienated from society. The archetypical Romantic figure of the wanderer, we are told in the opening song, ‘Gute Nacht’ (Good Night), arrived in town a stranger and now departs one as well. The inexorable progression over the cycle, ending with the devastating ‘Der Leiermann’ (The Organ Grinder), reflects far more than the upset musings of a jilted lover. Susan Youens, the author of three excellent books on the two Müller cycles, observes that the unnamed protagonist (we know nearly nothing about him) ‘loses more than the love of a single person – he loses the hope that human bonds are possible for him. With the sweetheart’s loss, he becomes so conscious of his alienation from everyone, not just her, that he fears being forced away from the town like a pariah and meets that fear with defiance. Recognizing that he is also a stranger to himself, that he is compelled to act in ways he does not understand, he resolves to journey into the wintry geography of his inmost self in search of knowledge.’

Müller’s metaphors of the journey, dead nature, and loneliness may have been standard Romantic fare, but they nonetheless provided Schubert with rich musical possibilities. The walking rhythms established in the first song reappear throughout. The lifeless wintry landscape offers no consolation, even if memories of past happiness provide some retrospective relief. ‘Der Lindenbaum’ (The Linden Tree), the only song his friend Schober apparently responded to immediately, is one example of such an idyllic interlude, and it has achieved something of the status of a folk song in German-speaking countries. But most songs in Winterreise, two-thirds of which are in minor keys, provide no such hope or solace. Natural elements freeze the wanderer’s tears and storms encumber his travel amid a vista of desolation, graveyards, and threatening animals.

Youens characterizes the writing of Winterreise as ‘heroic’ because Schubert fearlessly confronted Müller’s tormented poems at a time when his own health was ruined and when his future prospects were so uncertain. Upon hearing of Schubert’s death, the artist Moritz von Schwind wrote that his friend was now ‘done with his sorrows. The more I realize now what he was like, the more I see what he has suffered.’ Heroism and suffering in the face of physical adversity are more often associated with Beethoven (who died while the cycle was being composed), but allusions to Schubert’s trials during his final years recur in his friends’ letters and reminiscences. Spaun commented on ‘how deeply his creations affected him [and how] they were conceived in suffering … There is no doubt in my mind that the state of excitement in which he composed his most beautiful songs, and especially his Winterreise, contributed to his early death.’ These responses, written by anguished friends soon after Schubert’s death, run the risk of sentimentalizing the composer once again, yet perhaps they should not entirely be dismissed. The devastating songs of Winterreise were not intended to comfort, please, or entertain. They register life at the limits.

Christopher H. Gibbs is James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Music at Bard College.

SCHUBERT: WINTERREISE

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