Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise (A Winter’s Journey) is a setting for baritone and piano of poems by Willhelm Muller. These are stranger songs, paeans to a lost love, a sweetheart who is irreplaceable and now unattainable. The lone journey sees the obsessive and grief-ridden lover spurned, exposed to the elements of nature with winter ice, wind and snow to contend with.
But our protagonist almost welcomes such discomfort, a kind of melancholy masochism, all part of his self-loathing and self-pity. But we do empathise with the wanderer in all his isolation from civilisation, as he bemoans the transient nature of love and expounds his own heartbreak.
His sorrow at times turns to thoughts of death by suicide, the only way to end the pain of human existence. His only hope comes in dreams of his past love but even these fade back into his default mode of misery.
His heart may be seen as black or ‘hot’ and it seems as there is no redemption or deliverance from this world-weariness, seeing the essential futility nature of his life. His aimless voyage has taken him out of the company of those he fears hate him, and his remorse and regret covers all his thoughts.
Schubert’s settings are mainly quite gentle and tranquil throughout but full of melodrama and passion, capturing the beauty of the poems’ construction. The last stanzas are repeated for extra emphasis and the lilting melancholy of the music perfectly matches Muller’s narrative.
There are harsher moments to depict the traveller’s anger and frustration and lighter moments too when he tricks his mind into false hopes. The final poem, The Hurdy-Gurdy Man, ends with a final irony: ‘Will you play your organ to my songs?’
Baritone Philip Smith and pianist James Cheung team up to perform Schubert’s song cycle, Winterreise D 911 at Clothworkers Centenary Concert Hall, University of Leeds on Saturday 21 Feb. See http://concerts.leeds.ac.uk/events/winterreise/
Top image: Mariele Neudecker
Text: Rich Jevons