Winterreise

Music@Menlo LIVE announces the eagerly anticipated release of Schubert's song cycle Winterreise, featuring baritone Nikolay Borchev and pianist Wu Han. Schubert’s innovations to the art song elevated the entire genre, transforming it from simple, domestic fare into a musical form of primary importance for composers of the Romantic generation and beyond. Winterreise, composed over roughly the final year and a half of Schubert’s life, not only stands as the crowning achievement of the composer’s oeuvre of lieder but also ranks among the greatest triumphs of the Western canon at large.

Franz Schubert
Winterreise, op. 89, D. 911

Artists:

Wu Han (piano), Nikolay Borchev (baritone)

Notes on the Music:

FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797–1828)
Winterreise, op. 89, D. 911 (1827)

His magnificent accomplishments in virtually every other musical genre notwithstanding, Franz Schubert’s lieder—which number more than 600 and set texts by more than 150 poets—unquestionably represent his most significant contribution to the repertoire. While much of Schubert’s music went unrecognized during his lifetime, his songs for voice and piano were frequently performed—primarily at the Schubertiades, intimate affairs centered on Schubert’s music—and they were cherished by all who heard them.

Schubert’s innovations to the art song elevated the entire genre, transforming it from simple, domestic fare into a musical form of primary importance for composers of the Romantic generation and beyond. They are his legacy, rightly earning him the sobriquet “The Prince of Song.” The composer’s friend Josef von Spaun perhaps best summarized his legacy as a composer of lieder: “In this category he stands unexcelled, even unapproached…Every one of his songs is in reality a poem on the poem he set to music…Who among those who had the good fortune to hear some of his greatest songs does not remember how this music made a long familiar poem new for him, how it was suddenly revealed to him and penetrated his very depth?”

Winterreise, composed over roughly the final year and a half of Schubert’s life, not only stands as the crowning achievement of the composer’s oeuvre of lieder but also ranks among the singular masterpieces of the Western canon at large. Comprising twenty-four settings of poems by Wilhelm Müller, which chart the desolate winter wanderings of a young man abandoned by his beloved, Winterreise can lay claim to birthing the Romantic song cycle tradition. Though Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte (1816) preceded it by eleven years, Winterreise achieved new heights, in both its form and its psychological and expressive depth. Just as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony towered over a century’s worth of symphonists, Winterreise would represent an archetype for subsequent generations of song composers. Schubert’s cycle exemplifies the thoughtful sequence of songs, the perfect matrimony of words and their musical environment, which would set the standard for song cycles from Schumann’s Dichterliebe to the Beatles’ Abbey Road. It moreover unleashed the expressive potential of a seemingly innocuous medium: using only voice and piano, Schubert chronicles—for a duration and with emotive weight comparable to a full-length opera—a journey marked by discomfiting psychological questions and existential angst.

In its animation of Müller’s texts, Winterreise represents the apotheosis of the Prince of Song’s art. “I can neither play nor sing,” Müller wrote in his diary, “yet when I write verses, I sing and play after all. If I could produce the melodies, my songs would be more pleasing than they are now. But courage! Perhaps there is a kindred spirit somewhere who will hear the tunes behind the words and give them back to me.” In Winterreise, for the second time (following Die schöne Müllerin, composed in 1823), Schubert fulfills Müller’s hope. On hearing these songs, one feels that “Gute Nacht,” the start of the journey (“As a stranger I arrived, as a stranger I depart”), can begin only with Schubert’s dirge-like accompaniment. Both the furious wind and the rejected lover’s bitterness roar through “Die Wetterfahne” (“The wind plays with the weathervane atop my beautiful beloved’s house. And I thought in my delusion, that it mocked the poor fugitive”). The melancholy melodic arc of “Wasserflut” is the ache of Müller’s words—“Many tears from my eyes have fallen in the snow; its cold flakes thirstily absorb the burning woe”—come true.

Schubert scholar Susan Youens argued for Winterreise as a monodrama, “a work in which a single character investigates the labyrinth of his or her psyche in search of self-knowledge or escape from psychological torment or both.” Youens went on, “What defines monodrama is the exclusion of any other characters and the obliteration of as much awareness on the reader’s/listener’s part of the poet’s control as possible. Whatever we know in this cycle, we know from the wanderer’s point of view. There is no narrator, no plot, no logical succession of events in the external world. Instead, we spy on fleeting emotions and states of mind.”

Schubert’s musical treatment of Müller’s texts brings the wanderer’s fleeting emotions and states of mind to life with exquisite precision. Witness “Der Lindenbaum,” one of the monodrama’s most remarkable soliloquies. Müller casts the linden tree, a traditional venue in German literature for young lovers’ assignations, as the scene of bittersweet nostalgia. Schubert’s piano accompaniment suggests the wind blowing through the tree’s leaves. The same unassuming melody, set first in E major, takes on a complex psychological duality when it recurs in E minor (“I had to walk past it again today in the depths of night; there, even in darkness, I had my eyes closed. And its branches rustled as if calling to me: Come here to me, friend, here you’ll find your rest!”).

The jilted lover’s torment that pervades the first half of the cycle (as in “Erstarrung,” “I search in the snow in vain for her footprint’s trace, where she had crossed the green meadows on my arm”) yields to a descent into madness and longing for death in Book II. Over the latter twelve songs, the wanderer experiences the emotional highs and lows of Goethe’s Werther. His heart races with the galloping rhythmic gait of “Die Post” (“What is it that makes you leap so high, my heart? The post brings you no letter. Why then do you surge so strangely, my heart?”). He succumbs to fatalistic despair in “Die Krähe”: Schubert traces the crow’s flight—“A crow was with me as I departed the town, through the day it flew above my head, back and forth”—in the stark piano accompaniment, as the singer trudges wearily on (“Crow, strange animal, won’t you leave me? Do you mean that soon you’ll take my body as loot?”). “Der Wegweiser” alludes hauntingly to the march-to-the-gallows accompaniment of “Gute Nacht,” as the wanderer concedes, “One road I must travel, from which no one ever came back.”

Consideration of Schubert’s tribulations while working on these songs is inescapable. The syphilis that would claim him in his thirty-second year brought intense physical and psychic distress. Yet Schubert’s creativity did not abate in his final twenty months. On the contrary, his miraculous last chapter produced a staggering series of masterpieces, unequaled by many composers over entire lifetimes: the two Piano Trios, opp. 99 and 100; the Fantasies in C major, for violin and piano, and in F minor, for piano, four hands; the Great C major symphony; the Cello Quintet; the last three piano sonatas; and numerous other piano, vocal, and orchestral works. Many of these defy the temptation to correlate art and biography: the vigor of the trios, the life-affirming spirit of the Great Symphony, and the quintet betray nothing of their composer’s suffering.

But Winterreise lays bare the anguish of a ravaged soul, and does so as eloquently as it does unsparingly. Schubert confided to his friends that the twenty-four songs of Winterreise “have cost me more effort than any of my other songs.” By the end of the cycle, Müller’s wanderer too is utterly spent; the last sound he hears, in “Der Leiermann,” is the demented, obsessive drone of the hurdy-gurdy, played by a solitary old man, “barefoot on the ice.” “No one wants to hear him, no one looks at him, and the dogs growl around the old man…Strange old man, shall I go with you? Will you crank your hurdy-gurdy for my songs?” Youens surmised that Schubert, battling his illness and facing the prospect of mental deterioration, “might have wondered as he read ‘Der Leiermann’ whether he too would be condemned to suffer what the wanderer confronts: a future with his creative faculties numbed and the capacity to create music restricted to a single phrase, repeated mindlessly over and over.” Instead, he produced his most powerful music, what he warned his friends would be “a cycle of horrifying songs,” but of which he also remarked, “I like these songs more than all the rest, and you will come to like them as well.” As bleak a work as Schubert created in Winterreise, these twenty-four songs nevertheless represent a profound artistic triumph. 

—Patrick Castillo © 2019