Winterreise (Song Cycle), Op.89, No. 22 - Courage, D911

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This disease had a number of alarming prognoses.

Good Night (Gute Nacht)

Chief among these was that, after a number of years, it was probable that the disease would attack the brain and, with it, the powers of thought and creativity. By four years had already elapsed and, although he was still in command of all his faculties to say the least! Whom would it not in similar circumstances? Of course, we know something that he could not foresee—that he was to die within a year of completing Winterreise , spared the effects of tertiary syphilis, still at the height of his musical powers, still composing like a god.

But it was really much more likely that, in the normal course of his illness, the river of Schubertian melody would dry up. Perhaps he would be left, like the similarly afflicted Baudelaire, endlessly repeating the same words, parrot-fashion, like a record-playing needle stuck in the same groove of the brain. Can we imagine a Schubert bereft of melody and unable to compose? This was what he expected would be his fate.

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It was only a matter of time before the fall of the Damoclean sword. It is far too easy to imagine the character of the winter traveller as a self-portrait of the composer himself, denied love and alienated from society; no such autobiographical claim should be made for the cycle as a whole. The winter traveller is in a sense bigger than Schubert himself as King Lear is bigger than Shakespeare. The hero of this cycle achieves an eloquence and stature that are reserved for the mightiest characters in opera.

Winterreise is a dramatic event and cannot be explained solely by the sad fate of its creator who was largely able to forget himself and his problems when he was in the process of composing it. As we have seen, many songs in the work refer back to earlier works and can be seen simply as a continuation of Schubert's pioneering achievements in the genre, something quite separate from the special pleading of biographical parallels.

But there is documentary evidence that Schubert was shaken to the core in writing this work and that he was strangely moody and withdrawn during its gestation. Of all the songs it is Der Leiermann which might have provoked this reaction. With its barren and bleak landscape it is the only song in Schubert's entire output which is denuded of music itself. There is no real harmonic movement, and the repetitive musical phrases go round in circles.

The stumbling fingers of the old man are numb with cold, but perhaps they are also impeded by illness any musician's nightmare—arthritis, multiple sclerosis, some other neurological complaint—syphilis perhaps. In this way the hurdy-gurdy player on the ice does not seem to be a symbol of death as we usually understand it, but something which, in Schubert's eyes and ears, was far worse—living death, or, in his case, life without real music.

One need look no further than the last years of both Schumann and Wolf for an illustration of the protracted period of humiliating disability in the antechamber of death. In the failing music of both these masters' last periods we can detect the chilly grip and numb fingers of the hurdy-gurdy man. Der Leiermann was not drawn from the composer's own experience; the eerie tune was not formed from the large bank of musical allusion and tonal analogue at his disposal throughout the rest of the cycle: Where then does this music come from?

The composer's future, that is. This song is a moonscape, a projection of an unknown tomorrow.

Will your music be a fitting accompaniment for my poems? Is this how life—my life at least—will come to an end?

How the mighty have fallen! At the beginning of Schubert would never have believed that he would one day imagine a situation where his own musical abilities might have something in common with the incompetent drone and stumble of a hurdy-gurdy player. Plunge it into Lethe's flood'. The commentary on that work in Volume 25 suggests that, in sacrificing his protagonist and experiencing death alongside the young miller in musical terms, the composer found the strength to continue with what remained of his own life—five matchless years of creativity.

This was a cathartic act of self-therapy by someone in extremis, a composer whose artistic survival was in danger of extinction, and who used the most powerful thing he had—his own art—to overcome the crisis. Those who imagine the worst and put it down on paper, even turn it into art, might be thought pessimists and hypochondriacs.

But the belief in knowing your enemy, looking him in the eye, and disarming him before the moment of meeting is an ancient one. In Stone Age culture, rock-paintings depicted the successful hunt in anticipation of the event; in medieval times those wishing to be spared the plague simulated its symptoms in a dance of death. Just as Schubert had drowned the miller-boy in his stead, so he encourages the winter traveller to sing non-music with the hurdy-gurdy player; he even composes the non-music for them.

As the cycle ends, these two go off together into the distance, and the composer remains behind. In staging the meeting Schubert has not been absorbed or overcome by it. His own ability to write melody has remained intact; in short, he has remained in control. Thus do artists flirt with their own creations, identifying closely with what they are writing but always retaining a distance, a barrier against destruction by what they have called into life.

Mary Shelley's contemporary Frankenstein seems a warning against creators who fail to do this.

The piano supplies rich effects in the nature imagery of the poems, the voices of the elements, the creatures and active objects, the rushing storm, the crying wind, the water under the ice, birds singing, ravens croaking, dogs baying, the rusty weathervane grating, the post horn calling, and the drone and repeated melody of the hurdy-gurdy.

What might have forced the composer to confront and create the somber Winterreise? The Piano and Dark Keys: Schubert was very sick, having contracted the syphilis that inevitably was to affect the remainder of his life: In addition to his friend Franz von Schober , Schubert's friends who often attended his Schubertiaden or musical sessions included Eduard von Bauernfeld , Joseph von Spaun , and the poet Johann Mayrhofer.

Both Spaun and Mayrhofer describe the period of the composition of Winterreise as one in which Schubert was in a deeply melancholic frame of mind, as Mayrhofer puts it, because "life had lost its rosiness and winter was upon him. We were altogether dumbfounded by the sombre mood of these songs, and Schober said that one song only, "Der Lindenbaum", had pleased him.

Schubert: Winterreise

Thereupon Schubert leaped up and replied: There is no need to seek in external vicissitudes an explanation of the pathos of the Winterreise music when the composer was this Schubert who, as a boy of seventeen, had the imagination to fix Gretchen's cry in music once for all, and had so quivered year by year in response to every appeal, to Mignon 's and the Harper's grief, to Mayrhofer's nostalgia. It is not surprising to hear of Schubert's haggard look in the Winterreise period; but not depression, rather a kind of sacred exhilaration The composer of the Winterreise may have gone hungry to bed, but he was a happy artist.

Schubert's last task in life was the correction of the proofs for part 2 of Winterreise , and his thoughts while correcting those of the last song, "Der Leiermann", when his last illness was only too evident, can only be imagined. However, he had heard the whole cycle performed by Vogl which received a much more enthusiastic reception , [11] though he did not live to see the final publication, nor the opinion of the Wiener Theaterzeitung:. Schubert's music is as naive as the poet's expressions; the emotions contained in the poems are as deeply reflected in his own feelings, and these are so brought out in sound that no-one can sing or hear them without being touched to the heart.

Elena Gerhardt said of the Winterreise , "You have to be haunted by this cycle to be able to sing it. Although some individual songs are sometimes included separately in recitals e. The intensity and the emotional inflections of the poetry are carefully built up to express the sorrows of the lover, and are developed to an almost pathological degree from the first to the last note, something explored along with the cultural context of the work by the tenor Ian Bostridge in Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession London: Over the course of the cycle, grief over lost love progressively gives way to more general existential despair and resignation — the beloved is last directly mentioned only halfway into the work — and the literal winter's journey is arguably at least in part allegorical for this psychological and spiritual one.

Wintry imagery of cold, darkness, and barrenness consistently serve to mirror the feelings of the isolated wanderer.

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The cycle comprises a monodrama from the point of view of the wandering protagonist, in which concrete plot is somewhat ambiguous. After his beloved falls for another, the grief-stricken young man steals away from town at night and follows the river and steep ways to a coal burner's hut, where he rests before moving on.

He comes across a village, passes a crossroads, and arrives at a cemetery. Here being denied even the death on which he has become fixated, he defiantly renounces faith before reaching a point of resignation. The weariness of "Flood of Tears," the exhaustion of "Solitude," the weltschmertz of "The Sign Post," these songs are the key to Krause 's interpretation. The anger of "The Last Hope" is already hopeless and the bravado of "Courage" is already false. For Krause 's wanderer seeks neither death nor madness, but, like Schopenhauer , non-existence.

And in the last song, he finds it: Krause 's wanderer, like his interpretation, is barely present. Only in its final note does Krause 's voice rise above a stage whisper. Krause 's voice, although old and somewhat tattered in its upper range, suits his interpretation. One might reasonably ask which came first, the frayed voice or the interpretation.

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