1827: In Fairer Worlds – II

Franz Schubert (1797 – 1828): Winterreise

Well you may laugh at the dreamer
Who saw flowers in the winter…

Wilhelm muller: winterreise

Love and suffering were always synonymous in Schubert’s mind. He once admitted that he had spent most of his life, creative and otherwise, “torn between the greatest grief and the greatest love… Whenever I attempted to sing of love, it turned to pain. And again, when I tried to sing of pain, it turned to love. Thus were love and pain divided in me.” For Schubert, there was an almost symbiotic relationship between the two, as if one could not exist without the other.

Perhaps the agonizing association was rooted in two tragic setbacks from his teens. Firstly, he lost his beloved mother (to typhoid fever) when he was just fifteen. Three years later, he fell deeply in love with a local girl named Therese Grob, who returned the feelings and even accepted his marriage proposal. All looked set fair for the young composer until he found his path unexpectedly blocked, not only by Therese’s disapproving family, but by the draconian marriage-consent laws of the time, his marriage application being officially turned down on the grounds of his “impecuniosity” (poverty). Schubert could only look on helplessly as the Grob family eventually persuaded his beloved to marry someone else.

Schubert never again came so close to matrimony, and his prospects would only further worsen after he had contracted syphilis in 1824. Being rejected by respectable society as an unfit husband left lasting scars on him.

That sense of rejection, of unjust exclusion, would inevitably find its way into his creative world. It has often been suggested that Schubert took an indiscriminating approach to the texts he chose to set to music, seemingly unable to distinguish the artistic merits of a minor German poet from Goethe. The late nineteenth century German lieder composer, Hugo Wolf, once joked that Schubert could have convincingly set a cheese-label to music.

But the well-read Schubert was always more discerning about his literary choices than many suspected. One writer whom he particularly favoured in his later years was Wilhelm Müller (1794 – 1827) a classical scholar, librarian and author of supposedly naïve love poems. Schubert quickly found something in Müller’s emotional language that resonated with him deeply.

He had already made a musical setting of Müller’s Die Schöne Müllerin (The Fair Maid of the Mill) for voice and piano in 1823. The poems depict a young man falling in love with an unattainable woman and eventually drowning himself after seeing her taken off by another suitor – a storyline that, final denouement aside, Schubert could surely relate to.

Then in late 1826, Schubert came across and was mesmerized by the first half of Müller’s poetic collection known as Winterreise (Winter’s Journey). Schubert immediately felt a kinship with the texts, almost as if they were speaking to him personally. He set one half of the poetic collection during the first two cold, snowy months of 1827. Then he chanced upon the rest of the poems later in the year and set the remaining twelve poems, finishing the work by November.

It must have been an emotionally intense undertaking for the composer. The storyline of Winterreise manages to be even bleaker than that of Die Schöne Müllerin, and out of its texts Schubert would create one of his very darkest compositions.

The protagonist of Winterreise, a sensitive young poet, has just suffered a similar fate to his Die Schöne counterpart. In search of emotional and psychological oblivion, he walks out into a harsh, snowy December night and never comes back. Narrated in first person, the songs vividly light up both the young man’s inner and outward worlds – the bleak, icy landscapes through which he stumbles, against the hot torrent of grief and despair from within his soul.   

But the song cycle is not only about lost love, or indeed the fleeting transience of happiness. The central theme that emerges is very much of its time – that of the young Romantic artist, unable to fit into societal norms, at odds with the world and with himself.

The alienation theme is evident in the very words that open the cycle, in the song Gute Nacht (Good Night): “A stranger I arrived, a stranger I go hence.” The young man leaves his lodgings, bids his lost truelove a final farewell in his heart and begins his terrible journey. Although the predominantly D Minor tonalities adequately capture the sombre mood, it is the brief appearance of D Major towards the end of the song, with its passing ray of warmth, that is almost heart-breaking. At this point the young man briefly forgets his bitterness and feels a surge of tender love for the girl he is leaving far behind.

One song now follows the other in grim procession, while the piano plays its full part in creating a programmatic ambience around the singer, musically symbolizing many of the sights and sounds he describes along the way – from wintry storms, falling leaves and sinister crows, to horn-blowing mail coaches, rattling dog-chains and iced up rivers. Throughout all of this, the steady quaver-pulse that shapes much of the piano accompaniment, unmistakably suggests the weary tread of the heartsick traveler’s footsteps.

He passes a weathervane – toyed with by the wind – on his truelove’s house, its fickle whistling seeming to mock him. He sees a frozen stream and recognizes the tumult beneath the ice as a reflection of his own heart. He looks desperately in vain for any signs of greenery while his hot tears burn little patches into the snow.

At one point he sees a linden tree and remembers sitting under it with his lost love on a blossoming day in May. This song, Der Lindenbaum, is one of the most moving of the whole cycle. While the young man is lost in happy reveries, Schubert sets the music in a warm E Major tonality. The singer’s almost hymn-like melody is punctuated by rippling triplets in the piano, suggesting a balmy summer breeze. But the mood is entirely illusory: the piano’s rippling breeze is suddenly transformed into a raging gale, as the young man snaps back into the present and confronts his dismal surroundings once more.

It is these “illusory” moments that are so characteristic of Winterreise, and so poignant – the constant juxtaposing of a bright, hope-filled past against a dark, hopeless present. Another example is Frühlingstraum (The Dream of Springtime), where the exhausted traveler’s slumber (dreaming once more of happier times), is repeatedly interrupted by the harsh sounds of a cock crowing. In another very affecting moment, Schubert employs the softest, most tender accompaniment on the piano, while the young man sings:

Up until now, the young man’s journey has moved in linear fashion from place to place through the snowy landscapes. But as the song cycle passes its halfway point, the narrative gradually becomes more fragmented and impressionistic, while the traveler’s visions are increasingly surreal, as if reflecting his deteriorating mental state. There are noticeably fewer references to his beloved, as if her memory, along with his sanity, is now slowly slipping away.

Crows are frequently referenced. They had mocked him as he left his village, knocking clumps of snow onto his head from the rooftops. They sit on the outside of a charcoal burner’s hut where he seeks temporary refuge. In another song, Die Krähe, he finds one of the large black birds following him stealthily, as if waiting to feed off his carcass. The piano’s sinister-sounding triplets, in a higher tessitura than the singer’s vocal line, suggest the demonic bird flapping its wings just above his head.

In Der Wegweiser, the young man sees signposts for villages and towns, all offering opportunities to re-start his life somewhere else. But he passes by every one of them. Instead. he takes a road “by which no-one ever came back” and finds a graveyard that appears to him a welcoming inn (Das Wirtshaus) and is distraught to discover there are no available rooms.

Finally, he meets an old, ravaged man playing a hurdy-gurdy instrument (Der Leiermann) and decides to follow him:

Up to this point, all the ghosts and phantoms that the young man has encountered over the course of his journey have been from his past. But now the hurdy-gurdy man is one chillingly of the present – and of his probable future too. It is death, not as a fixed endpoint, but as a kind of transfiguration, both liberating and terrifying. Unable to find a place of rest, his spirit is condemned to wander the frozen wastes, singing his sorrowful songs in perpetuity.

Schubert reduces the piano accompaniment to its very barest elements for Der Leiermann. An unchanging, repeated drone chord of A and E in the piano bass (very much suggesting the hurdy-gurdy), prevents any sense of harmonic progress throughout the song, while the singer’s lament alternates with little flourishes of gypsy-like melody on the piano. The effect of this final song of Winterreise is both very melancholy and very creepy. As soon as you’ve heard it once, you never ever forget it.

The unrelenting bleakness that makes up Winterreise can sometimes feel like a shock for new listeners. It was certainly the case for Schubert’s circle of friends who became the song-cycle’s first ever audience in November 1827, as one of them recalled:

For some time, Schubert appeared very upset and melancholy. When I asked him what was troubling him, he would say only, “Soon you will hear and understand”. One day he said to me, “Come over today and I will sing you a cycle of horrifying [schauerlicher] songs. I am anxious to know what you will say about them. They have cost me more effort than any of my other songs.” So he sang the entire Winterreise through to us in a voice full of emotion. We were utterly dumbfounded by the mournful, gloomy tone of these songs, and Schober [Schubert’s closest friend] said that only one of them, “Der Lindenbaum”, had appealed to him. To this Schubert replied, “I like these songs more than all the rest, and you will come to like them as well!”

His friends did indeed come to like them more once they had hear them performed by a professional singer in January 1828. By then, Schubert was already dashing ahead with his next creative projects, as he entered the last year of his life, a year in which he would complete his F Minor Fantasia for piano duet, his last three piano sonatas, and his final, masterly piece of chamber music, the String Quintet in C Major. Schubert’s music was only getting better, more technically accomplished, original and visionary – even as his syphilis-weakened body was starting to pack up.

In September 1828 his health began to decline alarmingly, and he was forced to move in with his brother Ferdinand. In early November, he took to his bed and never left it again: only too late did his doctors and family see the danger and realise he was in the final stages of typhoid fever, the same disease that had killed his mother. One of Schubert’s final acts was to correct the proofs for Der Leiermann, the terrible, death-in-life song that concludes Winterreise.

Following Schubert’s death, his older brother Ferdinand did much to promote his music and safeguard his legacy. He made sure Schubert was buried in a grave close to Beethoven’s (as per his wishes)*. He also tried to put his innumerable manuscripts into some kind of order.

*Beethoven had died the previous year and Schubert was one of thirty-six torchbearers at his funeral. Although the two men had scarcely interacted with one another during their lives (something that was partly down to Schubert’s innate shyness), they both genuinely admired one another’s music. Beethoven once said of Schubert: “he has my soul.”

A few years later, Robert Schumann dropped by to see Ferdinand and discovered the forgotten manuscript for his brother’s Ninth Symphony. Although still a young man himself, Schumann was already an influential critic and well-connected in the musical world. He declared the forgotten work a masterpiece and quickly began to spread the word about Vienna’s lost genius. Felix Mendelssohn (a specialist in unearthing lost masterpieces) conducted the overdue premiere of the Ninth and was soon promoting Schubert’s other orchestral works. A mutual friend of Schumann and Mendelssohn, Franz Liszt, made up numerous piano-only arrangements of Schubert’s songs, allowing them an even wider circulation. There was now no question of Schubert’s place among the younger generation’s musical elite. Liszt called him “the most poetic musician who ever lived.”

History is full of examples of successful composers whose reputation waned and sometimes fell into complete disrepair after their death. It was the exact opposite for Franz Schubert. “Would that he had lived to see how people now revere him,” Schumann wrote ten years after Schubert’s death. “This would have inspired him to the highest degree.”