Album Notes

The Winter of the Spirit: Schubert’s Winterreise (Winter Journey), D. 911 In his 1858 reminiscences, Schubert’s friend Joseph von Spaun describes the first time that he and others in the Schubert circle first heard Winterreise: 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 to [Franz von] Schober’s 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 said that only one, “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.” The composer’s prophecy came true: people have long recognized in this cycle of twenty-four songs one of the nineteenth century’s most profound masterpieces. It is a matter for awe when one realizes that Schubert was only thirty years old when he set these words to music and that he was confronting his own possible fate as he did so. We know nothing about the circumstances in which this composer contracted syphilis, probably in late 1822, but he would have known that a syphilitic’s death was often preceded by paralysis and insanity, the winter wanderer’s fate thus a foreshadowing of what might become of him. The scant biographical record hints that Schubert knew in his bones every atom of the poetic persona’s despair in Winterreise; in a letter of 31 March 1824 to his friend Leopold Kupelwieser, he wrote: Imagine a man whose health will never be right again, and who in sheer despair over this makes things worse and worse instead of better; imagine a man, I say, whose most brilliant hopes have perished, to whom the felicity of love and friendship have nothing to offer but pain at best, whom enthusiasm . . . for all things beautiful threatens to forsake, and I ask you, is he not a miserable, unhappy being?---“My peace is gone, my heart is heavy, I shall find it never and nevermore” [lines from Goethe’s Faust, Part I, which Schubert had set to music in 1814 as “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” D. 118], I may well sing every day now, for each night, on retiring to bed, I hope I may not wake again, and each morning but recalls yesterday'’ grief. That he could clothe despair of such magnitude in music such as this was a Herculean feat. It would not have been possible without Wilhelm Müller (1794-1827), the young Prussian poet who died on the night of 30 September 1827, perhaps just as Schubert was completing his compositional labors on his second song cycle to Müller’s words (Die schöne Müllerin, D. 795, was the first). Twentieth-century critics were wont to decry Müller as a deficient poet, but the great Heinrich Heine did not think so: he acknowledged Müller’s deliberately paradoxical fusion of folklike forms and unfolklike content as the model for his own original poetic enterprise. “The German Byron”---Müller became famous for his poems championing the cause of Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire---published his winter journey in three stages, and the complicated genesis of the poetry would shape the formation of the music. On 16 January 1822, the twenty-eight year-old poet sent his Wanderlieder von Wilhelm Müller. Die Winterreise. In 12 Liedern (Wandering Songs by Wilhelm Müller. The Winter Journey. In 12 Songs) to the publisher Friedrich Brockhaus in Leipzig for the 1823 issue of the literary periodical Urania. It was this source that Schubert evidently discovered in late 1826 or early 1827, as the twelve poems correspond exactly to Part I of his setting. In March 1823, ten additional poems were published in Karl Schall and Karl von Holtei’s Deutsche Blätter für Poesie