Roman Trekel baritone
Oliver Pohl piano
“A cycle of eerie songs”:
Wilhelm Müller, Franz Schubert
and the Winterreise
At the end, the hurdy-gurdy man… Over
yonder… Outside the village… Excluded…
Barefoot… Tirelessly grinding his
hurdy-gurdy in the cold... Dogs snarling at
him... Only one person stops and listens: the
wanderer. It is just this wanderer who solitarily
and restlessly travels across the land in
Franz Schubert’s song cycle Die Winterreise
D 911, his setting of poems by Wilhelm Müller
(1794–1827). The wanderer must in fact
traverse a valley of quiet tears before he meets
the old man with the hurdy-gurdy.
One year after completing the song cycle,
the very ill Schubert died at the age of 31. The
work was published posthumously. Schubert
set the first twelve poems of Müller’s Winterreise
in February 1827. When Schubert found
out that Müller had written twelve further
poems, he set these in fall of the same year;
he did not, however, reorganize the cycle as
Müller had. Schubert introduced the cycle to
his circle of friends, announcing them as a
“cycle of eerie songs”.
The first listeners were at a loss to understand
the work’s deathly gloomy and pessimistic
perspective – nothing that went to such
logical extremes had ever been heard before.
One must simultaneously probe the significance
of Müller’s poems, as Erika von Borries
did in her 2007 biography of Müller. “In that
Müller melded biographical elements, literary
tendencies of the time and the dark, depressive
mood that followed the exaltations of the revolutionary
age and Napoleonic wars, he created
a work of art whose world- and life-negating
tenor is unequalled in romantic literature, and
which still affects today’s readers in particular.”
Müller’s Winterreise characterizes the “basic
feeling of the modern, the feeling of being a
vagabond in a cold world,” continues Borries.
Although the literary device of projecting
one’s own moods onto nature is no longer
original since Goethe’s Werther, “the natural
images that Müller found to express his
wanderer’s emotional state are a complete novelty
in their naïve vividness and expressivity”.
Aided by the emotional landscape, Müller
succeeds in penetrating unknown regions of
the psyche which had been unknown until
then. This is also why Heinrich Heine held
him in great esteem, and why Thomas Mann
immortalized the song Lindenbaum from
Winterreise in his work Zauberberg (Magic
Mountain).
In addition, Müller’s poems were also set
by Carl Loewe, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Fanny
Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Johannes Brahms
as well as Reiner Bredemeyer. And Schubert?
With his musical setting of Winterreise, Schubert
brought the romantic song – the genre
he virtually created – to perfection, and not
only because of the uncompromising emancipation
of the piano from its subordinate
role of accompanist. Here, in fact, the piano
is often the carrier of the message. Even in
the first song, the lyrical narrator leaves with
a wanderer rhythm that shows him to be just
as much a stranger as when he came – his
love unrequited and “the path covered by
snow”.
Gefror’ne Tränen, Rast and Einsamkeit are
also characterized by this “wanderer rhythm”.
In addition, Schubert sharpens the contradictions
between the dream world and memories
on the one hand, and the here-and-now
on the other with major-minor contrasts (as
in Gute Nacht, Der Lindenbaum, Rückblick or
Frühlingstraum). In contrast, sighing motives
are heard throughout the first, tenth, twelfth
or sixteenth songs. A macabre funeral procession
unmasks the Wirtshaus as a graveyard;
musicologist Thrasybulos Georgiades hears
the Kyrie of the Gregorian Requiem in this
piece as well.
When death is finally verbalized with the
last word of the song Irrlicht (grave), Schubert
represents this with falling fourths and
fifths. Long before Schubert’s use of them,
these intervals frequently symbolized death
and transcendence. Such semantics can be
seen until the present day, especially in Russian
and German music; in general, Schubert’s
song cycle points far in the future. The shimmering
accompaniment to Letzte Hoffnung,
which features descending staccato thirds
with no stable tonal center, already reveals
impressionist color. Finally, the last five songs
are so reduced that one might almost suspect
one were hearing something from the 20th
century. This austerity culminates in the final
Leiermann, which together with the Doppelgänger
from Schubert’s Schwanengesang
D 957, are the composer’s “emptiest” music
of all.
Fifths introduced by sighing appoggiaturas
dominate; the dynamics are monotone
and the expression highly subdued. Nothing
moves here anymore; everything sounds
hollow and empty. Major and minor dissolve
into fifths – thus simultaneously dissolving
the differentiation between dream and reality
which has been dramatically so important
until now. For in the face of death, everything
else is lost: in Schubert’s setting, the hurdygurdy
man is none other than Death. “Strange
old man, shall I go with you?” asks the
wanderer. “Will you play your hurdy-gurdy
to my songs?” The sprechgesang breaks off on
the higher tone of the fifth – the question
reverberates in nothingness.
Marco Frei
Translation: Elizabeth Gahbler
Translation: Elizabeth Gahbler