Two Reflections on Schubert's Winterreise
The following are the program notes for Schubert III: Winterreise, available now on the Brooklyn Art Song Society Digital Concert Hall.
Eis
Schubert began composing Winterreise in February of 1827. By the time he finished the work in November of that same year, he was about to begin the last winter of his heartbreakingly short life. While composing his “Winter’s Journey,” Schubert was struggling to survive both a literal and symbolic Winter of his own. The symptoms of Syphilis, which the composer had contracted sometime in 1823, were exacerbated by the cold. It was this disease that would ultimately lead to his premature death at a mere 31 years old. Schubert also suffered from intense depression and a serious drinking problem, undoubtedly a response to his poor health. The young composer clearly saw a kindred spirit in the protagonist of these 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller (1794-1827): a man who, heartbroken and alone, wanders in the cold forest to nurse his broken spirit. The physical signs of winter-the cold, the ice and snow, the wind- are omnipresent in Winterreise. It’s the musical manifestations of these elements- and the emotional states they represent- that lie at the heart of the work’s genius.
Schubert was a master word-painter. For him, the relationship between text and music was one to one. He had a unique ability to make the simplest musical gesture capture not just the literal meaning of a word, but also an entire world of subtext. For example, the snarling trills under the words “Der Wind” in Die Wetterfahne equally represent a biting gust of wind as well as the bitter resentment of the unnamed protagonist. The relentless triplets in Erstarrung paint both the flurry of a snowstorm and the Wanderer’s desperate mental state. Throughout the cycle ice and snow are not just acts of nature, they represent the emotional core of the work. In Wasserflut the Wanderer imagines his tears melting away the snow to reveal the spring-time grass beneath. In Gerfrone Tranen the opposite happens: as his tears fall to the earth they turn to ice. In both songs the point is that the heat of sorrow is not enough to overcome the numbness of the cold. Here lies the key to understanding these songs: Winterreise is not a work about feeling sad, it’s a work about feeling nothing at all. That is the true effect of trauma: being cut off from emotion. In. Schubert’s other great cycle, Die Schone Mullerin the protagonist drowns himself in a brook to escape his heartache; now, the brook has dried up (as in the song Auf dem Flusse).
The trajectory of the work is from darkness to despair. In the latter songs of the cycle the narrator increasingly longs for death. In Der Gresie Kopf the snow colors his hair grey as he laments that he is not actually old and close to the end of his misery. in Das Wirsthaus, he envisions the graveyard as a pleasant resting place. But the gut-wrenching reality of the cycle is not that the protagonist dies, but that he lives. The work ends with the image of the Hurdy-Gurdy Man: “with numb fingers/ he plays the best he can.” This is the fate worse than death: to be stripped of all emotion- even sadness, which can have its own kind of beauty. Numbness is the true Winter that Schubert found solace from in these haunting songs.
Tauschung
Winterreise was composed in two bursts of inspiration separated by eight months. Even though the score separates the work into two halves of 12 songs each, almost all performances do not mark the separation, presenting Winterreise as one continuous whole. There are subtle differences in the two sections that reveal important aspects of the cycle.
In the first part there’s a consistency in the use of modality (Major vs. minor). The present is always set in the minor key, while Major sections are reserved for references to the past or to dreams (which are, after all, made of memories). In songs like Der Lindenbaum and Fruhlingstraum these contrasts are stark, but in other songs like the opening verses of Gute Nacht, the difference is more subtle. Faced with the outward misery of Winter, the Wanderer finds brief moments of solace in the past. There’s never an actual moment of respite from the unrelenting cold; rather, these moments are mere creations of the imagination. In other words, they are illusions.
Part two of the cycle opens with the jarringly chipper Die Post. Personally, I always felt this song was a little out of place. Perhaps Schubert thought of it as a moment of relief from the unrelenting grimness of the rest of the work. But taken in another context, this song has a whole new meaning. Many of the songs in part two involve visions and hallucinations: the glittering light in Tauschung, the imaginary Inn that’s actually a graveyard in Das Wirsthaus, the three suns of Die Nebensonnen. All of these songs are clearly in Major keys, and all of them fantasies in the poet’s head. Perhaps the postman in Die Post was the first of these illusions and the beginning of a long descent into madness?
Schubert’s use of modality was fundamentally different then his processors. Mozart and Haydn saw Major and minor as a dichotomy- two opposing forces. Schubert saw them a dialectic- two sides of the same coin. In Schubert, the sweetness is always tinged with sorrow, and there’s always a strange beauty in the sadness. Schubert uses modality in Winterreise to say something fundamental about our shared human experience: our only solace from the darkness of the world comes from our inner being. We are all connected by our suffering and our struggle to keep our humanity in the face of a cruel winter. Without that core, we lose ourselves.
In this light, the seemingly pitch-black final song, where the Wanderer meets the equally lost and lonely Hurty-Gurty Man, can be seen as a small ray of hope, rather than a bleak, nihilistic, end point. In the proceeding songs the narrator is going deeper and deeper into his illusions and isolation. But in the final song he meets someone with whom he shares a fate, with whom he can empathize. He asks the Hurty-Gurty Man to accompany his songs, to share in his grief. Perhaps it’s this last hint of connection that keeps the man alive, that keeps him on his journey, and staves off- even if just for a brief moment- the final despair.