Programme Note for a Performance of Schubert’s Winterreise

Schubert’s Winterreise was composed in 1827 one year before his death at the age of 31. In 1822, Schubert contracted syphilis – an incurable disease at the time – and it was against a background of declining health as well as depression that the twenty-four songs that make up the cycle were written. In an interesting parallel to this, the author of the poems, Wilhelm Müller, died the year before Schubert at the equally early age of 32. The two men never met but the combination of Müller’s verses and Schubert’s music resulted in two works, which form a turning point in the development of song as an art form.

The idea of a song cycle—a set of songs linked in some way, musically or dramatically, was a fairly new one at this time. In 1816, Beethoven composed An die Ferne Geliebte and this is considered to be the first real example of such a work. Six poems are set to an uninterrupted flow of music lasting some fifteen minutes, and the final song draws on the music of the first, providing a sense of unity and completion.

Schubert was a great admirer of Beethoven (he asked to be buried next to him in the cemetery at Währung, north-west of Vienna), and it is likely the idea of composing a similar kind of work was in his mind when he came across the first volume of a collection called Seventy-Seven Poems from the Posthumous Papers of a Travelling Horn Player. This was published in 1821 and within it, Schubert found a set of twenty-three poems which he took and discarding three, set them to music. The author of the poems was Müller, and Schubert’s setting of them became known as Die Schöne Müllerin, published in 1823 as his opus 25. 

In 1826, Schubert discovered another set of 12 poems by Müller in a literary almanac called Urania and set them to music. These were the first 12 songs of Winterreise (performed this evening). The original manuscript, now in the Pierpoint Morgan Library, New York, shows that Schubert considered these 12 songs a self-contained cycle. Not only does the word “Finis” appear beneath the twelfth song, the key of this song (in its first draft) is the same as the first—D minor—bringing a sense of unity and closure to the sequence. 

Unbeknown to Schubert, however, Müller had composed another 12 poems, adding them to the first set, and publishing them together as a cycle (with Die Schöne Müllerin). Schubert found this group and set them, adding them to his existing sequence. Müller had set out a new ordering of the poems, but Schubert retained the original order preserving the dramatic narrative he had already shaped. He now developed and shaped it, however, and we see an emotional journey in two parts—the setting out of the protagonist on a journey and the immediate feelings aroused by his lover’s betrayal, and then a surge of hope in Die Post, followed by a gradual resignation and acceptance of the fact that she has truly gone and he has been abandoned.

Abandonment, unrequited love in all its forms, a restless dissatisfaction with life, and a sense of being outcast and alone were all dominant themes in German literature and art at this time. There was also a sense of a quest to go beyond what was already known and  search for greater depths of understanding and being. The protagonist of Winterreise represents all these concepts. Trapped within the pain of his unhappy love affair, he steps out into the night on a journey which as well as taking him metaphorically through the frozen winter landscape, also takes him on an inner journey into the frozen depths of his soul. During the course of his journey the elements of nature appear as symbols of his inner truths and act as a mirror to the emotional turmoil going on inside him.

Müller was not a poet in the league of Heine, Goethe or Schiller, but he was a recognised and respected literary figure and his work was popular. He also composed with the idea that his poetry would be set to music. In 1815 he wrote in a journal:

“I can neither play nor sing, yet when I write verses, I sing and play after all. If I could produce the melodies, my songs would be more pleasing than they are now. But courage! perhaps there is a kindred spirit somewhere who will hear the tunes behind the words and give them back to me”

Schubert was to do this, and beneath the folksong-like simplicity of Müller’s writing lay a depth of feeling and sensitivity which was not only rich in the Romantic imagery of the time, but also offered possibilities of exploring and expressing human emotion at a level previously unreached in song before. Schubert seized upon these and expanded the potential within each poem for a greater depth of expression as well as drawing a dramatic narrative. 

In music, the song became the ideal vehicle for the expression of such turmoil. It became possible to create a means of communicating the emotional content of a poem directly by means of allusion and symbolism without the need for gesture or scenery.  Rather than impersonate a character as he would in an opera, the singer becomes the poet and wanderer himself, thus enabling the expression of the text to be more directly emotional and personal.