Schubert was 14 years old when he wrote his first song, a biblical narrative entitled “Hagars Klage” (Hagar’s Lament) in 1811. “Die Taubenpost” (Pigeon Post) and “Der Hirt auf dem Feltsen” (Shepherd on the Rock) his valedictory masterpieces in the lieder genre, date from a few weeks before his death on November 19, 1828. During the intervening 17 years, he turned out some 600 songs, a quarter of which were composed in a single annus mirabilis, 1815. Schubert’s almost superhuman industry was matched by his omnivorous appetite for poetry, which took in everything from light verse and sentimental doggerel to the greatest texts of the age. Musically, too, his lieder run the gamut from unpretentious folksong-like settings to miniature dramas of surpassing grandeur and power. Many of Schubert’s songs were first heard at informal soirées held in the homes of the composer’s friends in Vienna. These convivial “Schubertiades” featured not only music making but poetry readings, party games, dancing, and other social activities. One member of his circle described an “excellent entertainment” at which “a lot of splendid songs by Schubert were sung and played by himself, which lasted until after 10 o’clock in the evening. After that punch was drunk, offered by one of the party, and as it was very good and plentiful the party, in a happy mood anyhow, became even merrier; so it was 3 o’clock in the morning before we parted.”

Composer and Poet
The first performance of Winterreise (Winter’s Journey), probably in the summer or fall of 1827 (the exact date is uncertain), was a more subdued affair: Schubert’s only known listeners on that occasion were his housemate, the poet Franz van Schober, and their painter friend Joseph Spaun. In light of the work’s dolefully fatalistic theme, the threesome seems unlikely to have been in the mood for merrymaking. Like Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin (The Fair Maid of the Mill) of 1823, Winterreise is usually labeled a song cycle, a genre that came to maturity in the early 19th century in works such as Beethoven’s An die fern Geliebte (To the Distant Beloved) and Schumann’s Dichterliebe (A Poet’s Love). Schubert composed the 24 lieder in two batches; the first twelve in February 1827, shortly before he and Schober moved into rented rooms above Vienna’s storied “Red Hedgehog” coffeehouse, and the last twelve the following October. Taking approximately 70 minutes to perform, Winterreise was conceived on a scale that invites comparison to Schubert’s symphonies and operas. Unlike Die schöne Müllerin, it’s not merely a set of independent, thematically linked lyrics but a cohesive psychological monodrama, related and experienced by an unnamed protagonist. When Part I of Winterreise was published in early 1828, one critic likened it to its popular predecessor as a dozen “laments over a sweetheart’s unfaithfulness”; not until the complete cycle appeared at the end of the year did its tragic dimensions become clear.

The “librettist” of Schubert’s lieder-drama was the poet Wilhelm Müller (1794–1827). Schubert set more texts by Müller than by any other poet, including the twenty poems that comprise Die schöne Müllerin. As fate would have it, the two men apparently never crossed paths—Schubert lived in Vienna, Müller in Dessau—and the thirty-two-year-old writer died of a heart attack in 1827 without hearing either of the song cycles that would ensure his immortality. Müller’s poetic model was the Volkslied, or folksong, which he and his fellow Romantics regarded as an expression of the pure German soul. Some critics, then and later, dismissed his simplified, folk-like verses as second-rate. However, no less an authority than Heinrich Heine, who acknowledged Müller’s influence on his own poetry, declared that “with the exception of Goethe, there is no lyric poet whom I admire as much as you.” Müller’s aversion to poetic artifice and inflated rhetoric reflected his conviction that the poet’s craft should be invisible, supporting but never overshadowing the emotional life described in his verse. Unlike Goethe, he also believed that his poetry was incomplete without music. “My songs lead but half a life,” he wrote, “a paper existence of black-and-white, until music breathes life into them, or at least calls it forth and awakens it if it is already dormant in them.” It seems likely that Müller would have welcomed Schubert as a collaborator, and even approved of the composer’s canny reordering of his poems and minor textual alterations.

Charting the “Geography of the Psyche”
The journey that Winterreise relates is at once physical and spiritual, an exploration of what musicologist Susan Youens calls “the geography of the psyche.” The anonymous traveler is evidently suffering from disappointment in love, but the source of his profound grief and restlessness remains obscure. All that Müller and Schubert tell us is that he feels alienated from his surroundings and is compelled to set out, like many another “wanderer” in Romantic literature, in search of something unknown and possibly unknowable.  “A stranger I arrived, / A stranger I depart” are his first words in “Gute Nacht,” their stern inevitability underscored by the piano’s trudging repeated notes and accents. The protagonist’s path takes him past his sweetheart’s house (“Die Wetterfahne”), whose wavering weathervane—neatly captured by Schubert’s mercurial accompaniment—reminds him of her inconstancy, and out into the snow-bound countryside. The natural world that once warmed the lovers’ hearts has become cold and hostile; the traveler’s tears audibly turn to ice (“Gefror’ne Tränen”), melt in a sequence of melodic cascades (“Wasserflut”), and join the streams that flow to the sea like “every sorrow to its grave” (“Irrlicht”). In the last two songs of Part I, lightly tripping visions of springtime (“Frühlingstraum”) give way to shattered dreams and unassuageable loneliness (“Einsamkeit”). That Schubert once planned to end Winterreise here is suggested by the fact that “Gute Nacht” and “Einsamkeit” originally shared a D-minor tonality, conveying a sense of closure. (Part 1 is still occasionally performed on its own.) In expanding the cycle, he transposed the twelfth song to B minor, a key that, according to Youens, Schubert associated with intense mournfulness.  

In contrast to the minor keys that predominate in Part I, Part II opens with bright, horn-like calls in E-flat major and galloping 6/8 meter, as the protagonist fantasizes about receiving a letter from his beloved (“Die Post”). The respite is short-lived, however, and his thoughts soon return to the ravages of aging (“Der greise Kopf”), the futility of hope (“Letzte Hoffnung”), and the illusion of domestic bliss (“Täuschung”). Müller’s imagery and Schubert’s music become increasingly death-obsessed in “Der Wegweiser,” with its throbbing eighth notes and parting reference to the road “from which there is no going back,” and “Der Wirtshaus,” whose chorale-like harmonies impart religious solemnity to the weary traveler’s urge to seek lodgings in a graveyard. After vainly attempting to pluck up his courage (“Mut”), the protagonist resigns himself to his solitary fate (“Die Nebensonnen”), epitomized by his haunting encounter with a hurdy-gurdy grinder (“Der Leiermann”), a fellow outcast whose isolation and hopelessness are expressed by the piano’s bleakly droning chords and the Sisyphean repetitions in the vocal line. Here, as elsewhere in the cycle’s second half, Schubert departs from the simple strophe-based forms he used in many of the earlier settings. The increasing structural complexity and variety of the later songs reflect the traveler’s emotional volatility as he journeys toward his final destination, a state of self-knowledge that is indistinguishable from despair.

Contemporary reviewers of Winterreise recognized it as an echt-Romantic work that plumbed the depths of the subconscious decades before Freud brought them to light. Schubert’s music, one commentator wrote, took listeners “through the immeasurable depth of the human heart into the far distance, where premonitions of the infinite dawn upon them longingly in a rosy radiance, but where at the same time the shuddering bliss of an inexpressible sentiment is accompanied by the gentle pain of the constraining present which hems in the boundaries of human existence. . . . in this logical establishment of harmony between outward and inward things lies the chief merit of both poets, the speaking and the singing one.”

Although nothing in Müller’s short but apparently contented life as a teacher and librarian in Dessau suggests that his Winterreise was autobiographical, Schubert—who had contracted syphilis in 1822 and knew he was living on borrowed time—almost certainly felt a personal connection to the doomed traveler. Joseph Spaun’s account of the cycle’s informal premiere, though written years after the fact, has the ring of truth:

For some time Schubert appeared very upset and melancholy. When I asked him what was troubling him, he would only say, “Soon you will hear and understand.” One day he said to me, “Come over to Schober’s today, and I will sing you a cycle of horrifying 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.”

© Harry Haskell, 2023