Die Winterreise

While the focus of Schubert’s later years was more on chamber and piano music, the song cycle Die Winterreise (“Winter Journey”) fuses his innate feel for song with assured mastery of large-scale formal thinking. The texts are poems by Wilhelm Müller (1794-1823); Schubert wrote the opening 12 songs in February 1827, with another 12 following in October. Their sombre and introspective quality is often attributed to the syphilitic illness from which he died just over a year later, though issues of an existential nature had long been a feature of his songs. The narrative trajectory of Müller’s poems facilitated a continuous sequence lasting 70 minutes and unified by subtle tonal relationships between the songs overall. Their underlying connection is that of the narrator’s journey, from the opening “Good Night”, where a sudden loss of love prompts the start of that journey to the 12th, “Loneliness”, in which surrounding life further intensifies this isolation; and then from the 13th, “The Post”, with its false raising of hope from the beloved, to the 24th, “The Hurdy-Gurdy Man”, whose playing in the face of total indifference ostensibly aligns the narrator with the composer. Premiered late in 1827 by baritone Johann Michael Vogl, the song cycle was published the next year, Schubert’s correcting of the proofs of the second half constituting his final creative task prior to his death.