Franz Schubert’s Winterreise review – music to make sense of the human condition
It is bleak midwinter. Not the depths plumbed in Harold Darke’s magical carol; more the amber warning variety, nineteen inches of snow enforcing the Covid lockdown. Bad timing for a winter journey, unless it’s Franz Schubert’s Winterreise, a twenty-four-song cycle colossus, composed shortly before his frighteningly premature death in 1828, at the age of 31. Syphilis got him. Our Franz was a bit of a player.
I know, I know, we’re all running ragged from isolation, so why take on Schubert’s “monster sacré”, as the work was described by Joseph von Spaun, Schubert’s lifelong friend, patron and Imperial counsellor? We’ve got enough to cope with, what with recovering Amazon packages lobbed into snow crusted hedges and shouting at Great Aunty Batty to unmute on Zoom, without veering over the cliff of depression. Is that where the doom laden Winterreise may inevitably lead us?
Not when it is performed and dissected by tenor Ian Bostridge. His absorbing 2014 book, Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession, reveals his long-term fascination with a work he considers to be Schubert’s finest. Sharing that obsession is a privilege.
At 490 pages the patient reader could be forgiven for thinking Bostridge had exhausted the potential of his subject, but he closes: “This book ….. is no more than a small part of a continuing exploration of the complex and beautiful web of meanings – musical and literary, textual and metatextual – within which this Winter Journey works its spell.” Beware all who enter here. You will be consumed.
I think what he’s getting at is that every time he sings it – and it is a regular in his repertoire – something else crops up unexpectedly, an unappreciated twist in the plot, perhaps a shading of character, or a nuance of the social mores of the times. It is also the story of an outcast.
Now, when exclusion is becoming such a political obsession, is a good time to revisit Winterreise. Not least to hammer home to wound up woke Tweeters that what they think they have uniquely stumbled across as a new affront, has actually troubled poets, authors, composers and the thinking population for centuries.
First the music, then the book. The songs are based on twenty-four poems by Wilhelm Mühler. The listener knows from the start that the world is not spinning on its familiar axis. The first piece, Gute nacht (Good night) is a sort of “to begin at the end”, unsettling approach. The songs then range across incidents and places on the wanderer’s journey, Frozen Tears, The Linden Tree – one of the best known of the cycle – Will-o’-the-Wisp, Delusion, Courage, The Mock Suns and finally The Hurdy-Gurdy Man.
That is only a short selection, but it gives a feel for the range of emotions, changes of heart and the ups and downs of the narrator’s story. Make no mistake, Schubert and Mühler take you deep into this man’s soul, but leave enough unsung for listeners to fill in the gaps for themselves. This music is an inescapable whirlpool, self-help psychotherapy on a CD – or from your Spotify account.
Mühler was swimming against the tide. That tide was German Romanticism, then overwhelming early 19th century art and literature. The fad was to “go with the flow”, wherever it led. Think heedless Byron. Mühler’s wanderer eventually rejects Romantic Schein(semblance) for realist Sein (actual being). There is nothing more real than The Hurdy-Gurdy Man at the end of the journey, prosaic, ignored, churning out timeless tunes.
Schubert’s friends hated the song cycle on first hearing it. They couldn’t understand why he would choose to dwell on misery. When he invited them for the first recital, he knew it would be “trouble at mill” time.
This is hardly an invitation to a jolly soiree. “Come over to Schrober’s today, and I will sing you a cycle of horrifying songs. They have cost me more effort than any of my other songs”.
When his friends pronounced them duds, apart from The Linden Tree, Schubert responded prophetically, “I like these songs more than all the rest, and you will come to like them as well.” Perhaps the singer composer was aware his friends were listening to his own epitaph.
Bostridge likens the Schrober episode to the experience of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, “Dejection, the friends who miss the point, the sense of a mystery that will be understood only after the death of its progenitor”. So, it proved to be for poor Schubert.
Schubert was second only to Rossini in popularity at the time. He was uniquely unshackled from aristocratic patronage; the first middle class composer of note, who lived from his not inconsiderable royalties and was free to follow his own star.
Sixteen of those shone as song cycles, including the difficult Die schöne Müllerin (The Pretty Miller Maid), whose unsuccessful suitor eventually ends it all in the mill race. Audiences, including the boys at Schrober’s that night, understood that events in Schubert’s songs tended to work out not necessarily in the best interests of the main protagonist.
Winterreise, however, was in a class all its own. The work is held together by large structures, motifs carrying on from one song into the next in different form, sometimes so subtly that the listener is not consciously aware. For example, the end figure of The Linden Tree feeds into the following Wasserflute (Flood).
Mood magic is performed by subtle movement from minor to major keys. Perhaps the most striking example is when the last verse of Good Night bursts into unexpected major optimism. The walking motion throughout is a reminder of the plight of the wandering Jew, unsettling. Jack Kerouac would later piggy-back on the idea for his 1957 travel novel, On the Road.
Downward sequences of quavers flag up trouble ahead. Lustrous post horns remind of real life. Will-o’-the-Wisp weaves romantic forest legend into the journey. In Die Post (The Post) the pace is lifted. Maybe a letter has arrived from the lost cause lover? Today it would be buzz from an SMS, or a ping from an email.
There have been two stand-out performer duos of this song cycle in recent times; Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the legendary German baritone, accompanied by pianist Gerald Moore and Bostridge, accompanied by Julian Drake.
Bostridge twigged early on that the wintry bleakness of the work, the desolate landscapes and the pervasive sense of foreboding could not be best presented by static singers in immaculate tuxedos standing next to gleaming Steinways. Lost in Translation springs to mind. The piece needed a sense of theatre to realise its potential.
Here is what he did. In 1997, American director David Alden, best known in the UK for his work with English National Opera in the mould breaking era of Sir Peter Jonas, made a film of Winterreise for Channel 4 featuring Messrs. Bostridge and Drake, transforming a recital work into a spellbinding operatic performance.
Some critics think Bostridge’s tenor voice too light for Schubertian gloom. I think he brings something different to the party – intensity. Herr Fischer-Dieskau is a performer. Mr. Bostridge IS the character. That’s it! I shall henceforth be monstered by the Fischer-Dieskau Anhänger (Fan) Club. No apology from this Bostridge fan. Sorry.
And Ian Bostridge wrote that book. What a book! A score of 48 sheets analysed in a mere 490 pages. Too much already? It would be if Bostridge was obsessed only with Winterreise but he uses each song chapter as a hook on which to expound on the history, art, philosophy, science and politics of the age.
Take The Mock Suns, about phantom suns (parhelia) which appear in winter conditions when light is refracted through snow or ice crystals. Turns out the phenomenon baffled Aristotle. It may even have baffled Schubert. But it is fully explained by Bostridge. One sun is real, the other two are the narrator’s lost lover’s eyes. Nerdy? Nothing nerdy about a phenomenon that had baffled intellectuals – and fascinated artists – for over 1,000 years. It hadn’t baffled me, until I read the book, as the words of the song had over fifty years largely swept over my unthinking head. Read the book.
Frankly, no synopsis of reasonable length could do justice to Bostridge’s easy erudition or grasp of the sweep of historical forces about to engulf post Napoleonic Europe after the supposed 1815 settlement at the Congress of Vienna. I had always put Bostridge down as a fantastic singer – especially as he is, essentially, untrained – but I had not cottoned on that he’s a polymath too. Read the damned book!
So, why bother with a miserable, disturbing work of art that is difficult to understand when what we need is cheering up? It is simply that unless we appreciate the complexities of our human nature, that our Yin and Yang are often optimism and despair in disguise, we will be incomplete. Life is definitely not just a bowl of cherries.
This week we are celebrating the life of hero Captain Sir Thomas Moore, whose catch phrase, “Tomorrow will be a better day”, echoed round the country, if not the world. His infectious optimism was not unfounded, but based on the rock of a difficult life, one which experienced the hell of the WWII “Forgotten Army” in India.
In a different age Winterreise was Schubert’s rock of life. Unsettling though his character’s journey was, the inevitable bleakness could not be ignored if the totality of the human condition was to be understood. Appreciate that eternal truth today via the medium of Ian Bostridge, singer and author. Either just enjoy the music or dig down. Discover in Winterreise’s wintry depths one of the great life-defining art works of the 19th century.