Franz Schubert. Winterreise

Joseph Spaun, one of the most devoted and keen friends of the composer, called Schubert’s Winter Journey “a cycle of excellent… and probably the most beautiful songs ever written to German lyrics”. Since then, the German and Austrian lyrical vocal genre has been enriched with a lot of remarkable pieces, but Spaun’s opinion still does not seem an exaggeration, for this string of songs to words by Wilhelm Müller is a special phenomenon even among great opuses of Schumann and Liszt, Mahler and Wolff (and of Schubert himself too).

In February 1827, in the library of one of his numerous friends, Schubert came across 12 poems by Müller out of his “Winter Journey” cycle. The composer was fascinated with them, and immediately set them to music. The poems were written by the author of the lyrics of his Die schöne Müllerin, and again depicted wanderings, sufferings, hopes, and disappointments of a lonely romantic soul. In the summer of the same year, the composer saw the poems of Müller again, this time in their complete edition published in Volume 2 of “Poems From Papers Left by a Traveling French Horn Player” (Gedichte aus den hinterlassenen Papieren eines reisenden Waldhornisten), and composed another twelve superb songs as the second part of Winter Journey.

The narrator of Winter Journey is wandering through snowstorms and snow heaps, seeing bare trees and frozen rivers. His journey is bleak, cheerless, and aimless — just further away from home, from the memories of happy days spent there once. The traveler is tired, and nothing in the world can cheer him up any more. He is lonely and unhappy, with no one around but the dead wintry landscape echoing with howls of wind and creaks of trees.

Müller’s poems are sincere and artless, and Schubert’s music is alike. Simplicity, intimacy, and insight, these marvelous elements of Schubertian art, show up in Winter Journey with incredible, astounding might. The cycle was finalized one year before the composer’s death, and absorbed all the main achievements of his creative progress, to become a kind of final coup in his colossal song heritage. Schubert’s fantastic insight in the essence of a poem, ability to depict in music any subtle nuances of the hero’s inner world and psychology, sophisticated diversity in technique, and a richest gamut of melodies and harmonies are matched here with his main discovery that was absolutely novel for that time. The composer implements the idea of superior unity previously applied only to large instrumental opuses, to the song format. Winter Journey lasts for over 70 minutes. The history of music does not know a similar Cyclopean amplitude in the chamber vocal genre, neither before nor after Schubert

Schubert worked on Müller’s poems with a tremendous, sometimes feverish passion, and distinguished Winter Journey among his other works. The composer did not want to let the opus “out of his hands”, and it was nothing but his deep poverty that forced him to sell the manuscript to a publisher. Several researchers even believe that exhausting work on the cycle was a cause of Schubert’s early death.

Today, 170 years after, this song masterpiece of Schubert has not lost its freshness and is still loved by all who value the German Romantic musical tradition and poetry. The performing archive of the Schubert — Müller cycle now comprises hundreds and thousand of interpretations and recordings. The Northern Flowers are happy to offer their contribution, a deep, refined, and inspired one, now available also to music lovers in Russia.