In an obituary notice for Schubert, who died on November 19, 1828, at age 31, poet Johann Mayrhofer said of Winterreise, “The poet’s irony, rooted in despair, appealed to him: He expressed it in cutting tones.” In 1858, another friend, Joseph von Spaun, wrote the following in his Reflections and Notes on My Friendship with Franz Schubert:
For some time Schubert appeared very upset and melancholy. When I asked him what was troubling him, he would say only, “Soon you will hear and understand.” One day he said to me, “Come over to [Franz von] 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.”
Wilhelm Müller, born in Dessau near Leipzig in 1794, was famous throughout the 19th century as “the German Byron” because he too was a philhellene, someone who espoused the cause of Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire. Müller’s Griechenlieder (Greek Songs), published between 1821 and 1826, were among his best-known works, but he also translated Christopher Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor Faustus into German, edited 10 volumes of 17th-century German poetry, and wrote novels, novellas, and lyric poetry—some of it spiked with acid commentary on Prussian politics. Throughout the late 19th century and most of the 20th, Müller was decried as a trite and naive poet. Nowadays we recognize his transformations of conventional themes as having genuine depth and originality; Schubert certainly did.
The poetic work appeared in three stages, beginning with the first 12 poems entitled Wanderlieder von Wilhelm Müller. Die Winterreise. In 12 Liedern (Wandering Songs by Wilhelm Müller. The Winter Journey. In 12 Songs), published in the periodical Urania: Taschenbuch auf das Jahr 1823 (Urania, Pocketbook Anthology for the Year 1823). Schubert discovered this source sometime in late 1826 or early 1827, as the order of the Urania poems corresponds exactly to Part I of his setting—which he thought was a complete work.
In March 1823, 10 additional poems were published in the Deutsche Blätter für Poesie, Literatur, Kunst und Theatre (German Album-Leaves for Poetry, Literature, Art, and Theater). At the third and final stage, the complete cycle, with the addition of the last two poems to be written (“Die Post,” or “The Post,” and “Täuschung,” or “Illusion”), appeared in the second volume of Müller’s collected poems, the Gedichte aus den hinterlassenen Papieren eines reisenden Waldhornisten II: Lieder des Lebens und der Liebe (Poems from the Posthumous Papers of a Traveling Horn-Player: Songs of Life and Love). It was published in 1824 and dedicated to composer Carl Maria von Weber. The title is Müller’s post-Romantic “send-up” of as many Romantic motifs as he could cram into one name.
According to Franz von Schober, Schubert discovered the cycle in Schober’s library—when and which one of the poetic sources, he does not say. Schober and Schubert shared lodgings in the autumn of 1826, after which Schubert lived alone from the end of 1826 until February 1827, when he once again moved in with Schober.
Sometime in late 1826 or early 1827, Schubert began setting the cycle to music; in early March 1827, he invited his friends to hear the unveiling of new works, but unaccountably failed to appear for the soirée he himself had arranged. It is possible that Schubert’s plans for the informal performance of his “completed” work in March were overturned by his discovery of the Waldhornisten poems and his realization that his music was not, in fact, complete.
Why Müller changed the ordering of his 24 poems at the final stage is anyone’s guess, but Schubert could not duplicate that order when he found the complete poetic cycle without disrupting the musical continuum already created. For his Fortsetzung, or Continuation (Part II, the last 12 songs), he simply set the remaining poems in order, beginning with “Die Post,” although he reverses the poet’s order of “Mut” (“Courage”) and “Die Nebensonnen” (“The Mock Suns”) near the end. Publisher Tobias Haslinger brought the work out in two stages. Part I appeared in the summer of 1828, Part II after the composer’s death. According to Haslinger and Schubert’s brother Ferdinand, Schubert corrected the proofs for Part II after he took to his bed in Ferdinand’s apartment on Kettenbrückengasse, where he would die shortly afterward.
Müller borrowed the subject of his cycle Die Winterreise from the stockpile of standard Romantic themes—a journey by an isolated, alienated wanderer with a tragic finale in madness or death—and varied it in original ways. (Schubert omitted the definite article from his title for a stronger, starker effect.) These poems constitute a monodrama, a work in which a single character investigates the labyrinth of his or her psyche in search of self-knowledge or escape from psychological torment or both. What defines monodrama is the exclusion of any other characters and the obliteration of as much awareness on the reader/listener’s part of the poet’s control as possible. Whatever we know in this cycle, we know from the wanderer’s point of view. There is no narrator, no plot, no logical succession of events in the external world. Instead, we spy on fleeting emotions and states of mind.
We are never told the persona’s name, occupation, upbringing, personal history, or appearance (except that he has black hair and is therefore not elderly). The lack of specificity underscores the interiority of the cycle; if we know very little about the wanderer’s external circumstances, we learn much more about his inner life. Long before Freud, he knows that dreams are wish-fulfillment fantasies, but, in his despair, he is unable to resist the lure of the illusions by which we comfort ourselves.
Before the journey begins, much has already happened to this character. In the first song, “Gute Nacht,” he tells us that he came to this place a stranger and departs still a stranger, unsuccessful once more in his quest for belonging. When he is jilted, he loses more than the love of one person: He loses the hope that human bonds are possible for him. Before he leaves, he bids the sleeping sweetheart farewell; in Schubert’s hands, Müller’s angry sarcasm at the end becomes tenderness made audible in a magical shift from minor to major mode. The repeated notes/chords in the piano symbolize the journey and return at significant points throughout the cycle.
The weathervane, changing direction with each changing breeze, is a traditional symbol for infidelity. In “Die Wetterfahne,” we hear the weathervane whirling about, the gusts of wind, and most of all the wanderer’s anger. The tears that come as if from nowhere and freeze on his face in “Gefrorne Tränen” hint that something even deeper than love’s betrayal is at the heart of the psychological turmoil. The fourth song, “Erstarrung,” exemplifies the tug of war between reason and emotion in the first half of the cycle: He searches frantically for mementos of her because he knows that without them, her image will eventually vanish from his heart.
The linden tree in “Der Lindenbaum” is where lovers in German literature traditionally have their rendezvous; here, the wanderer remembers bygone happiness. The rustling leaves seem to say, “Come to me and find rest”—but the only way to be one with Nature is to die. The wanderer resists and journeys onward.
In “Wasserflut,” he imagines rivers of tears flowing all the way to her house, and in “Auf dem Flusse,” he asks his heart whether a raging torrent flows beneath its frozen crust. Grief continually “looks back” at what is lost, and that is what the wanderer does in “Rückblick.”
Twice in this cycle, Müller invokes the will-o’-the-wisp or “ignis fatuus,” the ghostly light that appears in bogs, swamps, and marshes. Here, the will-o’-the-wisp is perhaps the girl who lured the persona into the emotional chasm through which he meanders aimlessly in “Irrlicht.” “I am used to straying,” he sings: For Schubert, whose syphilitic infection is believed to have come from an encounter with a sex worker in late 1822, this poem perhaps had personal meaning.
The wanderer pauses in his journey for the first time in “Rast,” but the pangs of anguish continue in his heart. Finally falling asleep in “Frühlingstraum,” he dreams of springtime and reciprocal love in strains of Mozartean delicacy and clarity, only to be rudely awakened to cold reality—not once, but twice. In the wake of this experience, he feels even more solitary and wretched than before. Schubert originally thought that “Einsamkeit” was the ending and wrote Fine (“The End”) with a flourish after the final bar.
“Die Post” at the midway point re-energizes the cycle with its horn calls and clip-clopping horses’ hooves. But thereafter, the wanderer longs repeatedly for death; in “Der greise Kopf,” he hopes that the frost on his hair means that he has grown old overnight and will soon die, and in “Die Krähe,” he hopes that the crow circling overhead is a death omen. “Letzte Hoffnung” inspired Schubert to complex and disorienting rhythmic patterns that tell both of an extremity of despair and of leaves that fall from the trees at random.
This spasm of despair is followed by scorn of sleepy small-town values, of those deluded people who can dream and hope for good things, unlike him. The figures at the beginning of “Im Dorfe” can be heard both as the dogs’ chains rattling and the villagers’ snoring; the wanderer’s renunciation of dream worlds at the close as a musical ending reminiscent of the Baroque era can be interpreted either wistfully or angrily. The next morning, he sees the image of his own heart in the storm-tossed clouds and fiery dawn of “Der stürmische Morgen,” with its “military march” middle section; the Lear-on-the-heath defiance is over almost before we can take in such violence.
For “Täuschung,” the second will-o’-the-wisp song, Schubert borrows from his 1821–1822 opera Alfonso und Estrella, where it told of a cloud-maiden who lured a hunter to follow her until he tumbled to his death far below. Here, the wanderer knows the will-o’-the-wisp is a delusion, but is so desperate for light and warmth and company that he follows it anyway, his music expressive of mad merriment.
The 20th song, “Der Wegweiser,” is the moment of peripeteia, of recognition. As he asks yet again why his road is so solitary and difficult, he sees a signpost in his mind for the road he must take, a road “from which no man has ever returned.” He does not say what it is—surely death—but we gather from the next song, “Das Wirtshaus,” that it will take longer to arrive than the wanderer would wish. When he stops at a cemetery, which he compares to an inn, and begs for a room, he is turned away by the “pitiless” innkeeper Death; he must continue his journey.
The false courage he tries to assemble in “Mut” quickly evaporates, followed by a song of profound resignation: “Die Nebensonnen.” The mysterious three suns could be Müller’s symbolic use of the atmospheric phenomenon known as parhelion, in which sun refracted through ice-crystals produces illusory images of the sun on either side. Here, the illusions symbolize the beloved’s gaze, which vanished from his sight.
At the “end” of the cycle (not truly an end) in “Der Leiermann,” the wanderer sees a hurdy-gurdy player, wordless, frozen, grinding out music so obsessive and elemental as to be deprived of all possibility of transcendence. This is living death, and it is worse by far than physical extinction.
When Schubert set these poems to music, he was confronting his own probable fate. Enough was known in the 1820s about syphilis for Schubert to realize that this disease often led to dementia and paralysis before release in death. He might have wondered as he read “Der Leiermann” whether he too would be condemned to suffer what the wanderer confronts: a future with his creative faculties numbed and the capacity to create music restricted to a single phrase, repeated mindlessly over and over. The cycle ends on a question mark for which there is no answer, only the echoing silence following the dying-away drone of the hurdy-gurdy.
Realizing this, one understands what a heroic act it was for Schubert to set this text, of all texts, to music, to fashion transcendent art from the bleakest fear imaginable. Perhaps Death, flattered by Schubert’s many portraits of him in music, spared the composer the fate he most dreaded, taking him swiftly before insanity and paralysis could claim him as their own. Despite the tragedy of his premature death (and we will always wonder what might have been), we can only be grateful that he did not become the wanderer, but instead turned him into songs he liked “better than all the rest.”
—Susan Youens