Over the past few days I've been listening to two contrasting versions of Schubert's masterly Winterreise sung, respectively, by Florian Boesch and Thomas Bauer. If this is indeed a song cycle depicting a man on the emotional brink, then Boesch sings the songs with the chilling calmness of a man that that has passed that brink into an emotional limbo, whereas Bauer sings the songs as a man raging at life’s vicissitudes. What I find interesting, though, about Boesch’s performance is the sense that the chilling calmness seems to indicate a state of mind that is pitched somewhere before the final two songs of the song cycle and the performance of the preceding songs is refracted by the wanderer’s current state of consciousness, whereas Bauer’s performance is one of a traditional linear narrative, albeit a very anguished one, in which one can observe the disintegrating effect of entropy upon the mind. Of the two versions, I find myself more acutely disturbed by Bauer’s highly subjective reading as Schubert must have been when he first encountered Wilhelm Muller’s poems, but Boesch’s is the more thought-provoking, perhaps a more objective view than Bauer’s, but no less successful in his penetrating insights.
What comes to mind so very vividly after listening to a performance of Winterreise as painfully honest as that of Bauer’s or Boesch’s is the following line from Goethe’s Faust, Part 1, which Schubert had set to music in 1814 as “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” D. 118: “My peace is gone, my heart is heavy, I shall find it never and nevermore”
Winterreise represents a spiritual journey rather than a physical one which traces emotional states of being and thought processes rather than a conventional linear narrative. The spiritual enquiry of the mind is reflected by the wanderer’s progress through the winter landscape, the bleakness of which is analogous to the emotional aridity of his heart. Searching for a place of belonging, he is estranged from the world without and the world within. He cannot accept the loss he has endured and he cannot move forward. Winterreise progressively tells the tale of a dissolution of the self, where, ultimately, the wanderer is lost in nothingness and submerged in emptiness.
Taken as a whole, Winterreise represents Schubert's mastery of a musical economy of means where he mirrors the poet Muller's condensation of his emotional angst to the bare minimum of words with musical language that echoes perfectly the panic, anger, fear, self-delusion, loss and self-nullification that lies at the heart of this work. Consider the sixteenth song in the cycle, Letzte Hoffnung (The Last Hope), in which the wayfarer stops before a tree on which a few leaves remain on its wizened branches. One of those last remaining leaves epitomises the fragility and tenuousness of the man’s last hope as it is subject to the whims of the gathering wind. If the leaf falls, so will his last hope fall, and with it his heart will sink also with all of its hopes and dreams. It is a beautifully captured study in miniature of a mind teetering back and forth between instability, fragility, apprehension and fear and is perfectly mirrored in Schubert’s ambiguity of metre and harmony, in its rising cadences and in its suspension of rhythmic momentum.
What is also worth remarking about Winterreise is that, despite the fact that the shadow of death permeates throughout, suicide as an option is rejected (unlike the tragic denouement in Schubert’s previous song cycle, Die Schone Mullerin). One of the most harrowing songs of all, Der Lindenbaum, sees the wanderer standing before a linden tree in the blackest of nights, with the icy wind blowing hard and thinking of earlier, happier times (in the springtime of the soul) when he carved his heart’s desire into the trunk of the tree. This bleakest of songs is the clearest invitation to suicide as the branches rustle and the wayfarer imagines the tree inviting him to a dark peace. (And, indeed, to Thomas Mann, this meant nothing but the implacability of blackest death, and is the song that his protagonist, Hans Castorp, sings in the concluding scene of his masterpiece, The Magic Mountain, as he is lost in the mist of a battlefield in the First World War.) But, he chooses the harshness of his predicament to death, puts his hat on his head and carries on. And yet, to Muller the poet and Schubert the composer, death must have been prevalent in their thoughts. (Muller would die before seeing completion of his poems and Schubert would die a year after completing Winterreise, and, indeed, he would continue to work on the proofs of this great work on his deathbed. There would never be enough time.)
The final two songs are where we take our leave of this wayfarer and where we get our clearest indication of his final state of mind. The three suns of the penultimate song (Die Nebensonnen) remind one of faith, hope and love. The first two have died, yet love, no matter how much the protagonist denies it, haunts him to his very emotional core, and yearns for its passing. This concept of love takes us back to Der Lindenbaum, which may well be the one thing which enables the wayfarer to reject suicide and press on with his life. The resonating force of the linden tree as an image of happier times and a place of rest and pleasant dreams is, ultimately, stronger than the seductive entreaties of Nature which invite the wanderer to a release from life’s struggles, and instils in his heart an anguished hope of love.
What is so horrifying about the concluding song to Winterreise is that there is no resolution, no climax, no dramatic end. The wanderer’s life becomes a living death. The hurdy gurdy man of the final song (Der Leiermann) represents a projection of the wanderer's own probable future, a refracted image of the man to come. Whilst the poet Muller may have envisioned the hurdy gurdy man as the embodiment of Death, I believe that Schubert sensed that there was more to it than that. Since 1824, he had lived with the spectre of syphilis hanging over him. He knew that his time was running out. Contemporary reports speak of a progressive paralysis of the body, finally attacking the brain and the powers of thought and creativity. Muller’s poems had affected him profoundly and friends spoke about the composer’s visible deterioration as he withdrew into himself to compose Winterreise. I think that the last two songs in particular evince an extended rumination about the significance and implication of Muller’s words. Uppermost in his mind, I believe, was the concept of corporeal transcendence - quite literally, the desire to free the mind from the body. The barefoot hurdy gurdy man epitomises physical deterioration as his stiff (arthritic) fingers attempt to stab out some sort of coarse melody on his organ. Nobody stops to listen, or even glance at him; he is beneath contempt. Even wild dogs shun him. And yet, he smiles continually, lost in his music, lost to any concept of fear or disappointment, or even any awareness of the world around him. The dying Schubert must have read Muller’s words with a conviction of its underlying truths and yearned for a future where he could dwell solely in his mind and cast off his body. To quote the last verse of the song: “Wunderlicher Alter!/Soll ich mit dir geh'n ?/Willst zu meinen Liedern/Deine Leier dreh'n?” - “Strange old man!/Shall I go with you?/Will you play your organ/To my songs?”
Life is full of transitory pleasures which grant us fleeting moments of joy, but the greatest art, and Winterreise is undoubtedly of that pantheon, endures and remains endlessly fascinating in its sense of permanence, and not the kind of permanence that is set in stone, unyielding like a fossil, but rather a living, breathing, organic thing that simultaneously consoles us and challenges us.
