Thinking that this was the entirety of the work, he set the cycle to music, perhaps in early 1827, and wrote “Fine” – The End – with a flourish at the conclusion of the twelfth song. Several years later, perhaps near the end of 1826, he discovered a cycle of twelve poems entitled Die Winterreise ( The Winter Journey) in the literary periodical Urania: Taschenbuch auf das Jahr 1823 (pp. In late 1822 or early 1823, Schubert had discovered Müller’s first anthology of poetry, the extravagantly entitled Siebenundsiebzig Gedichte aus den hinterlassenen Papieren eines reisenden Waldhornisten( Seventy seven poems from the posthumous papers of a travelling hornplayer, published in the poet’s native Dessau in 1821), and had set the first work in the volume – Die schöne Müllerin ( The Beautiful Miller Maid) – to music in 1823. Winterreise was not Schubert’s first cycle to poems by Müller, who was famous in his own lifetime as the “Griechen Müller,” or “Greek Müller” (like Lord Byron, whose works Müller helped to popularize in Germany, he championed Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire). lt was fashionable for much of this century to decry Müller as a second rate (or worse) hack, but he was actually a fine poet and a powerful one on many occasions, a writer who found new expression for the literary ideals of his day. We can surmise that he had sought appropriate poetry for a song cycle of his own for some time, and he finally found the perfect subject for his purposes in works by the Prussian poet Wilhelm Müller (1794-1827), almost exactly his contemporary. Schubert insisted that he had to have good poetry before he could compose good songs – he was among the most literary of all composers. One can, for example, see Schubert’s exasperation with an entire lengthy passage in the twelfth song, “Einsamkeit” (“Loneliness”), when he crosses out three unfinished staff systems with an X so furious that it almost cuts through the paper. Schubert’s autograph manuscript for the first half of the cycle is testimony to the effort Spaun recorded in his reminiscences – there are places that look as if the Napoleonic Wars had been fought all over again on these folios, replete with revisions, deletions, added bars, and changes of all kinds (the entire manuscript is in The Pierpont Morgan Library in New York and in a facsimile edition by Dover Publications, Inc.). “Like” is far too pallid a word for the way we now feel about this, one of the supreme masterpieces of the genre. To this Schubert replied, “I like these songs more than all the rest, and you will come to like them as well”. We were utterly dumbfounded by the mournful, gloomy tone of these songs, and Schober said that only one of them, “Der Lindenbaum” (The Linden Tree), had appealed to him. 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. I am anxious to know what you will say about them. One day he said to me, “Come over to Schober’s today and I will sing you a cycle of horrifying songs. When I asked him what was troubling him, he would say only, “Soon you will hear and understand”. Thirty years after Schubert’s death, one of his closest friends, a man named Joseph von Spaun, wrote down his memories of the first performance of this song cycle, a private performance in which the composer previewed his latest work for his circle of friends.įor some time, Schubert appeared very upset and melancholy. As published in the booklet of Thomas Hampson’s EMI/Warner Classics recording
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