INTRODUCTION

With a heart filled with endless love for those who scorned me, I . wandered far away. For many and many a year I sang songs. Whenever I tried to sing of love, it turned to pain. And again, when I tried to sing of pain, it turned to love.

-SCHUBERT, "My Dream," manuscript, July 3, 1822

Winterreise-Winter Journey-a cycle of twenty-four songs for voice and piano, was composed by Franz Schubert towards the end of his short life. He died in Vienna in 1828 aged only thirty-one.

Schubert was renowned, even in his own lifetime, as a song composer of matchless fecundity and a master of seductive melody; the Winter Journey apparently discombobulated his friends. One of the closest of these, Joseph von Spaun, remembered thirty years later how the cycle had been received by the Schubert circle:

For some time Schubert appeared very upset and melancholy. When I asked him what was troubling him, he would only say, "Soon you will hear and understand." One day he said to me, "Come over to 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 Winter Journey 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, "The Linden Tree," 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."

Another close friend, with whom Schubert had shared digs some years before, was Johann Mayrhofer, government official and poet (Schubert set some forty-seven of his poems to music). For Mayrhofer, Winter Journey was an expression of personal trauma:

He had been long and seriously ill [with the syphilis he had first contracted towards the end of 1822], had gone through disheartening experiences, and life had shed its rosy colour; winter had come for him. The poet's irony, rooted in despair, appealed to him: he expressed it in cutting tones.

Spaun confounded even more dramatically the personal and the aesthetic in his account of the cycle's genesis. "There is no doubt in my mind," he wrote, "that the state of excitement in which he wrote his most beautiful songs, and especially his Winter Journey, contributed to his early death."

There is something profoundly mythologising about these accounts, especially Spaun's, which has something of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane about it-the dejection, the friends who miss the point, the sense of a mystery that will only be understood after the death of its progenitor. As against the persistent legend of "poor Schubert"-unappreciated, unloved, unsuccessful in his own lifetime-it is worth remembering that he earned well from his music, was welcomed into the salons of the well-connected (if not the aristocracy), and earned critical plaudits as well as his fair share of brickbats. Schubert was probably the first great composer to operate as a freelancer outside the security and restriction of a church position or noble patronage and, allowing for a certain youthful fecklessness, he did well for himself. His music was second only to Rossini's for its popularity on Viennese programmes; it was played by most of the great instrumentalists of the day; and his fees were substantial. Winter Journey itself did not fall still-born from the press. Here is one contemporary review, from the Theaterzeitung of March 29, 1828:

Schubert's mind shows a bold sweep everywhere, whereby he carries everyone away with him who approaches, and he takes them through the immeasurable depth of the human heart into the far distance, where premonitions of the infinite dawn upon them longingly in a rosy radiance, but where at the same time the shuddering bliss of an inexpressible presentiment is accompanied by the gentle pain of the constraining present which hems in the boundaries of human existence.

Despite the slightly windy Romantic rhetoric, the writer has clearly perceived and engaged with what has become the acknowledged, canonical sublimity of the cycle; that transcendental quality which transmogrifies what could so easily be mistaken for a self-indulgent parade of disappointed love lyrics. For the initiate, Winter Journey is one of the great feasts of the musical calendar: an austere one, but one almost guaranteed to touch the ineffable as well as the heart. After the last song, "The Hurdy-Gurdy Man," the silence is palpable, the sort of silence that otherwise only a Bach Passion can summon up.

Yet the very notion of the "initiate" will set some alarm bells ringing. It's one of the reasons for writing another book about the piece: to explain, to justify, to contextualise and embroider. Piano-accompanied song is no longer part of everyday domestic life, and has lost its one-time supremacy in the concert hall. Art song, as Americans call it-what Germans know as Lieder-is a niche product, even within the niche that is classical music; but Winter Journey is incontestably a great work of art which should be as much a part of our common experience as the poetry of Shakespeare and Dante, the paintings of Van Gogh and Pablo Picasso, the novels of the Brontë sisters or Marcel Proust. It is surely remarkable that the piece lives and makes an impact in concert halls all over the world, in cultures remote from the circumstances of its origins in 1820s Vienna: I'm writing this introduction in Tokyo, where Winter Journey is as telling as it is in Berlin, London, or New York.

In this book I want to use each song as a platform for exploring those origins; setting the piece in its historical context, but also finding new and unexpected connections, both contemporary and long dead-literary, visual, psychological, scientific, and political. Musical analysis will inevitably play its part, but this is nothing as systematic as a guide to Winter Journey, of which there are plenty already out there. That I do not have the technical qualifications to analyse music in the traditional, musicological sense-I have never studied music at university or music college-has its disadvantages, but maybe advantages too. I have been heartened by Nicholas Cook's exploration of the "discrepancies between the listener's experience of music and the way in which it is described or explained in theoretical terms" (in his brilliant study Music, Imagination and Culture). Experiment has shown that even highly trained musicians tend not to listen to music as musical form in the technical sense; for all of us, unless we're making a special and determined effort of analysis, our encounter with music is more episodic and even cavalier, less relentlessly theoretical-even when we're listening to a piece from the great tradition that presents itself as musical argument, a Beethoven symphony for example, or a Bach fugue. Within as diffuse a structure as Winter Journey-a set of twenty-four songs, the first and greatest of concept albums-there may be recurring patterns or harmonic devices that deserve pointing out; but I tend to do so in what one might call a phenomenological mode, tracing the subjective and culturally loaded trajectories of listener and performer rather than cataloguing modulations, cadences, and root positions.

By gathering such a disparate mass of material I hope to illuminate, to explain, and to deepen our common response; to intensify the experience of those who already know the piece, and to reach out to those who have never heard it or heard of it. The lynchpin is always the piece itself-how do we perform it? how should we hear it?-but by placing it within a much broader framework unfamiliar, unexpected perspectives will emerge with, I hope, their own fascination.

MY OWN WAY TO Winter Journey was eased by great teaching and by personal idiosyncrasy. I first came across the music of Franz Schubert and the poetry of Wilhelm Müller (who wrote the words of Winter Journey) at school, aged twelve or thirteen. Our miracle of a music teacher, Michael Spencer, was always getting us to do magnificently, even absurdly, ambitious musical projects. As a singer, and not an instrumentalist, I had always felt slightly outside the charmed circle, though we sang plenty enough fantastic music-Britten, Bach, Tallis, and Richard Rodney Bennett for starters. When Michael, Mr. Spencer, suggested that he (piano) and one of my classmates, Edward Osmond (clarinet), perform something called "The Shepherd on the Rock," I had no idea how brilliantly off the wall it was. Going to his house on a Saturday morning to be with the other musicians and rehearse was one of the great excitements of my life.

"Der Hirt auf dem Felsen" was one of the very last pieces Schubert composed, written at the express request of the great opera diva Anna Milder-Hauptmann, whose voice was a contemporary marvel: "a house," as one had it; "pure metal," another. The opening and concluding verses are by the poet of Winter Journey, Wilhelm Müller, but nothing could be further from Schubert's great song cycle than this dazzling confection of virtuoso pastoral. A shepherd stands on a rock singing into the Alpine landscape before him. His voice echoes and reechoes and he remembers his lover far away. A grieving middle section is succeeded by an excited and excitable invocation of spring. Spring will come, the...