Schubert - Winterreise

Baritone Theo Perry and Pianist George Ireland perform Schubert’s Winterreise

St Michael in Lewes, Sussex, UK
1st September 2024

Notes on the piece:

“Come over to Schober’s today and I will sing you a cycle of horrifying [schauerlicher] songs. I am anxious to know what you will say about them. They have cost me more effort than any of my other songs.”
​ Joseph von Spaun, recalling Schubert’s words before the first performance of Winterreise.

It can be difficult to articulate the depth of Winterreise. To me, it is the most extraordinary, enigmatic, affecting song cycle ever to have been composed. For the performers it poses an array of challenges: to pace the unfolding of a slow-burn psychological thriller through 24 songs over the course of 70-75 minutes, in which musical and dramatic themes repeat themselves, pinning the singer and pianist to the audience, and vice-versa.

One word which repeats itself in different contexts throughout the cycle is “Ruh”. This literally translates as “rest”, but there is more to it than that. Through the lens of the narrator it speaks more of a search for eternal rest than rest in the sense of a good night’s sleep. In Der Lindenbaum, the narrator tells us of the tree calling him to rest: “Hier findst du deine Ruh!” Much later in the cycle, in Der Wegweiser, the narrator relentlessly searches for the path to “rest” amid signposts to various cities. Here is the penultimate stanza:

Weiser stehen auf den Strassen, Weisen auf die Städte zu,
Und ich wandre sonder Massen, Ohne Ruh’, und suche Ruh’.
Signposts stand on the roads, signs that point to the cities,
And relentlessly I wander without rest and seeking rest.

The final stanza shows him down the path he is looking for:

Einen Weiser seh’ ich stehen, Unverrückt vor meinem Blick;
Eine Strasse muss ich gehen, Die noch Keiner ging zurück
I see a signpost standing, unmoving in front of my eyes
I must go down a road, from which no-one has returned

Schubert’s musical treatment of this stanza is far from the concept of Ruh we see in Der Lindenbaum. In this context there is a horror to the profundity of death, and the music pulls us into an abyss instead of the ethereal place of rest implied in Der Lindenbaum. TP