Lammermuir Festival: Tenor Nicholas Mulroy on the enduring appeal of Schubert’s Winterreise
Schubert’s mighty song cycle speaks to us just as clearly about the human condition now as it did when it was first performed almost two centuries ago, writes Nicholas Mulroy
Vienna, 1828. Your friend who writes songs has invited you to one of his regular evening gatherings. You are hoping for a few pleasing melodies punctuated by conversation and drink, but what you get instead is a whole cycle of 24 songs - more than 70 minutes of unremitting bleakness. Afterwards, another friend comments, “we were altogether dumbfounded by the sombre mood of these songs, and Schober said that one song only, Der Lindenbaum, had pleased him”. Everyone’s a critic.
What you had heard that evening was the first performance of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise (”winter journey”), which I will be singing with the brilliant pianist Jeremy Denk on 17 September as part of this year’s Lammemermuir Festival. It seems, notionally, a tough sell. Its 24 songs are mostly in minor keys – the conventional musical colour of sadness, darkness, tragedy. They are about a person about whom we know next to nothing, and their descent into oblivion via mental disintegration, set against a cruel winter landscape. As you might imagine, there aren’t a lot of laughs.
And yet, Winterreise has been recorded well over 200 times, is an enduringly popular choice with programmers and the concert-going public, and is generally recognised as a pinnacle not just of song but of Western classical music. It’s worth a look at its enduring appeal, and asking how and why it retains such popularity and fascination.
Firstly, there’s the music. Schubert wrote a staggering amount in his short life, before his premature death, aged just 31. His piano works, his chamber music, even his symphonies, all belong in the very top tier of musical history. It’s arguably his 600 or so songs, though, that – like Mozart’s piano concerti or Bach’s church music – reveal his soul.
There were songs, of course, long before Schubert, but he revolutionised the form, radically opening up its musical reach and rapidly expanding its expressive possibilities. These piano parts offer acute psychological commentary as much as musical accompaniment, and, while they are staggering in quantity, sustained quality and variety, perhaps the most striking thing about them is just how organically the words and music emerge as a whole. The poems here (of Wilhelm Müller) seem to breathe out into melody, combining a folksy naturalness with the exquisite craft of a master. Listen to the bitter melancholy of Der Wegweiser or the tender simplicity of Der Lindenbaum, which many German speakers still today sing to their children. We might think of the song recital as arcane and forbidding, but these songs still communicate in as open-hearted and direct a way as any songs in any genre since.
Alongside the music, the character of the poet is simultaneously a confessional over-sharer and an enigma. We never learn much about him. Rather like a character in a Hammershøi painting seen only from behind, he projects only his own anonymity. He sets out at the start of the work - “A stranger I arrived, and a stranger I leave” – already ostracised, already ripped from the centre of his own story. As he travels through torrid internal and external landscapes, all the listener can do is observe, sympathise, and, in my experience, easily translate their own selves into this tale of someone hollowed out by capricious circumstance and driven to the depths of human experience.
The narrative begins at the point where the poet leaves town, destination unknown. We embark on a tour of standard poetic landscape and imagery: frozen rivers, snowy hills, unwelcoming houses, sinister characters, wild and dangerous animals. Time and again, the rather slight poetry is elevated into something sublime and universal by the music’s seemingly infinite imagination and inspiration: a harmonic slight of hand here, a soul-searching melody there, and the composer’s unerring ability to find musical material that illuminates the text. Towards the journey’s end, we stop at a graveyard or to gaze at a hallucinatory night sky, and Schubert pulls one of his favourite compositional tricks. Rather than choose an intuitive minor key, he writes about tragedy in the theoretically sunnier major. Somehow this produces a richer and more poignant sadness, acknowledging – within despair - the possibility of happiness, like looking through bitter tears at a photograph of happier times.
It’s this side of Schubert to which I reckon listeners respond most keenly. He doesn’t seek to channel the entire theological cosmos like Bach, he isn’t an iconoclast like (his idol) Beethoven. His music (especially here) is full of restraint, compassion, of understanding of life’s cruelty, and of sympathy for those who suffer (his short life was punctuated by long illness, so he had more than enough first-hand experience). For the performers, the songs mine some very personal, often painful experiences, and involve accessing dark corners of one’s past. It can be hard to retain objectivity, and some songs, particularly Das Wirtshaus or Die Nebensonnen, can be overwhelming when sung in their context. Indeed, finding appropriate personal connection to the material while retaining technical control is one of the main challenges of a work which asks for emotional, rather than vocal, virtuosity.
Lastly, I suspect one reason for the enduring appeal of the cycle is the experience of hearing it live. For the two performers to embark on this journey in the presence of a listening, breathing, feeling audience who will each bring their own stories, pain and memories to witness something unique and authentic is a particular privilege. This is collaborative, spontaneous chamber music at the service of a tale with eternal resonance: deep loss, shuddering alienation, mortal fear, forlorn hope, a self pulled relentlessly from its moorings. People will make their own conclusions. For some this will be a tale of young love lost; for others something that echoes the cruel, slow loss of someone beloved.
This is a work that takes its time to find light in human sorrow and suffering. The conclusion: not only are they necessary parts of existence, they genuinely enrich, and even enhance, our experience of being alive.
Winterreise retains its fascination because, in music of supernatural greatness, it speaks of the human heart and a lack of connection; of what we can bear, what we can survive, and what we can’t.
Nicholas Mulroy and Jeremy Denk will perform Schubert’s Winterreise at Dirleton Kirk on 17 September as part of this year’s Lammermuir Festival, which runs from 8-20 September, see www.lammermuirfestival.co.uk
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