A Winter's Journey Re-Journeyed

Right, so as usual I’m a little behind the times. It’s officially spring—time to pay the taxes, watch for the scilla (yes, my dear computer—it’s a little blue flower that against the newly green of grass and a fresh snow manages both to soothe and to shock the eye at the same time) and get the Frisbee out for the dog to play with. I spent the last weekend, however, immersed in that most wintery of music, appropriately called Winterreise, a Winter’s Journey.

Now for a word of reassurance. Readers of Iguanas will know that this was the music that I chose that was given to me when I descended into madness in December of 2011 and the following January. Relax—I’m not in the same place, but in one much better.

Saying which, I will also confess to not knowing now, as I didn’t know then, whose finger had been on the iPod then, or the mouse pad now. I simply stumbled onto Winterreise, which of course I don’t believe and neither should you.

So I was there and not there, a state eerily similar to the experience of watching a documentary, Over the Top with Franz, about the filming of a DVD about the singing of a glorious English tenor and the playing of a majestic also-English pianist of a song cycle written by an Austrian composer about a guy with serious problems.

The composer is Franz Schubert, the year was 1827, and the physical / psychological conditional of the composer was, as we would now say, quite compromised. Right, Schubert was rotting away with syphilis, untreatable at the time, and staring into the face of eventual madness. This normally does not provoke gales of laughter….

So Winterreise has moved out of autumnal and into the coldest of regions. Fitting, then, that as I read the lyrics—which you can do in five minutes, though the performance will last an hour easily—they’re really images: the weathervane, the village inn, the frozen spring. And the lyrics are spare; these are the lyrics to the song in the clip below:

He used to see three suns, but two of them have turned away to shine upon another, and now he sees only one, and he wishes that would pass away and leave him to the darkness.

Schubert’s treatment, to me, paradoxically matches that sparseness and is extended as well. Thus, you find yourself suspended in a long, bleak, horizontal landscape with no possibility of escape. The singer has left willingly the warmth of home that he knew; he could but will not go back.  The first poem makes this clear:

By moonlight, in winter, the poet leaves the house as he came to it, a stranger. The daughter has allowed their love to grow, and the mother has encouraged the pair to think of marriage: but the daughter's love has wandered to some new sweetheart. So he quietly and secretly steals away while they are sleeping, writing 'Good night' on her door, and leaving the path of his footsteps in the snow.

Pretty romantic stuff—the moonlight, the poet, the broken romance, writing “good night” on her door. But it’s almost artifice, this hoary repetition of the hero with the broken heart—the music suggests much more. Curiously, Schubert’s other song cycle, Die schöne Müllerin (D. 795, Op. 25, 1823) has the same theme, but the jilted young man has both an unhappier end and yet a stouter heart. Yes, he drowns himself, the hero of Mullerin; the hero of Winterreise goes on mutely, accompanied by an organ-grinder he encounters at the edge of the village. But could anything be worse than endlessly enduring, stoically going on, a poet chained by his own misery to an organ grinder?

Everything about Mullerin speaks of youth; everything about Winterreise whispers age, decay, and death.  And yesterday, I came upon a wonderful clip of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears performing and discussing three songs of Winterreise. They say, as does everyone, that it’s music for the old; Pears decided to wait until he was fifty to perform it.

Ian Bostridge, thank God, decided otherwise. And while it had been a superb German baritone, Matthias Goerne, who was the singer who accompanied me on my own winter’s journey a year ago, it was Bostridge, an amazing English tenor, who sang for me last weekend. And more than sang—I followed him throughout the process of making the film as he argued and sparred with an opinionated director, David Alden, a guy completed uncowed by the two artists in front of him. Both the pianist, Julius Drake, and Bostridge must have been frustrated; equally, they must have trusted that Alden would produce an interesting piece.

And it appears that he did, though I would have slapped Alden several times along the way. He constantly pushes Bostridge and Drake to be more gothic—at one point Drake plays the open notes of a song in a perfect parody of a music hall organist. Drake means it to repel; Alden is delighted.

But however much Pears may have been right to wait until his fifties to sing this work, I’m glad Bostridge didn’t. He’s perfect for the part—rail thin, gaunt, sunken cheeks and wide eyes.

His singing is amazing, his control perfect, and he’s unafraid, in one of the clips I saw, to make a truly ugly sound a couple of times in the last song. It shouldn’t work, it wouldn’t work with anybody else, but with Bostridge it does.

Wikipedia quotes a contemporary of Schubert’s, Joseph von Spaun, in the following anecdote:

"Come to Schober's today and I will play you a cycle of terrifying songs; they have affected me more than has ever been the case with any other songs." He then, with a voice full of feeling, sang the entire Winterreise for us. We were altogether dumbfounded by the sombre mood of these songs, and Schober said that one song only, "Der Lindenbaum", had pleased him. Thereupon Schubert leaped up and replied: "These songs please me more than all the rest, and in time they will please you as well." '.

That hasn’t happened for me yet. I suffer through Winterreise when it comes upon me, and am glad when at last it goes. I endure, not listen, when the unknown finger hits the play icon. Nothing about Winterreise is beautiful, everything about it is essential.

Is that its strange beauty?