Fleur Barron & Julius Drake: Winter Journey (Winterreise)

Praised as a “charismatic star” by the Boston Globe, mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron is the winner of Tanglewood Festival’s 2016 Jackson Prize, awarded to one outstanding young vocalist each year. “A collaborator gifted with sensitive phrasing and insight” (The New York Times), internationally-renowned pianist Julius Drake is the perfect accompaniment to Barron’s “thrillingly dark and rich-veined mezzo” (Seen and Heard International). Experience this unique presentation of Schubert’s Winterreise – a lieder traditionally performed by a tenor – sung by the mesmerizing Barron.

“[ Barron] brought incredible poise and expressive weight…”  – Seen and Heard International

“...with virtuosic ease, [Drake] blended the background colours around the main exhibit of an evening of song: the singing voice.” – Der Standard

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Program

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SCHUBERT Winterreise, D. 911

FRANZ SCHUBERT (1797-1828)
Winterreise, D. 911 (1827)

“I can neither play nor sing,” wrote the poet Wilhelm Müller in his diary in 1815.  “But when I compose my poem, I sing all the same and play as well. If I could express the tunes that come to me, my songs would please better than they do now. But patience. There may be found a sympathetically tuned soul, which will discover the tunes in the words, and give them back to me.”

Müller would find this “sympathetically tuned soul” in Franz Schubert, and it is chiefly because of Schubert that Müller is remembered today. Schubert’s two great song cycles—Winterreise and Die schöne Müllerin—are twin products of Müller’s contributions to the remarkable 19th century German poetic renaissance and the flowering of German song that it generated. Some 123 of Müller’s 783 poems were set by 241 different composers.

Though Schubert and Müller were almost exact contemporaries, the two never met. Müller, born in Dessau, Saxony, in 1794, went on to study history and philology at the University of Berlin. A member of Berliner Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache (Berlin Society for the German language), he achieved fame for his poetry and moved in intellectual circles that included Romantic giants like the Brothers Grimm, Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, Ludwig Tieck, and Friedrich Rückert—all names familiar to fans of the Lied. No less of an admirer than Heinrich Heine wrote in a letter to Müller: “How pure and clear your songs are, real folk songs. I am idle enough to believe that my name will once, when we live no longer, be mentioned together with yours.”

In 1827, the same year Schubert set Müller’s Winterreise to music, the poet died of a heart attack shortly before his 34th birthday. Schubert would die a year later, at age 31. 

Müller’s verses are rife with the influence of Goethe and they share with that master’s poetry the same sort of scenic and dramatic qualities that inspired so many Schubert songs. Their direct, vivid imagery and light, clear folksong-like style eloquently depict simple yet mighty emotions which seem to be mirrored in nature. The picturesque verses, crystalline diction, graceful meter, and gentle onomatopoeia of Müller’s Winterreise poetry sets in stark relief its tragic themes of physical and emotional iciness, perfectly linking nature with human suffering. And if only Schubert had ever managed to get his hands on an opera libretto that equaled Müller’s incisive way with dramatic conflict and character delineation, who knows what masterpieces may have graced the stage? 

Schubert seemed almost obsessed with the classic German Romantic figure of the Wanderer, as evidenced by works including his Wanderers Nachtlied I & II, Der Wanderer, Der Wanderer an den Mond, and of course, Die schöne Müllerin. And as in that cycle, as well as in Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen after them, the nameless protagonist of Winterreise melds three central German Romantic tropes: the wandering youth, the lonely artist, and the unrequited lover. But unlike his musical brethren, the wanderer of Die Winterreise begins his cycle not joyously in love but already defeated; the very first song begins, “Fremd bin ich eingezogen, fremd zieh’ ich wieder aus.” (“A stranger I came here, a stranger I depart.”) This wanderer seems to be fleeing from himself, and it’s all downhill from there.

Early in 1827, four years after setting Müller’s Die schöne Müllerin to music, Schubert discovered the first twelve poems of the same poet’s Winterreise in the Leipzig almanac Urania and eagerly began composing. In late summer, he located the complete set of 24 poems, published in 1824 in Gedichten aus den hinterlassenen Papieren eines reisenden Waldhornisten (“Poems from the posthumous papers of a traveling horn player”) and dedicated to a “master of German song,” Carl Maria von Weber. Schubert completed the cycle in autumn 1827, and when it was published the next year, he was paid one florin (probably around $15) per song.

The well-documented year of 1827 would turn out to be the penultimate year of the 30-year-old Schubert’s life. Its superficial details—filled with Kaffeeklatsches, parties, Musikverein concerts, and gemütlich “Schubertiades” (the informal home concerts that make us long to time-travel)—belie Schubert’s turbulent emotional and creative life. Beset with intense financial strain and severe headaches, he composed feverishly, as if sensing that his end was near. 

Schubert’s friend Joseph von Spaun observed, “We who were near and dear to him knew how much the creatures of his mind took out of him, and in what anguish they were born. No one who ever saw him at his morning’s work, glowing, and with eyes aflame, yes, and positively with a changed speech…will ever forget it.”

Spaun and other friends even blamed Schubert’s depression and death on his setting the Winterreise poems. “I hold it beyond question that the excitement in which he composed his finest songs, in particular the Winterreise, brought about his untimely death,” wrote Spaun. “Schubert had been in a gloomy mood for some time and seemed unwell. When I asked him what was wrong, he would only say, ‘Now, you will all soon hear and understand.’ One day he said to me: ‘Come to Schober’s today. I shall sing you a cycle of frightening songs. I am curious to see what you will all say to them. They have taken more out of me than was ever the case with other songs.’ He then sang us the whole Winterreise with great emotion. We were taken aback at the dark mood of these songs.”

Another friend, Johann Mayrhofer, poured it on even thicker. “The choice of Winterreise proved how much more serious the composer had become,” he wrote. “Seriously ill for a long time—Winter had set in for him.”

Yet immediately after finishing Winterreise, Schubert wrote the jubilant E-flat Piano Trio, a second series of sprightly piano Impromptus, some Italian songs for the bass Luigi Lablache, a Symphony and a String Quartet in sunny C Major, and the gloriously vernal Der Hirt auf dem Felsen. Perhaps the gloomy depths of Winterreise are more a chemical reaction between Schubert’s genius and Müller’s poetry than a mirror image of the composer’s own miseries.

Schubert perfected not only the German Lied as we know it, but the Lieder cycle; his two cycles are virtually without precedent. He likely knew Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte (1816), a string of six love poems composed in continuous cyclic form, more like an extended song beginning and ending with same music. Schubert attempted something similar in his song Viola, D. 786 (1823). 

But with Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise, Schubert brought to song the sort of unity previously heard only in instrumental works. He achieved that, however, not by threading musical motifs throughout but rather by exploring different ways of contrasting impassioned motion with icy stillness. Wrote baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, a definitive interpreter of Winterreise, “We must face quite unprepared the shock of each new manifestation of despair.”

Fischer-Dieskau called the cycle “a chain of variations on the theme of grief.”  Aptly, 16 of its 24 songs are in minor keys. We begin the cycle after the end of the real plot, with no concrete idea of what happened before. We hear nothing about a lost lover or a rival. The hero is no callow youth, but a world-weary adult, his relationship with other human beings already broken. The cast of characters around him comprises bare trees, frozen waters, and snowstorms; forbidding elements of nature.

The first 12 songs of Winterreise, vaguely referencing lost love, feature the recurring contrast of frozen immobility versus fiery passion. In Gefrorne Tränen tears freeze, despite their hot origin. In Erstarrung the wander hopes that the heat of his tears will melt the snow to reveal beloved footprints. In Wasserflut tears mixed with snow still hold memories of love. In Auf dem Flusse the heart is likened to a frozen stream.

The fifth song, Der Lindenbaum, holds a special place in the cycle, as the first of a precious few islands of apparent peace in the arduous journey (Das Wirtshaus is another.) The piano begins with rippling triplets, perhaps a memory of spring foliage, then the voice enters against warmly consoling chords and weaves a melody that distills the longing for a golden past. Schubert casts this song as a theme and variations, both melodic and harmonic, using one of his favorite “trademarks,” the chiaroscuro of alternating parallel major and minor.

The cycle’s second half, increasingly interior and abstract, offers more striking contrasts of mood, even within songs. We hear grief detached from its original cause, a psyche slowly unravelling. The final songs depict abrupt mood swings. With simple chordal textures and the harmonic profile of church music, Das Wirtshaus imagines a graveyard as an inn for weary travelers. In the last song, the breathtakingly bleak Der Leiermann, the wanderer initiates human contact for the first time in the cycle, but it is with another hopeless outcast. Against bagpipe-like fifths in the piano’s left hand, the voice, a monotonous drone, gradually fades away for the last time.

Winterreise heralds a new phase in Schubert’s creative life, one he sadly did not live to entirely realize. The modified strophic structures and simplicity of texture match Müller’s direct, open verses. But with fully mature technique, keener harmonic tang, newly masterful thematic development, and a new intensity and spiritual depth, Schubert made the leap from the wistful to the truly tragic. “Should one perform Winterreise in public at all?” wondered Fischer-Dieskau. “Should one offer such an intimate diary of a human soul to an audience?”

— by Cori Ellison

Program Notes

Winterreisse Text & Translation

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