The breadth of scholarly approaches to Franz Schubert's song cycle Die Winterreise testifies to the structural and dramatic complexity of the work; assessments range from complicated graphs, complete with interlocking axes and cryptic semantic labels, to outright sighs of resignation over the work's intractability. Perhaps this intrigue is what attracts performers and academics alike to the work; singer and scholar Michael Besack traces the ambiguous dramatic trajectory of Schubert's cycle back to antiquity. "Epic poetry and the tragic theater never produced a story with a moral," he pointed out.

A central question concerning the cycle is whether it really is one. The two dozen poems by Wilhelm Müller that Schubert took as his texts appeared piecemeal in three separate publications between 1822 and the completion of Schubert's setting in 1827; Müller's third publication, finally bearing the title Schubert would adopt, featured the newest poems along with the ones previously published (though the latter were reordered). The chronology of Schubert's setting also calls the idea of a continuous cyclical narrative into question: he set Müller's initial 12 songs early in 1827, then completed the other dozen later that year. Still, while some of the individual songs are frequently performed alone, one can easily read a composite story into the cycle. Literary scholar Cecilia Baumann describes the work as "a simple story of a rejected lover who leaves the town where his love resides and sets out in winter on an aimless journey." Schubert biographer Jacques Chailley reads a different kind of journey: "not simply that of a scorned lover—he is only a phantom—but an image behind which one can discern at each moment the journey of man toward the tomb: Die Winterreise is the sinister voyage of life." Such existential ideas gain support from the bleakness of Auf dem Flusse (At the River), in which the lover's description of the frozen stream seems to shade into one of a physical corpse, and of the melancholy hurdy-gurdy-man's lament that ends the cycle.

The songs ruminate on, rather than depict, events that have befallen the rejected lover; as the first two lines of the first song indicate ("A stranger I came hither, a stranger hence I go"), the journey has already taken place: the famous fifth song, Der Lindenbaum, likewise centers on symbols of remembrance. Schubert's introduction establishes a tranquil major mode with an airy, fluttering accompaniment; it becomes apparent that this figure represents the rustling of the eponymous lime tree. "Upon its bark when musing, fond words of love I made," the wanderer tells listeners, "and joy alike and sorrow still drew me to its shade." Only briefly do the mode and mood of the music change to minor, in direct correlation to the image of passing the tree in darkness. These pictorial elements lie only on the surface, however. Certain musical elements create a sense of geographical and chronological remove: the rustling figure is constantly interrupted by a leap up to a quaint stepwise descent; the echo of a "hunting horn" figure suggests distance—spatial and temporal; the wind blows off the wanderer's hat, but he trudges forward without even turning around. The cold wind listeners that it is winter; the presence of leaves is unlikely. The rustling sound is not a real, but an imagined, phenomenon: "Now many leagues I'm far from/The dear old linden tree/[But still] I ever hear it murmur/'Peace thou wouldst find with me.'" Schubert's song does not evoke images; it evokes the act of remembering images.

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1.Gute Nacht

The breadth of scholarly approaches to Franz Schubert's song cycle Die Winterreise testifies to the structural and dramatic complexity of the work; assessments range from complicated graphs, complete with interlocking axes and cryptic semantic labels, to outright sighs of resignation over the work's intractability. Perhaps this intrigue is what attracts performers and academics alike to the work; singer and scholar Michael Besack traces the ambiguous dramatic trajectory of Schubert's cycle back to antiquity. "Epic poetry and the tragic theater never produced a story with a moral," he points out. What would the message of the Iliad or the Odyssey be?"

A central question concerning the cycle is whether it really is one. The two dozen poems by Wilhelm Müller that Schubert took as his texts appeared piecemeal in three separate publications between 1822 and the completion of Schubert's setting in 1827; Müller's third publication, finally bearing the title Schubert would adopt, featured the newest poems along with the ones published previously (though the latter were reordered). The chronology of Schubert's setting also calls the idea of a continuous cyclical narrative into question: he set Müller's initial 12 songs early in 1827, then completed the other dozen later that year. Still, while some of the individual songs are frequently performed alone, one can easily read a composite story into the cycle. Literary scholar Cecilia Baumann describes the work as "a simple story of a rejected lover who leaves the town where his love resides and sets out in winter on an aimless journey." Schubert biographer Jacques Chailley reads a different kind of journey: "not simply that of a scorned lover—he is only a phantom—but an image behind which one can discern at each moment the journey of man towards the tomb: Die Winterreise is the sinister voyage of life." Such existential ideas gain support from the bleakness of "Auf dem Flusse" (At the River), in which the lover's description of the frozen stream seems to shade into one of a physical corpse, and of the melancholy hurdy-gurdy-man's lament that ends the cycle.

The songs ruminate on, rather than depict, events that have befallen the rejected lover; as the first two lines of the first song indicate ("A stranger I came hither, a stranger hence I go"), the journey has already taken place: The famous fifth song, "Der Lindenbaum," likewise centers on symbols of remembrance. Schubert's introduction establishes a tranquil major mode with an airy, fluttering accompanimental gesture; it becomes apparent that this figure represents the rustling of the eponymous lime tree. "Upon its bark when musing, fond words of love I made," the wanderer tells us, "and joy alike and sorrow still drew me to its shade." Only briefly do the mode and mood of the music change to minor, in direct correlation to the image of passing the tree in darkness. These pictorial elements lie only on the surface, however. Certain musical elements create a sense of geographical and chronological remove: the rustling figure is constantly interrupted by a leap up to a quaint stepwise descent; the echo of a "hunting horn" figure suggests space and distance; the wind blows off the wanderer's hat, but he trudges forward without even turning around. The cold wind reminds us that it is winter; the presence of leaves is unlikely. The rustling sound is not a real, but an imagined phenomenon: "Now many leagues I'm far from/The dear old linden tree./[But still] I ever hear it murmur:/'Peace thou wouldst find with me.'" Schubert's song does not evoke images; it evokes the act of remembering images.

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3.Gefrorne Tränen

One could go on and on about the Classical poise of Gefror'ne Tränen (Frozen Tears), the third song in the Winterreise cycle: the strict four-part writing of the accompaniment, the properly prepared modulation to the relative major, the return of the piano's introduction as a postlude, the clarity of the vocal melody. But so many of these characteristics appear more classical because they follow the violent Romanticism of the second song, Die Wetterfahne. In fact, Gefror'ne Tränen's Romanticism is subsumed into its classical poise. For one thing, the structure of the song is oddly balanced: the three verses of Müller's poem are turned into four verses in Schubert's song by the repetition of Müller's third verse as the song's fourth verse. For another, the phrases of the first half of the song are not in the standard four bars. The piano introduction is in seven bars. The first verse is in two four-bar phrases but followed by a two-bar tail. The brief second verse is in two halves: two half-bar phrases followed by a two-bar phrase, then a half-bar phrase followed by a one-bar phrase and a one-bar piano transition to the third verse. But the song's most conspicuous Romantic gesture, its use of the flattened supertonic or Neapolitan chord as a pivot back to the tonic minor is integrated into the song's Classical poise. It appears as the pivot at the end of the second four-bar phrase in the third and fourth verse but it has long been prepared for by the tiniest of Classical grace notes in the transitional second verse, grace notes which are themselves in flattened supertonics leading to the climactic third and fourth verses.

Schubert, especially in his Winterreise, was surely a Romantic composer in harmony, melody, and emotional content. But, as Romantic as he was in all those ways, he was no revolutionary and all his Romantic tendencies are wholly subsumed in the Classical poise of the music.

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6.Wasserflut

Of all the fallacies, the pathetic fallacy is one of the most pernicious. Imagining that nature mirrors one's moods—like ascribing anthropomorphic qualities to the Deity—is the height of egotistical narcissism. How dare one believe that nature mirror's man's evanescent moods! Nature—the world, the universe—is nature and that's all. Forcing this burden upon it merely indicates the narcissism of man. No wonder it's called the pathetic fallacy! And no wonder it was the Romantics favorite mode of poetry (think of Bryon's Child Harold wandering in the Alps). And no wonder Goethe called Romanticism sick.

In this sense, there are few sicker poems than Muller's Wasserflut (Torrent), the sixth of the Muller settings which make up Schubert's Winterreise (Winter's Journey) cycle. Even in the title, the narrator has already invoked the pathetic fallacy in elevating his tears to the status of a torrent of water. In the first verse, the snow is ‘thirstily' sucking up his tears. By the third verse, the narrator is talking to the snow. And in the fourth and final verse, the narrator has tells the snow that, when it melts and runs to town, its torrents will grow warm with his tears when they flow past his beloved's house. This fallacy is truly pathetic.

And, in Schubert's setting, particularly pernicious. The first strophic setting in the cycle since the opening Gute Nacht!, Schubert's Wasserflut sets Muller's four serves as two halves of a twice repeated strophe. Like the song Erstarrung (Numbness), the music of Wasserflut is exactly the opposite of what its title implies. To a stately, almost Handelian dotted rhythm at a Langsam (slow) tempo, Schubert's accompaniment marches with heavy tread across the snow. But above this dotted rhythm, the vocal melody flows in listless waves of triplets. Never does the vocal melody and the accompaniment rhythm come precisely together except at the song's internal climax at the end of the first and third verses. At that one moment, in the harshest dissonance of the song setting the word Weh (Woe), the voice and the piano come together on an accented discord making the woe tangible.

All this is Schubert's compositional genius creating music of the greatest beauty. But all this is far too gorgeously beguiling. One has only to recall the record number of suicides which followed in the wake of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther with its protagonist's suicide to imagine what the effect of Schubert's pathetic Wasserflut, his whole Winterreise would have had on German youth. Fortunately or unfortunately, Wasserflut like most of Schubert's music, remained in more of less obscurity until decades after his death.

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9.Irrlicht

After listening to Irrlicht (Will o' the Wisp), the ninth song in the Winterreise (Winter's Journey) cycle, we know—or think we know—how the cycle will end and exactly what end awaits the singer. The Irrlicht takes the singer deep into the rock. But this doesn't matter to him; he is used to being led astray by falseness (he is, of course, referring to having been led astray by his faithless beloved). But this truly doesn't matter to him; as he sings in the poem's final couplet, "Every stream will reach the sea; every sorrow also to its grave." And so we know—or think we know—the singer's end.

There is nothing illusory about Schubert's setting: it is resolutely and unrelentingly in the tonic minor. Nearly every phrase ends on the tonic minor, and, on those few occasions when a phrase ends on the relative major, it is quickly followed by a repetition of the words to music that returns mercilessly to the tonic minor. And when it seems as though the music might actually turn to the tonic major in the third verse, Schubert turns to the flat supertonic as a Neapolitan pivot to the tonic minor once more.

At its slow tempo and in its deliberately severe tread, Schubert's music denies the power of illusion of the will-o'-the-wisp phenomenon and leads—or seems to lead—to the grave. But, as those who have lived through the entire Winterreise know, the grave is not the end, and the power of illusion is stronger and more intractable than it seems in Irrlicht.

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10.Rast

One of the wonderful things about Schubert's Winterreise (Winter's Journey) is that it demonstrates that the darkest hour is not always followed by the dawn, that behind every dark cloud there may not be a silver lining, and that things can always be worse than they seem. In Rast (Rest), the tenth song of the cycle, the singer of the verses takes refuge from the cold in a charcoal-burner's tiny hut but, instead of giving him the rest suggested by the title, the shelter only allows the serpent within his heart—his pain and bitterness—to rise up and sting him.

Schubert's music embodies this terrible realization. The song sets the four verses of the poem as two paired stanzas, but each stanza begins and ends with the piano's introduction and fulfills the harmonic structure that it contains. And that piano introduction is itself the essence of the dark becoming darker. In a moderate tempo and a regular rhythm, the introduction literally spells out the dark becoming darker. The tonic of the first bar becomes the dominant of the major subdominant in the second bar. But the major subdominant of the second bar becomes the minor subdominant of the third bar. And the minor subdominant of the third bar forms a plagal cadence to the tonic major which opens the fourth bar. But the tonic major of the opening of the fourth bar turns to the tonic minor of the end of the fourth bar, which becomes the pivot to the bare and empty fifth on the dominant in the fifth bar. And in each bar, the implications of the bar before become darker as major thirds become minor thirds which become, in the fifth bar, no third at all.

For Schubert's brokenhearted hero, things can always get worse. And things will get worse yet.

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11.Frühlingstraum

Hope—the singer of Frühlingstraum (Dream of Spring Time) still has it. While asleep in the charcoal-burner's hut in which he took refuge in the previous song of the Winterreise cycle, the singer dreams of spring and of love. But although he awakens from his dreams to the awful reality of his situation, the singer cannot help but hope that at the next spring his beloved will return to him.

Schubert's music knows better. Structured in two halves of three verses each, Schubert's song shows the hopelessness of hope. In each section, the opening verse is set to a delightful little ditty in the tonic major over a swaying 6/8 rhythm. But after a fermata, the singer awakes in the second (and fourth) verse to a harsher strain in the tonic minor, replete with cruel dissonances. Yet this, too, fades after another fermata as the music changes tempo from Mässig (Moderately) to Langsam (Slowly) and time signature from 6/8 to 2/4, and the vocal melody gently sails over a tender, almost caressing accompaniment. But there is something deeply wrong with the music for the third (and sixth) verse. It starts, or seems to start, in the tonic major, but the tonic major becomes the dominant of the major submediant. Yet this major submediant, like the major submediant of the previous song, turns to the minor submediant, and the major tonic which had been its dominant becomes the minor tonic which ends the song.

This is no hope. As the singer himself knows and Schubert's brilliant harmonic layout makes perfectly clear, this is all a dream. And as he knows, or should know by the sixth and final verse, a self-willed dream is a delusion.

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12.Einsamkeit

Believe it or not, Schubert originally intended for the Winterreise (Winter's Journey) to end with the 12th song. Of course, he only intended it to end here because with the 12th song, he had set all of the poems of Winterreise that he knew. Wilhelm Müller's poems were published in two sets in 1823 and 1824, and Schubert, when he set the first 12 poems in the winter (when else?) of 1827, simply did not know that the second set of 12 existed. So when Schubert wrote "fine" at the end of "Einsamkeit" (Loneliness), this is how he thought the cycle would end, not with the bang of death which had seemed to have been implied several times in the cycle, but with the whimper of simple loneliness. He even closed the cycle harmonically by returning to the same key as that of the opening song.

Let us imagine that this is, indeed, the end of the cycle. The singer has left the town in which his heart was broken by his faithless beloved; he has wandered through the night and the snow, recalling her love in pain and bitterness. He has taken refuge in a small hut, has dreamed dreams of spring and the return of his beloved, and has now awoken to "Einsamkeit." And in his loneliness, he has seen that the world is bright and beautiful and that he has self-consciously willed himself away from it, imprisoning himself in his sorrows and wishing the weather would turn dark and stormy again.

What a jerk! Only Schubert's music redeems him, music of such pathos and power that it makes his self-pity almost sympathetic. This through-composed song builds through Müller's three verses to the furious declaration of the singer's desire for a howling storm to embody his despair, a despair which Schubert brilliantly casts in the song's broken return to the tonic minor pianissimo.

Great as Schubert's music is for the first half of Winterreise, one must be grateful that he encountered the second set of 12 poems, so that he could bring the cycle to a more satisfying, and far more awful, conclusion than a self-deluding jerk wishing it would snow.

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18.Der stürmische Morgen

After taking his leave of the dreaming village at night in the 17th song, Müller's traveler encounters Der stürmische Morgen (The Stormy Morning) of the 18th song. While the dreaming village had been evoked in gentle D major, the stormy morning is depicted in thunder crashes of D minor, and while the 17th song had been spaciously expansive, the 18th song is the shortest and most concise in the cycle, lasting less than a minute and filling only 19 measures.

And 19 brutal measures they are. With no time and less patience, Schubert tears through Müller's three verses Ziemlich geschwind, doch kraftig (Rather fast but strongly). All three verses are set to different music, albeit with small but telling repetitions of a few abrupt gestures. After a short piano introduction embodying the thunder and lightning of the storm, the singer joins with the piano for the first verse. Literally joins with: the singer and the pianist have the same melody for the whole first verse. After another thunder crash in the piano, the second verse starts in the flat submediant major with the singer's melody riding atop the fortissimo chords of the accompaniment. The third verse follows immediately upon the second, with not even a break for thunder. The singer and the pianist join together, as they had in the first verse, for the same melody in the first line, then split apart as they had in the second verse for the second line. There follows another thunder crash which ends the song.

Nasty, brutal and short, Der stürmische Morgen ideally symbolizes Müller's traveler's view of life.

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21.Das Wirtshaus

Many, even most, critics think that Das Wirtshaus (The Inn) is actually Schubert's greatest hymn. It is hard to disagree. Above a choral harmonization of the utmost simplicity and the profoundest humanity, the weary-unto-death traveler on Schubert's Winterreise (Winter's Journey) sings a yearning melody which embodies his longing for death in music of heartbreaking beauty. Each of the four verses is set to different but related music: as the verses progress, the melody rises, and the harmonization in the accompaniment becomes more poignant. That the Wirtshaus of the title is a really a graveyard, and that the traveler cannot find rest even there, only makes the sublimity of the music all the more moving. One of the greatest of all Schubert's Lieder.

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24.Der Leiermann

In perhaps the most astute commentary ever made on Der Leiermann (The Hurdy-Gurdy Man), the last song of Schubert's Winterreise, Brahms took the song's melody, turned it into a triple canon for a cappella choirs, and used it as a setting for the words "The suffering of love is monotonous but whenever I hear the song, I can't help but hum along."

Indeed, Schubert's song is monotonous in the extreme, or, to put it more accurately, it is monotony in extremis. Almost nothing happens. Over an open fifth in the pianist's left hand which sounds on the downbeat of every bar of the song, the right hand plays a hurdy-gurdy-like melody whose changes are so slight as to be almost unnoticeable. The singer's melody is almost not worthy of the name. There is a two-bar tune which wanders around the pitches of the tonic triad. This is repeated exactly. Then there is another two-bar tune which also wanders around the pitches of the tonic triad, but moved up a minor third. This tune is repeated exactly and then repeated exactly again. Then the whole thing up to this point is repeated exactly.

These repetitions are almost too much to bear. By everything that music, that culture, that humanity holds dear, something has to happen, musically and emotionally, something has to happen. But almost nothing does. In a ghostly coda, the singer's melody seems to break down. There is a one-bar phase consisting of only two different notes. After a beat, there is a one-bar phrase of four different notes. After another beat comes the longest phrase of the song: a two-and-a-half-bar almost-melody, an aching and agonizing almost-melody setting the words "Will you turn your hurdy-gurdy to my songs?"—a phrase which shows that, beneath the numbed madness of the singer, he knows of the horror of his condition and knows that he has not the will or the wish to do anything to change it.

After having his heart broken by his faithless beloved, the singer has gone out on his winter's journey, seeking death. It would be, he thought, the only cure for his shattered life. Yet he did not find death. He found instead madness, a fate worse than death. And, as Brahms so surely and truly saw, in that madness he found only love's sweet, sad song.

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