The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Franz Schubert · a song cycle for voice and piano, D. 911, Op. 89, on twenty-four poems in German by Wilhelm Müller · two parts of twelve songs, sixteen of them in minor keys · about seventy to seventy-five minutes in performance
Mode
Song cycle; twenty-four lyric monologues for one voice and piano, with no story, no frame and no other person present until the last stanza
Mythos
The quest inverted: a stranger walks through winter seeking rest and is refused it at every station; the linden, the signpost, the graveyard inn, the hurdy-gurdy man
Phase
One winter journey, from a gate at night to the ice beyond a village; D minor at the first song, A minor at the last
Presentation
Concert music; twenty-four songs for voice and piano in two parts of twelve, setting Müller’s German, sixteen in minor keys and eight in major
Register
From the walking quavers of “Gute Nacht” and the linden’s rustle to a monotone over a chromatic bass and an open fifth held as a drone
Scale
One man, one season, one road; a voice and a piano; about seventy minutes
Governing Proposition
A young man leaves a house at night in winter and walks through twenty-four songs of snow, ice and false signs, asking each station for rest and being refused it, until the only person he addresses is an old beggar grinding a hurdy-gurdy that no one hears. The wager of the work is that estrangement is not the result of loss but the condition before it, and that a voice and a piano, in separate songs with nothing between them, can hold a mind exiled from its own feeling and still walking.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The cycle begins with the piano walking alone, quavers in D minor, 2/4, before the voice enters on a line that falls. “Fremd bin ich eingezogen, / Fremd zieh’ ich wieder aus”
“A stranger I came in, a stranger I go out again.” The first word of the work is stranger, and it is said of the arrival, before any loss has been told. The girl spoke of love, the mother even of marriage. “Die Liebe liebt das Wandern – / Gott hat sie so gemacht”
“Love loves to wander; God made it so” is sung without bitterness, over the walking quavers, as a fact about the world.
Three stanzas go by in the minor, to the same tune. The fourth turns to D major, at the gentlest words in the song: he will not disturb her dream, and he writes “Gute Nacht” on her gate so that she may see he thought of her. The piano walks on in the major. It is the first instance of the law that governs the whole cycle: the major key arrives where the wanderer is kindest to himself, and the bar that turns to it is the cruellest in the song. Of the twenty-four songs sixteen are in minor keys. The eight in the major are each a dream, a memory, a false signal or a refuge that fails; not one reports a present good.
Then the town he is leaving. In no. 2 the wind plays with the weathervane on her house and the piano’s unison figure spins with it, and the last line is the first social fact of the work: “Was fragen sie nach meinen Schmerzen? / Ihr Kind ist eine reiche Braut”
“What do they care for my pains? Their child is a rich bride.” In no. 3 frozen drops fall from his cheeks in detached chords, and he had not known he was weeping. In no. 4, over running triplets, he searches the snow for her footprints. Müller wrote that the heart was as if frozen; Schubert set “Mein Herz ist wie erstorben”
“My heart is as if dead”, with her image staring cold inside it. If the heart thaws, the image will flow away with it.
Movement II
No. 5, “Der Lindenbaum”, is the first song in a major key, E major in 3/4, and it opens with a rustling triplet figure and horn-like fifths in the piano. The linden stands by the well before the gate. Tonight he passed it in the dark and shut his eyes, and the branches rustled as if calling: “Komm her zu mir, Geselle, / Hier find’st du deine Ruh’!”
“Come here to me, friend, here you will find your rest.” The third stanza is in E minor. Then the cold wind, and an agitated interlude: “Der Hut flog mir vom Kopfe, / Ich wendete mich nicht”
“My hat flew from my head; I did not turn.” Hours away, he still hears it: “Du fändest Ruhe dort!”
“You would find rest there.”
The rest a linden offers in German verse is the grave, and the sweetness of the song is the sweetness of that offer. The major key is the first refuge, and he walks past it. Friedrich Silcher’s four-part arrangement of a simplified melody made the song a folk song under its first line, and it is sung by people who have never heard the cycle. In no. 6 his tears fall into the snow; when the snow melts the brook will carry them through the town, and where they glow, there is his beloved’s house. The piano sets a dotted rhythm against triplets, and whether the short note falls with the last of the triplet is a question performers have never settled.
No. 7, “Auf dem Flusse”, E minor: the river that roared is silent under its crust. With a sharp stone he scratches her name into the ice, the day of the first greeting and the day he went, and a broken ring around them. Then the song turns on itself. “Mein Herz, in diesem Bache / Erkennst du nun dein Bild? / Ob’s unter seiner Rinde / Wohl auch so reißend schwillt?”
“My heart, in this stream do you now recognise your image? Whether under its crust it too swells so violently?” A still surface over a torrent is the emblem of the whole cycle. No. 8 runs him out of the town without drawing breath, the crows throwing snow and hail at his hat, and its middle section, in the major, remembers how the town received him, before he names it the city of inconstancy.
Movement III
A will-o’-the-wisp leads him into a ravine in no. 9, and he does not mind: he is used to going astray, and every stream will reach the sea, every sorrow too its grave. The grave is named as a destination for the first time, and it is named as a comfort. In no. 10 he shelters in a charcoal-burner’s narrow house, and only now, lying still, does he feel how tired he is; the heart that was so wild in the storm feels its worm stir in the stillness. It is a song about rest over an accompaniment that will not rest.
No. 11, “Frühlingstraum”, is in A major, a lilting 6/8, and it is built in three sections, twice over. He dreamed of flowers as they bloom in May and of birdsong; the music is a dream of spring. When the cocks crow he wakes: cold, dark, ravens shrieking from the roof, the music fast and in the minor. Then slow: who painted the leaves of frost on the window? “Ihr lacht wohl über den Träumer, / Der Blumen im Winter sah?”
“You laugh, I suppose, at the dreamer who saw flowers in winter?” The second strophe dreams of love returned and wakes alone, asking when the leaves on the window will turn green and when he will hold his love in his arms. It is the self watching itself dream, and knowing the dream for what it is while it goes on dreaming.
No. 12, “Einsamkeit”, B minor, ends the first part. He goes like a dark cloud through bright air, and the part closes on its cruellest observation: the air is so calm, the world so bright, “Als noch die Stürme tobten, / War ich so elend nicht”
“When the storms still raged I was not so wretched.” Part I ends not in storm but in fine weather. These twelve songs were written in February 1827, from the twelve poems Müller had published under the title Die Winterreise in the almanac Urania for 1823; Schubert set them before he knew there were twenty-four. He sang them to his friends at Schober’s and, by Josef von Spaun’s recollection, written some thirty years later, announced them as horrifying songs; the friends were dismayed, and he answered that he liked these more than all his others, and that they would come to like them too.
Movement IV
Müller had printed all twenty-four poems in 1824, in the second volume of his Gedichte aus den hinterlassenen Papieren eines reisenden Waldhornisten, with the Urania twelve spread through the set in a new order. Schubert found them and in October 1827 set the remaining twelve as a second part, keeping his first twelve as they stood. Müller had died at Dessau at the end of September, aged thirty-two. Part II opens with “Die Post”, E flat major, 6/8, the piano in the posthorn’s figure, and the heart leaps. “Die Post bringt keinen Brief für dich”
“The post brings no letter for you.” It is the first sound of the human world, and the last time the beloved is named. After no. 13 she is gone from the text, and the second half is about what remains when grief has no object.
The stations come faster now, and each is a refusal. In no. 14 the frost has whitened his hair; he thought himself an old man, and it thawed: how far still to the bier. In no. 15 a crow has followed him from the town, and he asks it for faithfulness to the grave. In no. 16 he hangs his hope on one coloured leaf, over off-beat notes with no key to hold them. In no. 17 dogs bark and chains rattle in the bass while the villagers sleep; he is finished with all dreams, he says, in D major, and the judgement falls on him too. No. 18 states the method of the cycle as a sentence: the heart sees its own image painted on the sky, and it is nothing but winter. In no. 19 a light dances ahead of him in A major, to a tune Schubert had used in Alfonso und Estrella, and he follows it, knowing: only delusion is gain for him.
No. 20, “Der Wegweiser”, G minor, asks why he avoids the roads other wanderers take. “Habe ja doch nichts begangen, / Daß ich Menschen sollte scheu’n”
“I have done nothing, after all, that I should shun people.” Then, on one repeated note over a creeping chromatic bass: “Eine Straße muß ich gehen, / Die noch keiner ging zurück”
“I must go a road that no one yet has come back along.” No. 21 brings him to a graveyard, and the piano plays a slow chorale in F major; he asks the inn whether all its rooms are taken, and is refused. Death will not have him. No. 22, “Mut”, marches between minor and major, forced cheer and the cycle’s one blasphemy: if there is to be no God on earth, we are gods ourselves. No. 23 sees three suns in the sky, a slow dotted dance in A major; they are not his suns, and in the dark he will be better. Müller had placed the suns before the bluster; Schubert reversed them, his one change to Müller’s order, so that the end falls: bluster, the wish for darkness, the hurdy-gurdy man.
Movement V
No. 24 is in A minor, 3/4. The left hand holds an open fifth, A and E, from the first bar to the last; the right hand plays a short tune and repeats it between the voice’s phrases; the voice moves in two-bar phrases close to one pitch. Out beyond the village, on the ice, an old man turns a hurdy-gurdy with stiff fingers, barefoot, his little plate always empty. “Keiner mag ihn hören, / Keiner sieht ihn an, / Und die Hunde knurren / Um den alten Mann”
“No one cares to hear him, no one looks at him, and the dogs growl round the old man.” He lets it all go as it will; he turns, and his hurdy-gurdy is never still. The drone has not stopped since the song began.
Then the only question put to a human being in the whole work. Before this he has spoken to her door, his heart, his tears, the river, the crow, a leaf, the dogs and the suns. “Wunderlicher Alter, / Soll ich mit dir geh’n? / Willst zu meinen Liedern / Deine Leier dreh’n?”
“Strange old man, shall I go with you? Will you turn your hurdy-gurdy to my songs?” The piano plays its tune once more and stops. No answer is given. The cycle began in D minor and ends in A minor, on the dominant of the key it began in. Who the old man is, Death, the double, the artist or a beggar, and whether the wanderer dies, goes mad or goes on, has been argued for two centuries and is not settled.
Tobias Haslinger of Vienna published the work as Op. 89. Part I appeared in January 1828. Schubert died on 19 November 1828; it is reported that he corrected the proofs of Part II in his last weeks, and Part II appeared at the end of December, six weeks after his death. For decades the cycle was heard mostly in extracts, and complete performances became usual only late in the century. Silcher’s linden went into folk memory, and in Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg it is the song Hans Castorp carries to the battlefield. Hans Zender rescored it for tenor and ensemble, Elfriede Jelinek wrote a play under its title, and William Kentridge staged it. What it brought into the open holds without the biography: that a consciousness can be exiled from its own feeling before anything is lost, and go on walking, and that the last thing it is offered is not consolation but another outcast making music no one hears.
Act III · The Twelve
Length is not charged: seventy minutes of walking is what the argument needs. The subtractive test meets resistance at every station that bears structure: no. 1, which sets the stranger walking; no. 5, the first offer of rest; no. 7, the crust over the torrent; no. 12, the calm worse than the storm; nos. 20 and 21, the signpost and the inn; no. 24. It finds give in three places: the two-part shape is the accident of the twelve poems Schubert found first; “Täuschung”, on a borrowed tune, and “Der stürmische Morgen” restate earlier songs; and “Rast” and “Die Post” repeat a strophe the ear already knows. The one change to Müller’s order, “Mut” before “Die Nebensonnen”, shows the ending was chosen.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The disclosure can be stated. Estrangement is not the result of the loss; it precedes it: the first word of the cycle is “Fremd”, stranger, before any loss is told. The beloved leaves the text after no. 13, and the second half is about what remains when grief has no object: the self watching itself dream, the heart addressed as another person, hope staked on a leaf and known for a delusion, death wished for as an inn, and the inn’s refusal. The signpost’s “I have done nothing, after all” is the modern outsider’s sentence: exile with no crime. Held below the top because the listener assembles the proposition from twenty-four lyric moments; it is never said in one place.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Height reaches the ceiling, in a cold register. The sublime of dread: the climb and collapse that close no. 7; the leaf of no. 16 falling through off-beat notes that give no key; the monotone over a creeping bass in no. 20; the drone of no. 24 under a voice that barely moves. The sublime of beauty: the linden’s E major and its rustle; the May dream of no. 11; the chorale of no. 21, written for a graveyard. At least ten of the twenty-four rise, at both ends and in the middle. Held below the Ninth and the Passion on height of forces, and because nos. 14, 18, 19 and 22 are flat by design.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Myth built from a jilted man, a town and the weather, on no older story’s spine. What is built is a quest inverted: a man seeks death through twenty-four stations and is refused it. The linden invites him and he does not turn; the will-o’-the-wisp promises every sorrow its grave; the crow waits; the leaf falls; the signpost names the road; the graveyard inn turns him away; and the last figure is an old man who has become what the wanderer will be, a maker of music no one hears. The particulars stay exact: a weathervane, a posthorn, a plate always empty. Held below the literary summit because the archetype is one figure, and Goethe’s Harper and Müller’s own miller stood behind him.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The inheritance is the Lied of Reichardt, Zelter and Zumsteeg, Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte (1816) and Schubert’s own Die schöne Müllerin (1823). The departures: a cycle with no story, no frame and no beloved present; sixteen minor keys out of twenty-four; the major key used throughout as the sign of illusion; a song declaimed on one note over moving harmony, and one built on a drone and a short tune; a piano that is the world and the double; an ending that is a question put to a beggar. The stake was real: by Spaun’s account the friends were dismayed at the first hearing. Held below the top because the road was his own: the Müllerin had already made a Müller cycle the drama of one consciousness.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Change the form and the work loses what it knows. Twenty-four separate songs with nothing between them: the silences are the walking. The strophic form is the form of compulsion; “Gute Nacht” says its four stanzas to one tune because the walker can say nothing else, and “Der Leiermann” is a strophe over a drone because the old man’s life is one. Voice and piano are two halves of a divided self. Recast as opera, the work loses the solitude; as spoken poems, the knowledge, since the verse alone does not know that the linden is death; as a through-composed scena, the stations. Held below the top where the two-part shape is accident and a few strophic repeats carry less than their form implies.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Evidence, not promise, and two centuries of it: a performance tradition in which every major singer of German song has recorded the cycle, Fischer-Dieskau across four decades, Pears with Britten (1963), Fassbaender (1988), Goerne, Bostridge; in print, Richard Capell’s Schubert’s Songs (1928), Susan Youens’s Retracing a Winter’s Journey (1991), Charles Rosen’s The Romantic Generation (1995), Ian Bostridge’s Schubert’s Winter Journey (2015); and Hans Zender’s composed interpretation for tenor and ensemble (1993). The questions stay open: who the Leiermann is, Death, the double, the artist or a beggar; whether the wanderer dies, goes mad or goes on; which order, Müller’s or Schubert’s, the poems want. Held a tenth below the Passion for proportion: the literature is largely of the last century.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force, in the German Lied, is real: the work made the song cycle a drama of consciousness without a plot, and made song hold emptiness, monotone and the drone. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: within the Lied, decisive. Schumann’s cycles of 1840, Dichterliebe above all; Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, whose wayfarer ends under a linden; Wolf; the recital of a whole cycle, which the Lied now lives by. Outside music, Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924), which carries “Der Lindenbaum” to the battlefield, and Silcher’s arrangement, which put the linden into folk memory. Discounted for a field smaller than the symphony’s or the opera’s, and for a public life that began a generation after publication.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Survival is demonstrated: in print since 1828, recorded for a century, central to the recital repertory, in a language most of its audiences do not speak. One song became a folk song and outlived its author’s name. The surface fixed to its moment is small and reads as the work’s world, not a date on it: a posthorn, a weathervane, a hurdy-gurdy, a small town of the 1820s. The piano has changed since 1827 and the work has not needed retouching. The cost is in the early record: published in two parts, the cycle was heard for decades mostly in extracts, and complete performances became usual only late in the century, so its whole public life waited a generation. Level with Op. 131, whose early history is similar.
Score: 9.5 / 10
The making bears weight throughout. The piano’s figures are each an image and a structure: the walking quavers of no. 1, the spinning vane of no. 2, the rustle of no. 5, the keyless off-beats of no. 16, the chorale of no. 21, the drone of no. 24. Modal mixture is grammar: the major is illusion, and the turn to it is always the most painful bar. The declamation sets German stress without a wasted note, and strophic variation changes meaning without changing the tune. The cost is in the words. Müller’s verse is plain and often exact, sometimes merely serviceable or, in “Mut”, blustering; it is part of the work. The borrowed tune of no. 19 is charged a little. The music alone would support 9.7.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements, the May dream of no. 11 and the drone of no. 24. One law governs them, stated in no. 18: “Mein Herz sieht an dem Himmel / Gemalt sein eig’nes Bild”
“My heart sees its own image painted on the sky.” Every major key is the state the wanderer cannot have: the dream is the major that must break, the drone the minor that cannot. The chorale of no. 21 and the bluster of no. 22 obey it too: both are what he meets when he asks for an end, and both refuse. The tension is Part II’s order, partly Müller’s residue: “Die Post” after “Einsamkeit” obeys the law of images, not of sequence. The range governed is one voice and one season, and narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The orders the work holds are held together by its one law, not listed: consciousness; the natural order, as the whole surface, snow, ice, river, crow, leaf and storm; the social, at the edge and sharp, in the rich bride, the sleeping village, the beggar no one hears; the sacred, as absence, in a God who made love to wander and may not be; labour, in glimpses, the charcoal-burner and the hurdy-gurdy as a trade; mortality, built as the inverted quest. What holds the axis here is absence: the state, history and the family, a mother who spoke of marriage in one line, do not appear. One voice holds one mind, the weather and people seen from outside; the figure says how many orders that is.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form, The Bottomless Well, The Imperishable and The Made, all at 9.5. A form in which the silences between songs are the walking and the strophe is compulsion; two centuries of singers, scholars and reworkings with the last song’s question still open; a cycle in print since 1828 and sung wherever the piano is played, in a language most of its audiences do not speak; and a piano whose every figure is an image and a structure, with the major key made grammar.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.7: one voice holds consciousness, the natural order, the social edge, the sacred as absence, labour in glimpses and mortality, but the state, history and the family do not appear. Next above it, The Inevitable at 8.9, held by the two-part shape, which is the accident of the twelve poems Schubert found first, and by two songs that restate others and two strophic repeats the ear already knows.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.5, The Made at 9.5, The Inner Law at 9.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.5, Pressure on Tradition at 9.3, The Unconcealment at 9.2, The Archetypal Deep at 9.2 and The Swerve at 9.1 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.9, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.7. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · the score of Winterreise, D. 911, Op. 89, in the keys of the first edition (Haslinger, Vienna, 1828), and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, edition or recording was in hand, and the running time is a range across the recorded tradition, not a measurement. Twenty-four songs in Schubert’s order, in two parts of twelve, are scored as one work; the songs are not scored separately, and no performance is the object. The autograph has five songs in other keys, and the first edition’s keys are the text performed; transposed editions for lower voices are the same work. Müller’s own order of the poems is evidence, used under the first and eleventh axes, not the unit. The words are part of the work and are read in German, as Schubert set them. The German is quoted only where the words are sure, and sparingly; no poem is quoted at more than a third of its length; every English gloss is the desk’s own, plain and literal, and none is taken from a published translation. Müller’s order was set against Schubert’s by script. Figures that could not be verified, among them the poems’ line counts, the dates of the first public performances and the first complete performance, are not given. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.