The Gramophone -award winning partnership of Gerald Finley and Julius Drake turns to perhaps the most celebrated song-cycle of them all. Finley brings all his considerable dramatic powers to his performance—and all but submerges them under the ice.
As the first twelve songs were already with the printer, he merely appended the new songs to the original twelve. In his order, Die Nebensonnen and Der Leiermann form a haunted close to the cycle, their transfigured bleakness and suffering uninterrupted by any show of defiance. Before Winterreise Schubert had composed individual songs of pathos and despair, even of apocalyptic terror. The next two songs are dominated by images of ice and scalding tears. More than any of the other Winterreise songs, Der Lindenbaum the linden tree, with its idyllic associations, played a crucial role in the German Romantic imagination has attained an independent popularity.
German and Austrian schoolchildren sing it as a quasi-folksong. But the beguilingly sweet melody, soft, full keyboard harmonies and suggestions of distant horn calls another quintessential German Romantic symbol are even more haunting within the context of the cycle. Major turns to minor for the third verse as dream and memory are confronted by the chill reality of the storm-swept night.
Auf dem Flusse resumes the walking gait of Gute Nacht with a new lassitude. And the star athlete is the tenor Ian Bostridge, who has lived with the work for thirty years, has made a commanding recording of it with the formidable pianist Leif Ove Andsnes , and who now has a way to carry it well into his middle age.
But if you need to put a team together, it assumes the existence of a competing force. The waning attention span of the audience, of course, and the crush of popular culture against which classical music must fight to maintain its presence.
But on another level, it is a statement of acute anxiety. I saw one of them, a presentation of the voice-and-piano version in which an onslaught of projections by the artist William Kentridge provided an imaginative but pointlessly distracting backdrop to an eloquent performance by the baritone Matthias Goerne.
For some time, Schubert appeared very upset and melancholy. I am anxious to know what you will say about them. They have cost me more effort than any of my other songs. Schubert insisted that he had to have good poetry before he could compose good songs — he was among the most literary of all composers.
Several years later, perhaps near the end of , he discovered a cycle of twelve poems entitled Die Winterreise The Winter Journey in the literary periodical Urania: Taschenbuch auf das Jahr pp. The disease or perhaps the treatment of it , was ultimately responsible for his death in at the age of The songs take the audience on a journey that it is clear, by the very nature of the opening song, will end fatefully.
Along the way he experiences a turmoil of different emotions, mostly ranging from despair to greater despair. During his short life Schubert wrote over art songs, 20 sonatas for piano, six major works for violin and piano, nine symphonies for orchestra and an impressive amount of chamber music for other groups of instruments.
Winterreise would prove to be a much darker journey. The first song in Winterreise, Gute Nacht Good Night begins enigmatically, as our protoganist ventures out into the snow, accompanied by trudging and relentless short notes on the piano.
Why is the traveller embarking on this journey? Surely this is about unrequited love. His love is not merely missing but truly dead and gone.
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