Some notes on Winterreise

This was a pre-concert talk for A Winter's Journey, a Musica Viva tour with tenor Allan Clayton and piano Kate Golla, with images taken from artwork by Fred Williams.

This evening’s unique performance of Schubert’s magnificent Winterreise features not just two outstanding musicians, tenor Allan Clayton and pianist Kate Golla, but also a curated art experience with Australian landscape paintings by Fred Williams. I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to open the can of worms we call performance practice and to discuss the boundaries of what a musical interpretation can and should be. Winterreise has spawned so many interpretations and re-interpretations, and as we sample just a few of the many Winterreises, I’m hoping to provoke you to the point where you think to yourself, “Well, I thought I was open-minded, but that one went a bit too far.”

This iconic song cycle has been a lightning rod for adventurous musicians for many reasons: the music is wild and rich, but also relatively sparse in texture so that one has room to explore new possibilities, the poetry itself poses more questions than answers, and there are many underlying universal themes that apply differently to different places and different eras.

Here's a little controversy relating to performance practice. In the last song from Winterreise, the protagonist, or “the Wanderer” as I call him, observes a travelling musician playing the hurdy-gurdy with fingers numb from the cold and bare feet, and Schubert has the pianist imitating the sound of the hurdy-gurdy with a drone in the bass. “Has anyone thought to play Schubert on the hurdy-gurdy?” was what turned out to be a stupid question, because of course YouTube is full of hurdy-gurdyists doing exactly that.

If the piano can only manage a pale imitation, I think the hollowness of the its timbre fits with the emotional bleakness of the words. (I might be biased.) Just to add a little spice to the drone on the piano, Schubert adds a grace note to the first two chords. After that opening, the piano plays the drone with open fifths throughout the entire Lied.

To be honest, those little grace notes are really satisfying to play on the piano, and what if Schubert meant for them to continue through all the drone chords? That could be a really nice effect that hints at the rawness of the hurdy-gurdy. On one obscure corner of the internet, there is a blog post by the maverick musicologist Michael Lorenz that addresses precisely this issue. Mr. Lorenz’s 3000-word post is titled, “The Continuing Mutilation of Schubert’s ‘Der Leiermann,’ ” and he strongly disapproves of any such liberty with the written score. I’d like to play a recording that he singles out as being particularly offensive, for not only adding grace notes but making them a prominent feature: “all the way through the lied, we now hear a dissonant chord in the bass which reaches a peak of tasteless cruelty at that moment when we realize that, for the first time ever, Schubert's song cycle now ends on a dissonant chord.”

This transgressor is none other than Paul Lewis, and if his particular tastelessness appeals to you as it does to me, I look forward to seeing you right here for his Musica Viva tour this coming October. But even so, our disapproving musicologist friend is speaking from a long tradition of Schubert interpretation. His strict adherence to the score goes back to Schubert’s friend, the music lover Leopold Sonnleithner who wrote in the 1850s that Schubert’s songs were “usually performed in a manner that is directly opposed to the intention of the creator.” He specifically took issue with one of Schubert’s most celebrated interpreters, Johann Michael Vogl, an opera singer who worked closely with Schubert and in fact inspired some of Schubert’s most dramatic songs, the Erlkönig to cite one familiar example. After Schubert’s death, Vogl was the singer most commonly associated with Winterreise, but he reportedly sang in a way that not just Mr. Sonnleithner but also modern audiences would likely find objectionable. He would switch to speech or falsetto, cabaret-style, and freely changed rhythms and notes and ornaments and dynamics for dramatic effect. So even from the original circle of Schubert devotees, there was this divergence in taste between the dramatists and the purists—Vogl and Sonnleithner.

It is true that Schubert’s music, on its own terms, has so much inherent drama that you don’t need to add anything. One particular musical device that is quintessentially Schubert and that he used in his own signature way is was we call “modal mixture”. That’s the technical term for sliding between major and minor modes in the same key. For example, in the first song “Gute Nacht” we are in the dark key of D minor. “I arrived a stranger, a stranger I depart,” sings the Wanderer who has been cast out of the village, and escapes into the darkness. Then when he thinks of the girl he leaves behind and how he doesn’t want to disturb her dreams, the music changes from D minor to a tender D major.

Following straight after is “Die Wetterfahne,” a bitter reflection on the wind turning the weathervane on the roof, again in a minor key (play excerpt). Again, at the end of the song, when he sings of his beloved, the music changes to major, but this time with a twist of irony, as he has discovered he has been rejected in favour of a rich suitor.

Thus at the end of the second song, the plot of Winterreise is complete, and we have twenty-two songs left for our Wanderer to really marinate in his misery. We also have some central themes emerging. One is this sense of alienation and disenfranchisement. We find this in the writings not only of the poet Wilhelm Müller but also of Schubert’s own letters. Müller likely never met Schubert and did not know that the composer had set his poetry to music, but they were similar in that they were both young men in German-speaking countries who died in their early thirties, in what is known as the “Biedermeier period”, a time in this region that saw industrial development and a burgeoning middle class, but also repression and censorship and secret police. This younger generation felt that disenfranchisement, that the thin veneer of Biedermeier respectability covered a system that was crushing them down. They were being priced out by staggering levels of inflation on food and housing, and even marriage was an impossibility because one needed proof of income to obtain a marriage permit. This meant, for example, that by 1834, nearly half of babies in Vienna were born out of wedlock. The social commentary angle of Winterreise is currently a musicological hot topic—there's a great chapter on the topic in the Cambridge Companion to Schubert's Winterreise by George S. Williamson.

Another important theme in Winterreise is nature and our relationship with the natural world. How the linden tree was full of life and love in the spring, but in winter it portends death. Or the tree in “Letzte Hoffnung” (Last Hope), in which one leaf that has managed to withstand the icy winds represents the Wanderer’s final hope, and if it falls his dreams are over. The modal mixture we already saw in the first two songs gets taken to the next level, constantly switching between major and minor to illustrate the Wanderer’s frenzied thoughts. Here's a recording by Lotte Lehmann from 1941 that comes from the dramatic Schubert tradition, sung with an operatic artistic license that you rarely hear in modern performances.

I feel a strong connection between Müller's poetry and the landscape paintings by Fred Williams in the way they both bring out the inhospitableness and the wonder of nature. Europe in Schubert’s day was in the grip of a mini-Ice Age with fiercely cold winters, contributing (for example) to Napoleon’s defeat in Russia in 1812, and also the “Year without a Summer” in 1816, when Europe suffered massive crop failures caused by the cooling effects of volcanic ash from Mount Tambura in Indonesia. The cold naturally crept into the cultural Zeitgeist, and I think we can identify with this sense of being at the mercy of forces much more powerful than ourselves, even if our climate challenges today are different from theirs.

On the flip side nature also provides us with incredible phenomena and the joy of discovery. Sometimes I feel that in spite of himself, our Wanderer can’t help but be amazed by the world around him. Light is a recurring theme, with the mock suns of “Nebensonne” demonstrating a winter phenomenon known as parahelia, or the mysterious light in Irrlicht that leads him through mountain paths, or in Täuschung, the will-o’-the-wisp that dances in front of him in a display of colourful trickery. 

I also get that same feeling of discovery from Schubert’s music. He has so many creative ideas and wonderful nuances that really make this song cycle “pop”. I’ve talked a little bit about his modal mixture, and I want to introduce one more “Schubertism” that later music theorists have called the “omnibus progression” (great name!) Here's a brief non-technical description of this complex music theory concept: imagine chord progressions are a journey that takes you to the end of the musical sentence, what we call the cadence. And within this journey the omnibus progression is a way of building a lot of musical tension without actually going anywhere. It’s fitting that Schubert used the omnibus to accompany the following verse:

“I see a signpost standing

immovable before my eyes;

I must travel a road

from which no man has ever returned.”

Let's finish with some more extreme interpretations (re-interpretations) of Winterreise, using the 13th song “Die Post” (The Post) as a model. This song has some nice effects imitating the post-horn and the hoof-beat of the horses—or possibly the wanderer’s racing heart as he hopes in vain for a letter. And now I’ll play you a re-interpretation by Hilary Demske, an incredibly gifted pianist and composer who performed a one-woman, solo piano Winterreise that she called Journey for One. You can hear the hoofbeats represented by tapping on the piano.

And one more version, perhaps the best known “creative transformation” of Winterreise, by the German composer Hans Zender. This recording was just released last month (January 2026) and it will be a nice segue into the concert because it features our star tenor this evening, Allan Clayton.

That was the tip of the Winterreise iceberg. Just for you, I have one final provocation, courtesy of the great Arnold Schoenberg. Re-listening to his favourite Schubert songs, Schoenberg was shocked to realise he had no idea what the words actually were. So he got out his Schubert scores and concluded that words were unnecessary. He had already grasped the real musical content more profoundly than if he had relied on the surface meaning of the text. So, in the spirit of Arnold Schoenberg, I invite you now to forgot all this, keep the program closed (it is for after the concert), and embark with me on the feast of the senses that is A Winter’s Journey.