Arrangements

Before recordings and radio, musical transcription was the easiest way for music to travel: symphonies and operas were arranged into versions for other instruments, to be played at home.⁴ Arrangement might not seem as important for songs for solo voice and piano, but, as mentioned, Winterreise was not as popular as other Schubert Lieder. It was appreciated first by other musicians and in public rather than domestic performances. Arrangements could make the cycle, or at least individual songs from it, more palatable to nineteenth-century ears. Schubert’s contemporary, the folk-music collector Friedrich Silcher, produced a version of “Der Lindenbaum” for four-part male chorus that, Reinhold Brinkmann notes, “corrects” the melodic trajectory, making it more conventional.⁵ Franz Liszt arranged a selection of twelve songs from the cycle as virtuosic showpieces, reordering them and adding expression marks, extravagant embellishments, and extra musical material for rhetorical emphasis. He also converted some songs into introductions for others to create composite forms.⁶ Other composers were freer still: Johannes Brahms used portions of the melody but not the words of “Der Leiermann” for his setting of Friedrich Rückert’s “Einförmig ist der Liebe Gram” in his Canons for Female Voices, Op. 113 (published 1891).

More recent transcriptions of Winterreise can seem less radical, yet they also reveal changing attitudes to the cycle and Lieder performance more broadly. It is rare now to hear individual songs from the cycle in recital, whether as originally written or in an arrangement, and even relatively experimental renditions generally remain faithful to the poetic text and Schubert’s score – orchestrations enhance and expand what is written, rather than rework it. For example, versions arranged by Jens Josef for tenor Christian Elsner with the Henschel Quartett (2002) and by Richard Krug for baritone Johan Reuter with the Copenhagen Quartet (2016) explore the expanded timbral range of string instruments, but stay fairly close to Schubert’s figuration. The same is true of singer Daniel Behle’s lively arrangement for the Oliver Schnyder Piano Trio (2014). Oboe d’amore player Normand Forget takes a more adventurous approach in his arrangement for French-Canadian wind quintet Pentaèdre with accordion, recorded with Christoph Prégardien (2008). Müller’s order is restored, “Die Post” features a “real” horn, the quintet members sing a chorale in “Das Wirtshaus,” and the accordion sounds more like a hurdy-gurdy than a piano. Maurice van Bueren arranged the cycle for piano and the female vocal group Coco Collectief (2017), in some ways harking back to the choral style of Silcher, even if presenting the cycle in multiple voices seems more alien in the twenty-first century than it did in the nineteenth. Dispersing the voices makes Winterreise less about subjective alienation, particularly as presented in Dave Malloy’s playful Three Pianos (2010), which switches between German and English, and shares the music among three singer-instrumentalists, lubricated by swigs of bourbon. Making Winterreise a happy experience is a drastic re-interpretation, but has been well received.

There are also instrumental versions of the cycle, such as violist Roger Benedict’s and pianist Simon Tedeschi’s recent A Winter’s Tale (2018). In 2016, Judith Brandenberg’s ensemble La Bicicleta took a much freer approach to the music, transmogrifying Schubert into tango, played by violin, piano, bassoon, and accordion. French-Canadian bass-baritone Philippe Sly has presented Un voyage d’hiver (2018), developing the idea of the wanderer into that of the Ashkenazi Jew or figure of the gypsy; the musical arrangement by Samuel Carrier and Félix de l’Etoile replaces the piano with a group of klezmer musicians (trombone, violin, clarinet, accordion).

The most well-established of recent compositional responses to Winterreise is Hans Zender’s “composed interpretation” (1993). The whole of Schubert’s cycle is presented, but accompanied by an ensemble: string sextet, piccolo, cor anglais, oboe d’amore, clarinet, saxophone, double bassoons, horn, timpani and percussion, mouth organ, and wind-machines. Sound effects accentuate the wintry atmosphere. The first song, “Gute Nacht,” gradually emerges out of tramping rhythms evoked through brushes on a drum, col legno playing from the strings, and breathy sounds from the woodwind. “Die Wetterfahne” makes sonically present the gusts that blow around the weathervane. Zender often interrupts the flow of Schubert’s songs, decoupling the melodies of voice and piano so that the latter’s music is scattered around the ensemble. Some numbers are sung in a lurching slow motion (“Die Post”) while elsewhere the singer resorts to Sprechstimme – in “Wasserflut,” for instance, the horn plays the tune, on which the singer then seems to comment. Zender’s “composed interpretation” includes moments of extreme sweetness, but also passages that intensify the protagonist’s anguish. At the start of “Auf dem Flusse,” rasping brass and woodwind chords make the opening musical material sound tortured, yet when the singer enters, accompanied by plucked strings, all seems even more normal than usual – only tinnitus-like harmonics hint at anything foreboding.

Zender likened his Winterreise to contemplating an object from multiple perspectives, and performances have magnified the score’s potential for historical multivalence. In a 2016 production directed by Netia Jones, tenor Ian Bostridge wore white face-paint and tails, making him look like a ghostly cabaret singer from the Weimar era. Projected behind him, in addition to surtitles and hackneyed wintry images, were pictures of Bostridge performing the cycle as a younger man, adding another historical layer from the singer’s own biography. The way that Zender’s Winterreise cross-references styles from different periods is not about “performance practice”; rather, as Jürg Stenzl argues, it demonstrates that “musical interpretation is nothing less than a historical phenomenon.”⁷ Or, as Simon Emmerson explains, “To quote Schubert in the late 20th century in this manner, reworking, placing against contrasting material, is to say something about difference … and we must perceive the character of that difference for ‘meaning’ to emerge.”⁸ Whereas in the nineteenth century transcriptions and arrangements were used to disseminate musical works, to widen their familiarity around the world, now their purpose is to defamiliarize them – to make them strange, or stress their “difference,” and thereby keep them fresh.

Musical Legacy

Many composers have been inspired by Schubert’s Lieder. It is difficult, though, to pinpoint exact stylistic references to Winterreise, unless every narrative song cycle about Romantic wanderers, lost love, and death is considered in its debt. The musical style of the cycle is also elusive; individual songs, such as “Der Lindenbaum” and “Der Leiermann,” are quoted or alluded to in various works, but attempting to define the musical traits that distinguish Winterreise as a whole is confounding because the cycle contains such a broad stylistic range. There may well be Schubertian “fingerprints,” to borrow Susan Wollenberg’s term, that reveal the composer’s influence, such as shifts between major and minor modalities, a predilection for tertiary relationships, or particular kinds of pianistic figuration, but it is sometimes challenging to determine which belong to Schubert, to Winterreise, or to a generation of Romantic composers. Other composers may have set poems from Müller’s Die Winterreise before Schubert, but he was the first to gather his settings into a substantial cycle. A precedent for a song collection centered on a lone wanderer was Conradin Kreutzer’s Neun Wander-Lieder von [Ludwig] Uhland, Op. 34 (1818), which Schubert admired.⁹ After Schubert’s Winterreise, many more composers selected poems from Müller’s collection (though not quite as enthusiastically as they had from Die schöne Müllerin). Some paid musical homage to Schubert, borrowing and building on nuggets of his songs, as in Carl Banck’s sequel to the cycle, Des Leiermanns Liederbuch (1838–1839), and Wilhelm Kienzl’s “Der Leiermann” from Zwei Lieder, Op. 38 (1904). Much later and more radically, artists in the German Democratic Republic used the notion of the “winter journey” to comment on their own political situation and relationship to the musical canon. Thus, according to Elaine Kelly, Reiner Bredemeyer’s Die Winterreise, composed for baritone, horn, and piano (1984), gives “absolute prominence” to Müller’s poems, keeping their original order and eschewing textual repetition. Bredemeyer creates “a sparse atonal, or as he puts it, ‘skeletal’ texture that reflects the political landscape of winter.”¹⁰ Here, Schubert citations are dissociative; for example, a musical fragment of “Gute Nacht” appears not in Bredemeyer’s setting of that poem but rather in the setting of “Der stürmische Morgen.” According to Bredemeyer, Schubert had misread or misrepresented Müller’s Die Winterreise as love poetry, rather than seen it as political commentary. A more musicologically critical approach was taken in Andrea Cavallari’s Winterreise for Kammeroper Frankfurt (2006–2007), in which settings of Müller’s poetry with instrumental accompaniment (accordion, cello, piano) were interleaved with Schubert’s songs, original and commentary being brought into dialogue with each other.

Detecting the influence of Schubert’s Winterreise when composers are setting poetry other than Müller’s becomes still more complex. Susan Youens points out that Gustav Mahler never acknowledged the relationship between the four songs of his Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (1884–1885), composed to his own, Des Knaben Wunderhorn-derived poetry, and Schubert’s Winterreise.¹¹ However, according to Youens, there are significant thematic connections between the two cycles. Mahler described his Gesellenlieder as being about “a wayfaring man, who has been stricken by fate, [and] now sets forth into the world, travelling wherever his road may lead him.” Like Schubert’s cycle, Mahler’s encompasses a solitary farewell, a sweetheart who is married to another man, and longing for death. The same could be said of dozens of nineteenth-century German songs, but, Youens argues, Mahler “inverts elements that could only come from Müller and Schubert.” Schubert’s “winter journey” thus becomes a “summer journey.” The most convincing references to Schubert’s cycle occur in Mahler’s fourth song, “Die zwei blauen Augen von meinem Schatz” (“The Two Blue Eyes of my Beloved”). Like the wanderer of Schubert’s opening song, Mahler’s wayfarer sets out alone, at night. Their journeys’ companions are similarly mostly mute and non-human: birds, the moon, a river. Youens compares the beloved’s blue eyes in Mahler’s poem to the suns of Müller’s “Die Nebensonnen.” Perhaps more obviously, at the end of the song, Mahler’s protagonist falls asleep beneath a linden tree. The symbolism of the linden tree as a meeting-point for lovers extends back centuries to the Minnesingers. In “Erstarrung” and “Der Lindenbaum” from Winterreise, the linden tree becomes associated with the unending sleep of death. Yet Mahler’s wanderer might here defy historical precedent, for he could refuse to stay under the tree and instead choose life.

The 1928 centenary of Schubert’s death encouraged not only more performances of and scholarship on his music, but also more responses from composers. For Ernst Krenek, it was important to reclaim Schubert as an Austrian as a means to resist the pan-German nationalism that was becoming politically dominant. His song cycle Reisebuch aus den österreichischen Alpen (Travel Book from the Austrian Alps) (1929) begins “Ich reise aus, meine Heimat zu entdecken” (I set out traveling in order to discover my homeland). Although again the protagonist is a lone wanderer, the poetry of Krenek’s Reisebuch is more place- and time-specific than Schubert’s Winterreise. Krenek name-checks particular locations and current fashions and technologies (gramophones and automobiles), thereby marking the difference between his era and Schubert’s. Similarly, his music mixes Schubertian tonal devices, including major/minor fluctuations and tertiary relationships, with more dissonant passages, the juxtaposition of sweet lyricism and consonance with disjunct melodies and dissonance conveying his dissatisfaction with the modern world.

Schubert’s music also functioned as a nostalgic cipher for earlier, less troubled times in Hanns Eisler’s Hollywood Liederbuch (1942–1947). Eisler fled Nazi-occupied Europe, eventually arriving in Hollywood in 1942. In the forty-seven songs of the Hollywood Liederbuch (more a collection than a cycle), Eisler set poetry by his contemporaries – especially his long-term collaborator Berthold Brecht – as well as earlier authors, including Germans familiar to Schubert, such as Goethe. Despite its title, the Hollywood Liederbuch became a vehicle through which Eisler could express his feelings about being exiled from his homeland. There is a fleeting reference to the first phrase of Winterreise, “Fremd bin ich eingezogen,” in Eisler’s “Über den Selbstmord” (“On Suicide”), at the words “Und die ganze Winterzeit.” (Eisler also dedicated a song to Schubert, a setting of Hölderlin’s “Heidelberg,” giving it the Schwanengesang-like title “An eine Stadt.”)

Although the Hollywood Liederbuch acknowledges its nineteenth-century heritage, it would be inaccurate to say that Winterreise specifically was Eisler’s primary reference point. Composers in the second half of the twentieth century similarly borrowed images or motifs that might be associated with Schubert’s cycle but typically combined them with references to other works by him, or to works by other composers. Questions about influence then become less relevant than unpicking the historical significance of intertextuality. A notion of Romantic strangeness – hung, again, on the opening line of Winterreise, “Fremd bin ich eingezogen” – infiltrates Wolfgang Rihm’s Ländler (1997), dedicated to his composer friend Wilhelm Killmayer.¹² Nico Muhly’s Good Night (2017) takes as its texts fragments from both Schubert’s essay, Mein Traum, and singer Ian Bostridge’s book, Schubert’s Winter’s Journey, and borrows from Schubert’s “Gute Nacht” what Muhly describes as its “hypnotic repeated chords”:

Muhly’s response, then, is a kind of textual-musical palimpsest, overlaying Schubert’s autobiographical writing with Bostridge’s commentary on Winterreise (thereby historicizing the cycle), and then loosely deriving its musical impetus from one of the songs.

There are several references to Schubert in Bernhard Lang’s “Monadologies” cycle, which the composer describes as “meta-compositions,” combining and manipulating musical cells from past centuries. The most substantial Schubert references are found in the thirty-second installment, The Cold Trip (2014–15). In part one, for voice and four guitars, Lang references the first half of Winterreise, with Schubert’s second half providing material for Lang’s part two, for voice, piano, and laptop. The latter uses samples of prepared piano that, Lang explains, create “palimpsests of Schubert’s original textures. The voice in both parts traces the lost lines of the songs, sometimes touching them as if remembering.” Müller’s poems are rendered in punchy English translations and, as Frankie Perry observes, “it is instances of simple word-switching and brazen updating that are most memorable”: thus, “Die Post” becomes “Mail,” about waiting for messages to arrive in one’s inbox.¹⁴ Lang constantly explores the repetitive potential of Schubert’s musical cells, looping vocal and piano phrases around themselves to intensify the feeling of anxiety. The Cold Trip, Perry points out, can be heard as a song cycle that “is both intrinsically indebted to and happily removed from its Schubertian origin … The Cold Trip might be understood on its own terms as Lang’s winter journey, tagged with Schubertian graffiti that can be sought out, studied, appreciated, noted, or simply passed by.” That a work so obviously derived from Schubert’s Winterreise also can be taken on its own terms, without an awareness of its intertextuality, suggests that to search for Schubert in such music is to take the wrong path. The cycle’s canonical status does not crumble as a result; if anything, composers’ use of it to generate new music confirms its influence.

Literary Responses

Scott Messing’s two-volume study of Schubert reception in the long nineteenth century contains strikingly few references to Winterreise.¹⁵ A couple of individual songs – “Der Leiermann” and “Der Lindenbaum” – appear in novels, but the whole cycle does not really impinge on the literary imagination until later in the twentieth century. This absence reflects the performance history of Winterreise; as noted, the cycle was rarely heard in its complete form.

Literary references to Winterreise often mingle with other Schubertian tropes. In Romain Rolland’s novel Jean Christophe (1903–1912), the titular character meets the reflected gaze of a countess, an old acquaintance, during a performance of “Der Lindenbaum.” Messing claims that it is likely that Rolland was here nodding towards Schubert’s supposed passion for Countess Caroline Esterházy. The song is also appropriate because the linden tree is a traditional place for lovers to meet, and in Müller’s poem, of course, the wanderer reminisces about lost love. There is a hint of similar nostalgia in Jean Christophe – Philomela’s “lovely voice” has an “elegiac warmth … and the pure music called up sad memories.” Jean Christophe’s romantic thrill at his potential reunion with Grazia is fleeting, for she is now married. Schubert’s song was prescient.

“Der Lindenbaum” is also featured in perhaps the most famous novelistic description of listening to Schubert, Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924). Apparently the author owned a recording of “Der Lindenbaum” sung by Richard Tauber; Mann listened to it repeatedly, explaining that “[t]he song was for me the symbol of everything worthy of love and seduction, in which lurked the secret germ of destruction.”¹⁶ Similarly, the protagonist of Der Zauberberg, Hans Castorp, listens repeatedly to “Der Lindenbaum” on a gramophone. Mann goes into some details about the music of “Der Lindenbaum” but more important is what it means to Castorp:

Mann’s account of Castorp’s response to “Der Lindenbaum” presages significant strands of twentieth-century Schubert reception. First, a connection between the Lied and profound emotion. Second, the undermining of that profundity by technological mediation; the song could all too easily “degenerate to a piece of gramophone music played by electricity” – it was merely one of “Hans Castorp’s favourite records.” Third, a sense that Schubert’s music embodied the Austro-German spirit. Finally, the inevitability of all this leading to death. As Castorp wanders wounded on the battlefield in the last pages of the novel, he sings lines from “Der Lindenbaum”:

Castorp’s tragic end – one shared by thousands of young men in the trenches – and its association with Schubert suggested a very different image of the composer from that familiar from popular hagiographical operettas such as Das Dreimäderlhaus (1916). Through the course of the interwar period, as a greater number of his Lieder became available from recordings and on the radio, scholarship on the composer flourished, and as performances of whole song cycles became more common, Schubert began to be taken much more seriously.¹⁹ Winterreise was central to this new approach, for its scale, relatively sparse style, and existential poetic themes seemed more in keeping with the modern world, as is evident from the greater number of writers who invoked the cycle.

Samuel Beckett, in a letter to his cousin from 1965, described himself listening to recordings of Winterreise and “shivering through the grim journey again.”²⁰ He had long been drawn to the cycle, returning repeatedly to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore’s version from 1955, and even claiming that he chose the actor Leonard Fenton for the role of Willie in the London premiere of Happy Days (1979) because he could sing some of it. Perhaps then it is unsurprising that Beckett’s last play, What Where? (1983), contains an allusion to Winterreise. Each of the four actors – Bam, Bem, Bim, and Bom, virtually indistinguishable because all wear the same long grey gowns and have the same long grey hair – is interrogated about an unspecified violent crime. A small megaphone at head height projects the voice of Bam, who announces the passing of the seasons until finally the end is reached: “It is winter. Without journey. Time passes. That is all. Make sense who may. I switch off.” Much as Youens argued about Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, if Beckett is referring to Schubert here, it is through inversion and, indeed, negation: this is winter without a journey. Moreover, it seems that at the end of What Where? the reiterative voice is extinguished, unlike Schubert’s equivalent, the hurdy-gurdy man.

Beckett’s existential response to Winterreise has fed into productions of his plays and of the song cycle. In 2009, director Katie Mitchell presented an abridged version of Schubert’s Winterreise (sung by tenor Mark Padmore, in a translation by poet Michael Symmons Roberts) interwoven with Beckett texts (recited by Stephen Dillane) and sound effects – dogs barking, wind blowing, gates closing, sobs, and footsteps crunching through the snow. Such “imaginative dialogues” between Schubert and Beckett have been pursued with other authors: for example, director Conall Morrison embedded songs from Winterreise into a performance of Georg Büchner’s play Woyzeck to create Woyzeck in Winter (2017). Both works, Morrison reasoned, were by “a troubled genius who died young. Each narrates the course of one man’s obsessive thoughts and his downward slide towards dissolution. The play is a collection of 24 scenes, the song cycle 24 songs. Placed side by side, playscript and lyrics could be said to be having a conversation.”²¹ Further integration of play and cycle was attempted by the actors singing the songs in translation. The critical reception of both of these productions has admittedly been fairly hostile; instead of appreciating the dialogue between Winterreise and the other texts as enriching each other, most reviewers have resisted disruptions to the musical cohesion of Schubert’s cycle, feeling that neither Beckett nor Büchner gained much by the association.

Other writers have drawn from both Schubert and Beckett. Eva Figes’s novel Winter Journey (1967) mirrors Winterreise (one of the author’s favorite pieces of music) in its title. Janus Stobbs, the aging, traumatized protagonist, might resemble Schubert’s wanderer or any of Beckett’s lone voices. Silvia Pellicer-Ortin argues, though, that the more significant intertextual link for Figes was Robert Falcon Scott’s Journey to the Antarctic (1901–1911), not least because Stobbs seeks out Scott’s diaries.²² The broad topoi associated with Winterreise – winter journeys and solitary figures – signal its cultural currency, and thus its canonical status, yet almost every link is compound, rarely representing “just” Schubert.

Elfriede Jelinek’s play Winterreise (2011) represents a more historically sensitive response to Schubert. Tom Smith argues that Jelinek is attracted by the “emotional ambivalence” of Schubert’s compositional response to Müller’s poetry, that she is “drawn to music for its potential to articulate marginalized, isolated subject positions, and yet repelled by its easy co-option by those who would impose emotional norms.”²³ Moments of “instability, dissoluteness and ambivalence” become means to “resist Schubert’s co-option in discourses of nationalism,” and a more personal, introspective relationship to the musical canon thereby can be established. In various scenes from Jelinek’s play, glancing at Schubert serves to undermine or problematize the action on stage, much of which derives from recent Austrian history. An example involves the story of the kidnapped teenager Natascha Kampusch, who, on her escape in 2006 after eight years of being held hostage, became a minor celebrity, yet also attracted negative press from those who did not believe her tale. The opening lines from Müller’s “Erstarrung,” where the wanderer searches for traces of his beloved (“Ich such im Schnee vergebens / Nach ihrer Tritte Spur”) are echoed in scene four’s description of Kampusch’s disappearance (“Da ist eine Schritte Spur, und jetzt ist sie weg … . Suche vergebens.”). The subtle allusions in Jelinek’s text are accentuated in productions through the use of Schubert’s music: for instance, the director Johan Simons, in his version for the Munich Kammerspiele, punctuated the tirade against Kampusch with unison singing of phrases from “Mut!,” thereby representing, according to Smith, “a judgemental society.” Schubert is present in Jelinek’s play as a kind of ghost, haunting the language. His music is almost surplus to requirements, but for those who are not well-versed in Müller’s poetry, perhaps it is necessary to make explicit the lineage of an Austrian Winterreise.

Winterreise in Visual Media

At the start of Ingmar Bergman’s film for television, Larmar och gör sig till (In the Presence of a Clown) (1997), the first eight measures of “Der Leiermann” are played repeatedly on a gramophone. The man lifting the needle is an inmate in Uppsala Psychiatric Hospital in the winter of 1925. Fifty-four-year-old Carl Åkerblom has been institutionalized, having attempted to murder his much younger fiancée. He is obsessed with Schubert, talking to his psychiatrist about the composer’s illnesses and furtively listening to recordings, never getting further than those first eight measures of “Der Leiermann.” Carl is visited in the night by the clown of the title, seemingly the figure of death; subsequently, he hatches a plan to make talking pictures, and decides that the film’s plot should be a fictional relationship between Schubert and Mizzi Veith – a “Countess” who was forced into prostitution by her stepfather and whose suicide caused a scandal in Vienna in 1908. (Writers Karl Kraus and Peter Altenberg used Veith as an exemplar of moral hypocrisy.) In the end, the film is presented as a play, with Carl acting the role of Schubert. Music is the vehicle through which fantasy and reality are blurred: in the play’s performance, the opening of “Der Leiermann” is heard again when the clown appears to Carl and when Schubert declines Mizzi’s kiss. The music is a figment of Carl’s imagination until the end of the play, when it becomes diegetic, accompanying the arrival of Count Veith at Schubert’s deathbed to tell him that Mizzi has drowned herself.

Bergman explained that, for him, “Der Leiermann” is about death. In the film’s narrative, it becomes a fragmented soundtrack to the ultimate demise of Carl, a “madman” who “identifies with Schubert and his destiny,” according to the director.²⁴ Anyssa Neumann argues for a subtler approach than simply associating the song with the figure of death, and draws a comparison between Carl and the wanderer of Winterreise: both are “caught between past life, future death, and a musical stranger.”²⁵ Bergman was unusually sophisticated in his selection of pre-existing music in his films, and in this instance, “Der Leiermann” adds to the portrayal of insanity. Yet, is one song alone enough to make In the Presence of a Clown about Winterreise as a whole? Can or should “Der Leiermann” serve as a synecdoche? It is an unusual song within the cycle in its deliberate musical simplicity and repetitiveness, and it is the only song directly addressed to another person. Its position as the last number has encouraged readings of the hurdy-gurdy man as a harbinger of death or as a potential imagined performer of the songs, the cycle being recycled. “Der Leiermann” is undoubtedly the most famous song from Winterreise, but it is not fully representative of its musical and emotional range; instead, it skews the image of the cycle towards the existential.

While some films sample songs from Winterreise (usually “Der Leiermann”), there have been a number of attempts to make films of performances of the full cycle. Some are fairly straightforward documentaries of concerts, with occasional nods towards the theatrical (such as Peter Pears in a deerstalker, in a version he made with Benjamin Britten for the BBC in 1970). Opportunities for close-ups and other camera angles that bring the audience closer to the performers have also been exploited (for example, Fischer-Dieskau and Alfred Brendel, 1979; Christophe Prégardien and Michael Gees, 2013). Other versions have taken more liberties to suggest alternative interpretations or framing narratives for the cycle. Swedish baritone Håkan Hagegård, who had played Papageno in Bergman’s film version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, produced a version of the cycle for television directed by Måns Reuterswärd (1978). The story around the cycle was set in Gotland, with the songs sung in a free Swedish translation. Czech filmmaker Petr Weigl devised a film of Winterreise (1994) in which mezzo Brigitte Fassbaender sings the songs dressed as a nun, flanked by angels and devils (pianist Wolfram Rieger is never seen). The songs accompany a web of stories, loosely set in the nineteenth century, showing young couples frolicking in fields, a ballerina spooked on stage, and, inevitably, travelers in a wintry landscape. They might be enacting the nun’s memories of her youth, but perhaps she is simply imagining lives different from her own, as art can help to do.

In 1997, director David Alden worked with Ian Bostridge and Julius Drake on a performance of Winterreise filmed in a deserted asylum. The piano being deemed a hindrance to creating a sense of drama, it remains out of sight, leaving Bostridge to sing while wandering through the empty rooms. Occasionally he is joined by silent characters in Biedermeier dress; at one point, he sits by the fire, contemplating the blade of a dagger. A more fantastical approach is taken for “Die Krähe,” with Bostridge filmed from above, the tails of his long black coat becoming the wings of the crow as he circles through the white sky. “He’s up there with the bird looking down, dizzy,” Bostridge later explained, finding a synergy with Schubert’s hallucinatory music.²⁶ A documentary accompanied the DVD release, showing Bostridge and Drake rehearsing with Alden; interestingly, both were somewhat resistant to trying to “act out” the cycle, arguing that there was enough drama in the music without additional histrionics.

The continued appeal of presenting Winterreise in a quasi-theatrical way partly reflects the cycle’s ubiquity. It is, these days, the most frequently performed of Schubert’s three cycles (Schwanengesang, compiled by the publisher after Schubert’s death, being the third), and there is probably a need to find new ways to “sell” the various versions. Winterreise continues to represent a challenge for performers and audiences. It is, undeniably, a long work, with little timbral variety beyond the capabilities of singer and pianist. When performed with skill, it can be tremendously engrossing, but even then, providing visual stimuli alongside musical ones might help some audience members engage with the story, such as it is. One challenge for directors and designers is that the imagery of the cycle, while in some senses easily rendered, can come close to cliché.

The problem is apparent in responses to the cycle by visual artists. Singer Lotte Lehmann produced watercolours illustrating the songs of Winterreise, which she also performed and recorded. Each one captures a scene, such as a windswept tree, or the protagonist (in Lehmann’s rendering, a rather gothic-looking gentleman) leaving town, or him later weeping. German-born artist Mariele Neudecker produced a film to accompany a live performance of Winterreise by bass-baritone Andrew Foster-Williams and pianist Christopher Gould (2003). Snowy landscapes and ice-skaters, all from the 60th parallel north, were projected behind singer and pianist on the concert platform. South African artist William Kentridge undertook a similar project for the Aix-en-Provence festival in 2014, producing stop-action films animating pen-and-ink illustrations responding to each of the songs performed by Matthias Goerne and pianist Markus Hinterhäuser. Apparently, the images Kentridge associated with the cycle came from his childhood in Johannesburg, watching his father listen to a recording of Winterreise by Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore. As Kentridge did not understand German, Müller’s texts appeared “like prayers,” he explained: they were incomprehensible but elicited an emotional response. For “Die Krähe,” the tools slung over a worker’s back become the wings of the crow, which then flies over varied landscapes, at one point seeming to morph into the Reichsadler atop a domed building; in a more domestic setting, a man – Kentridge’s father? – looks out of a window.

Confronting history has occupied many post-war German and Austrian artists, and while Schubert’s music does not feature in their works as often as Wagner’s or Beethoven’s, one can occasionally glimpse the legacy of Winterreise. Of Gerhard Richter’s series of paintings derived from photographs of the Baader Meinhof gang, 18 October 1977 (1988), T. J. Clark writes, “These are mugshots from an anarchist archive. Concealment. Obstruction. Fading. Take a look at the pseudo-poignant record player (a record player!) with Winterreise; or, ‘Street Fighting Man’ stopped on the time-turntable.”²⁷ Schubert’s presence here, in a terrorist’s cell, alongside The Rolling Stones, suggests that his canonical status is assured. The range of reference within which Winterreise thrives, though, has escalated. A retrospective of Sigmar Polke’s took travel as its theme, charting the artist’s responses to everywhere from Lapland to Indonesia as well as abstract landscapes. Its title, almost inevitably, was Eine Winterreise. Instating the article allows the difference between Schubert’s cycle and its historical derivatives to be clear: it is not one winter’s journey, but one of many.