Concocting the Cycle

If one reads the poem titles of Wilhelm Müller’s earlier cycle Die schöne Müllerin from its original edition and the titles of the songs in Schubert’s published score, one quickly notes that while Schubert omitted the long Prologue and Epilogue and three other poems, he retained all the rest of the Müllerin poems and kept them in the same order as the poet’s.² Schubert did a bit of judicious cutting, but left the poetic cycle largely intact.

But a comparison of the titles from the first publication of the twenty-four poems of Müller’s cycle Die Winterreise (Table 5.1, Column D) with the titles in Schubert’s published cycle (Column E) leads to a very different conclusion. All the poems are present in both, but one immediately notices multiple discrepancies in their ordering, mainly in the second half, some quite radical. How did Schubert arrive at this sequence?

The ordering of the poems in Schubert’s cycle was arguably the result of unforeseen events. Müller published his poems in three waves. The first two were installments in periodicals: the first twelve poems in 1823 in Urania (Column A), ten more later the same year in Deutsche Blätter für Poesie, Litteratur, Kunst und Theater (Column C). The third publication (in 1824), of these twenty-two poems plus two more (Column D), was his complete cycle of twenty-four poems, in a volume of his poetry with the whimsical title Sieben und siebzig Gedichte aus den hinterlassenen Papieren eines reisenden Waldhornisten (Seventy-seven Poems from the Surviving Papers of an Itinerant Horn Player). Schubert encountered the poems in this piecemeal manner, coming first upon the publication in the periodical Urania. One can presume that he was so taken with these twelve poems that he set them to music straightaway, unaware of the possibility that the poet might have a larger design. This presumption is based on internal evidence other than the selection and order of the poems. First, Schubert’s texts in four instances correspond to the readings in the Urania poems, but differ from those in Waldhornisten. (To cite one example, in “Erstarrung,” both Urania and Schubert’s setting read “Wo sie an meinem Arme / Durchstrich die grüne Flur,” whereas Waldhornisten has “Hier, wo wir oft gewandelt / Selbander durch die Flur.”)³ Second, inspection of Schubert’s autograph manuscript strongly suggests that the first twelve songs constitute a distinct compositional stage because they have many more corrections than the second half of the cycle, which appears to be the clean manuscript of the latter twelve songs.⁴

Schubert may have been unaware of the publication of Müller’s second set of ten more poems in Deutsche Blätter, but when he discovered the complete set of twenty-four poems in Waldhornisten, he was motivated to add the twelve remaining poems to his song cycle. Initially, however, there was what must have appeared to Schubert a nearly insurmountable problem: In adding the ten poems from Deutsche Blätter (shown in boldface in Table 5.1) plus two new ones (underlined) to the original set to create the complete Waldhornisten cycle (Column D), Müller integrated some of these into his earlier twelve and appended others. The poet thus fractured the sequence Schubert had already composed (Column B). The composer faced a difficult choice: Either he could do a full-scale revision and augmentation of his original song cycle, adhering to Müller’s new sequence, or he could just make the best of the situation and compose the remaining twelve poems as a second part. He of course decided on the latter course, setting these twelve poems in the order in which they occur in Waldhornisten, except for the reversal of “Mut!” and “Die Nebensonnen” (compare Columns D and E).

Since Die Winterreise, unlike the Müllerin cycle, is not a linear narrative, one seeks to understand the significance of the poet’s orderings. Apparently, Müller himself did not regard the sequence of the first twelve poems as sacrosanct, for in the final version he inserted some of the newer poems into that first group. So neither, perhaps, might Schubert have felt he would damage Müller’s cycle with his own, different ordering. But if there is not a story, what holds the poems together? Context, to be sure – season and landscape and state of mind – but is there more? We can agree that “Gute Nacht” must stand at the beginning since it provides essential exposition of the situation that sends the protagonist on his winter journey, and “Die Wetterfahne” must probably come next for the same reason. “Der Leiermann” is the best candidate for closing the cycle, given its single meeting with another human character, its open-endedness, and its absolutely flat affect. But beyond these, what?

Should we regard Müller’s own order as preferable, or might we so regard Schubert’s? Does the order of the poems, outside the first two and the last, matter? Does Schubert’s music provide its own ordering principles? Nowhere in the literature on Winterreise are these questions definitively answered, though Susan Youens, Richard Kramer, and others have speculated on them at length, including finding common motivic and harmonic features in several songs. Far be it from me to attempt even a summary of this imponderable issue here. Perhaps one must fall back on this formulation by Kramer: “[Winterreise is] a complex grouping of songs that bear on one another in ways that everyone acknowledges to be significant, even as the specific nature of their relatedness has proved to be elusive in the extreme.”⁵ It should be acknowledged that Kramer’s statement stands at the beginning of his own ambitious attempt to pin down that relatedness.

Altering Müller’s Texts

Schubert made only a few changes to Müller’s poems. Most of these appear to be relatively minor, worthy of a textual note at best, since they do not significantly affect the sound or sense of the verse. A handful of alterations, however, reward close study, for they are interesting in themselves and reveal Schubert’s attention to detail. (Here I look only at word changes, and do not consider word and line repetition or violation of line and strophe integrity.)

In the fourth and final eight-line stanza of the first poem, “Gute Nacht,” the young man says that as he leaves the house at night, he closes the door quietly so as not to disturb his beloved’s sleep, and writes on the gate, “Ich hab’ an dich gedacht” (I thought of you). In his song, Schubert altered Müller’s text to “An dich hab’ ich gedacht.” This changes neither the words themselves nor their meaning, but it rearranges their order, with expressive results:

Schubert’s altered line creates an internal rhyme – “dich” and “ich” – and aligns both of their -ch sounds with that of the closing accented syllable (“ge-dacht”), bringing out the assonance. The “dich” and “ich” rhymes also both occur on a descending fourth motive (f#″–c#″, d″–a′; mm. 85–87). This all passes by quickly, but it creates a pleasing aural effect. It is worth adding that if Schubert had used the earlier, corresponding phrase ending (mm. 49–51, 53–55, or 81–83), the transposed melody would have carried the singer to a high a″ within the pianissimo dynamic!

In song 4, “Erstarrung” (stanza 5, line 1), Müller wrote “Mein Herz ist wie erfroren” (My heart is as if frozen), but Schubert changed “erfroren” to “erstorben” (dead). This raises the emotional temperature of the utterance considerably, but it vitiates the poet’s metaphor. The poem goes on to say, “Her image frozen cold within; / If my heart ever thaws again, / Her image will melt away, too!” The metaphor depends on the image of his heart as ice. Apparently, the image of a dead rather than merely frozen heart was so potent that Schubert was willing to sacrifice Müller’s tidy metaphor.

In song 6, “Wasserflut” (stanza 3, line 2), Schubert actually changed Müller’s wording:

The meaning is not affected by Schubert’s change, but Müller’s reversed second foot, an iamb within the trochaic line, would have created a problem. In this compound strophic setting, Schubert used the same music for stanzas 3 and 4 that he composed for 1 and 2. One can see in the autograph manuscript that he first inserted Müller’s line unchanged into his score where the notes had originally served the straight trochaic line, “Ist gefallen in den Schnee.” He quickly realized that his dotted rhythm and bouncing melodic line would not serve the reversed foot (or better, that Müller’s words would not fit his melody), and he altered the text then and there, crossing out “mir, wohin” and substituting “wohin doch.”

At the beginning of song 14, “Der greise Kopf,” Schubert ignored a subtlety of verb tense sequence. Müller’s first couplet is in the past perfect tense – “Der Reif hatt’ einen weissen Schein / Mir über’s Haar gestreuet” (The frost had spread a white sheen all over my hair). The second is in the simple past tense – “Da meint’ ich schon ein Greis zu sein” (I thought myself already an old man) (my translations). Waldhornisten reads “meint’” in line 2, but Schubert changed this to “glaubt’.” In line 1 “hatt’” is short for “hatte,” the auxiliary verb which creates the past perfect with the participle “gestreuet,” but this is apparent only if one is looking at the poem on the printed page. In spoken or sung language, there is no distinction between “hat” and “hatt’,” so I would argue that Schubert disregarded the tense sequence and simply wrote “hat.” The meaning is clear despite the sacrifice of Müller’s subtlety. (The Neue Schubert-Ausgabe restores Müller’s reading.)

In song 17, “Im Dorfe,” Schubert removed the syntactical variation in Müller’s opening lines and also softened a condescending depiction of the “snoring” villagers. Müller’s first two images present the predicate before the subject – “Es bellen die Hunde, es rasseln die Ketten” (There bellow the hounds, there rattle the chains) – while for variety and emphasis in the second line he reverts to normal word order – “Die Menschen schnarchen in ihren Betten” (People snore in their beds) (my translations). Perhaps Müller meant thereby to emphasize his unflattering comparison of the snoring villagers to the bellowing hounds. Schubert changed “schnarchen” to “schlafen” and preserved the inverted word order (“Es schlafen die Menschen”). His villagers are sleeping quietly. But if Schubert removed this mildly derogatory auditory image, he did not soften the implication of the emptiness of their lives in Müller’s subsequent lines. (Graham Johnson fears that if Schubert had left Müller’s text intact, many singers would be tempted to mimic a snoring sound on the word “schnarchen”;⁶ this would indeed be easy to do with a rolled r and guttural ch.)

In song 20, “Der Wegweiser,” Schubert changed a rhyme word, perhaps unawares. Müller’s quatrains have an alternating rhyme scheme, and the third stanza rhymes Strassen/zu/Massen/Ruh. But Schubert changed “Strassen” to “Wegen.” The meaning of the line is not hindered, but the rhyme scheme is. Here is an instance in which one is sorely tempted to restore the poet’s reading, despite the editorial principle of being faithful to the composer’s last written intention, even if the text alteration might have been unintentional. It is possible that Schubert altered the word to impart fourfold alliteration to this quatrain (Weiser, Wegen, Weisen, wandre); notice that the poem’s first stanza also contains considerable alliteration (Was, Wege, Wo, Wandrer; versteckte, verschneite). But this would be the sole instance in Winterreise of Schubert corrupting a rhyme. (Johnson believes that Schubert substituted “Wegen” because “Strassen” is “unsuitably banal,” but he doesn’t explain this opinion.⁷)

Setting the Poems: Unusual Uses of Triple Meter

In this section, my focus narrows from the whole cycle to a group of eight songs, all of which are in triple meter:

In general, triple meter is used infrequently in Lieder. A “quick and dirty” survey of the 446 songs in the seven-volume Peters Edition of Schubert songs (about 75 percent of his total output) reveals only 101 songs in triple meter, and twenty-four of these use triple meter only within internal sections. Thus only seventy-seven of 446 songs start in and are wholly or largely in triple meter; this is 17 percent, or fewer than one song in five. Of the twenty Die schöne Müllerin songs, only four are in triple meter, or 20 percent of the total. By contrast, in Winterreise, eight of the twenty-four songs are in triple meter, a full 33.3 percent. (Schwanengesang has an even larger proportion: six of fourteen, or 43 percent.)

One of the primary decisions a song composer makes is how the text will be declaimed in time – the choice of meter, the note durations used, their placement within each measure. This is not the place to delve into the intricacies of poetic and musical meter and rhythm, but the reader must be aware of these kinds of things during the following discussion.⁸ Duple meters like 4/4, 2/4, and the compound meter 6/8 all accommodate the trimeter and tetrameter lines of the era’s lyric poetry straightforwardly and “naturally.” “Gute Nacht” provides a good example of three-foot lines, in which the last foot of each line is extended or followed by a rest. “Die Krähe” provides a straightforward instance of four- and three-foot lines in alternation.

The conventional procedure in triple meter is to set the feet to an alternation of long and short notes. “Der Lindenbaum” is the first song in triple time in Winterreise. The first and third feet of the trimeter line fall on downbeats and are extended through the second beat; the second foot falls on the third beat of the measure:

This song flows so pleasantly with its undeniably charming major-key melody (except for the turbulent middle section, of course) that it has easily become the signature song of the cycle for many listeners. No other triple-meter song in Winterreise follows its conventional rhythmic setting. In contrast, all but one of the triple-meter songs in Die schöne Müllerin do follow this customary pattern. Besides its more common rhythmic setting, the overall major tonality of “Lindenbaum” contrasts with the minor keys of other triple-meter songs; a major key does not open and predominate with such clarity in a triple-meter song until “Die Nebensonnen.” Though “Letzte Hoffnung” has an E♭ major signature, it acts as though it is in the parallel minor much of the time. (“Rückblick” is the negative image of “Lindenbaum”: pounding rhythms in G minor open in the present time, while the placid central section of past memories is in G major.)

In stark contrast to this conventional use of triple meter, the rhythmic settings in songs 6, 9, 14, 16, and 23 stand out. (The remaining triple-meter songs – “Rückblick” and “Der Leiermann”

– draw on another rarely used text-setting manner, discussed below.) In these five triple-meter songs, the vocal lines open with two measures of a short–long pattern, the first poetic foot aligned with the first metric unit and the second occupying the rest of the measure, reversing the customary triple-meter declamation. This same pattern is anticipated in the piano introductions of four of these songs (but not in song 16). The short–long pattern recurs to varying degrees throughout each of the triple-meter songs. There is a second component to the patterning in most of them: the two measures of the short–long pattern constitute the first half of the musical phrase, and they are followed by two measures that progress without a break to a cadence in the fourth measure, the whole pattern represented as 1 m. + 1 m. + 2 m.

Here are the opening texts of these songs (6, 9, and 16) shown schematically:

It is possible that we have simply failed to notice the special, individual qualities of this group of triple-meter songs because the cycle is so familiar. One hopes this fresh look will prompt further study.

Notice that “Wasserflut,” “Irrlicht,” and “Letzte Hoffnung” are all in trochaic meter and have four stresses in each line; hence the pattern fits them like a glove.

“Der greise Kopf” (song 14) alternates four-stress lines with three-stress lines, which fit this declamation pattern less easily. There are too few syllables in the even-numbered lines to place a foot on each quarter note of the third measure of the phrase and have a foot left for the final measure; Schubert, however, convincingly keeps the melodic motion going with untexted notes into the cadential fourth measure, as shown in (a). “Die Nebensonnen” is entirely in tetrameter with enough syllables in line 2 to fill out the third measure of the phrase, but Schubert, responding to the primary stress on the first syllable of “angesehn,” saves the whole word for the next measure, as shown in (b). He sticks to this declamation throughout, and, in fact, it suits the other affected lines well; see mm. 12–13, 22–23, 28–29. Thus in both of these songs, the overall phrase pattern (1 + 1 + 2) is still distinguishable.

Schubert’s use of this patterning seems, however, not always to be related to the relative stresses in the lines, at least not unambiguously. For example, in the first of these songs, “Wasserflut,” it is clear that line 1 has stressed substantives (Trän’, Augen) on the second and fourth feet of the line, with weaker-stressed adjectives on the first and third (manche, meinen). Youens and Johnson note these relative stresses, and both observe that Schubert accorded an extended duration and high pitch to “Trän’” to compensate for their placement on the relatively weak second beat of the triple meter.⁹ But why does Schubert set himself this hurdle to leap? Why not follow an easier path? He might have placed his rising arpeggiation figure on the upbeat and then have continued with this same pattern, aligning it as follows:

This would be a more commonplace metric declamation of this line in triple meter. It is a perfectly usable solution, adhering to the more common convention. It might even seem a more “natural” or straightforward metric setting of the lines, putting the more heavily accented or significant words/syllables on the downbeats, rather than on the second, weaker beat of a triple measure, and having to compensate for that position through higher pitch and/or dynamics.

But looking ahead, perhaps, Schubert saw and heard that in the second and fourth lines of the stanza, he would want to place the noun “Flocken” (flakes) on a strong beat, that the anthropomorphically important adjective “durstig” (thirsty) was ill-suited to an upbeat, and that the adverb “ein” (complementing “saugen”) would sound odd on the downbeat. Thus the “unnatural” placement of the syllables turns out to work very well for parts of this poem. Moreover, and perhaps more significantly, this short–long setting presents an arresting declamation pattern.

The short–long pattern and phrase structure permeates each of these five songs to varying degrees. In “Wasserflut,” though the poem’s second and fourth stanzas are set to different melody and harmony, they preserve the short–long pattern and 1 + 1 + 2 phrase structure (mm. 19–28). The form is thus ABAB. In “Irrlicht” the short–long pattern is missing in the second couplet’s first line (m. 9), but the phrase pattern is present, and the second stanza is a slight variation of the first (mm. 17–26). The last stanza is free, making the song’s form AA′B. In “Der greise Kopf,” the first stanza’s patterning and phrase structure return in stanza 3 (mm. 29–42), though they are absent in the middle of the song, creating an ABA form. In “Letzte Hoffnung,” the piano prelude does not anticipate the short–long pattern (as in songs 6, 9, 14, and 23), and the vocal line, though adhering to the short–long pattern in the first couplet, loosens its hold in the second. The second stanza is wholly free of the pattern, but in the third stanza, the pattern and phrase structure return for the first three lines (elongated with piano echoes and interludes); the final line breaks free of the pattern and, by repetition, stretches the conclusion of the song to nine measures (mm. 35–43). Finally, “Nebensonnen” adheres to the short–long gesture and four-measure phrase except for two lines of quasi-recitative in the middle. (The pattern is slightly modified in songs 14 and 23, as noted earlier.)

Arnold Feil says this pattern in “Wasserflut” “drags so slowly that it conveys the impression of exhaustion, even apathy,”¹⁰ but he does not call attention to Schubert’s use of it in other triple-meter songs. Youens points to “the second-beat durational emphases [of earlier songs] as premonitory of the hurdy-gurdy tune in the final song,”¹¹ but it seems to me there is more to this pattern than a foreshadowing of the last song. Yonatan Malin notes most of these distinct triple-meter patternings in Winterreise, commenting that “Schubert seems to have liked this schema.”¹² The object of Malin’s book is to provide a systematic categorization of the schemata by which poetic lines of varying lengths align with musical meter and rhythm in German Lieder in general, but he does not set out to study the expressive role of any particular schema in the literature.

The two remaining triple-meter songs, “Rückblick” and “Leiermann,” share a different distinctive patterning, that of declaiming two lines of the poem in even metric units with no break at line endings – a kind of “run-on” declamation. The result is so different in these two cases that one can miss the fact that they share this trait. “Rückblick” has four-foot lines, so the eight feet of two lines continue for two and two-thirds measures of 3/4 meter without stopping. The pairs of three-foot lines of “Leiermann” completely fill up two measures. The long and syllable-saturated phrasing in “Rückblick,” abetted by the pounding piano accompaniment with its syncopated echoes, lends a driven quality to this song. The similar unbroken declamation of “Leiermann,” with a melody that curls around itself and its bare accompaniment, creates a wholly different effect, one of lassitude and stasis rather than energy. Youens notes the driven quality of “Rückblick” and attributes it to the saturated declamation,¹³ but does not note that the same declamation principle – albeit with shorter lines and quite different effect – occurs in “Leiermann.”

While the vocal melody of neither of these songs has anything to do with the short–long pattern, the piano music of “Leiermann” most certainly does echo that pattern. The vocal melody by itself, on the other hand, is ambiguous; one could easily hear its meter as duple (2/4).¹⁴ I believe this ambiguity continues into the third stanza and is emphasized by the new declamation at “Wunderlicher Alter” (mm. 53–55) where, for the first time, two lines are not run together and the second line, “Soll ich mit dir geh’n?,” begins on the second beat of the second measure. It is as if the triple meter in the piano is sounded against duple meter in the voice; thus the metrical disjunction between voice and piano continues. The last two lines in the voice (mm. 56–57) finally conform unambiguously with the 3/4 meter of the piano because of the use of the same melody for both lines. The wanderer thereby answers his own question – “soll ich mit dir geh’n?” (shall I go with you?) – by agreeing in the end with the hurdy-gurdy’s meter: he and the Leiermann are finally singing and playing together.

Some Conclusions

Arnold Feil describes “Nebensonnen” as a “carefully measured walking dance, serious and slow,” resembling a sarabande.¹⁵ This slow, stately Baroque dance in triple meter stresses the first beat, but emphasizes the second beat by lengthening it. As we have seen, five of the triple-meter songs in Winterreise have these characteristics. Furthermore, sarabande phrase structure often consists of two segments of the short–long pattern followed by a flowing cadential segment twice as long. For example, J. S. Bach’s sarabandes in his French Suites 1, 4 and 6 clearly manifest this structure. This is by no means to claim that Schubert consciously modeled these songs on Bach or any other particular eighteenth-century pieces, but rather that the older sarabande may have cast its shadow over these songs.

I have no explanation for Schubert’s fondness for the sarabande-like patterning of these songs. Nor do I insist on this Baroque dance name, which I use only as an identifier of these musical characteristics. What I do insist on is that this pattern is unmistakably present in five of the triple-meter songs of Winterreise and that it bestows a distinct expressive quality on these songs and therefore on the cycle.

Here are some concluding observations. Schubert, in his encounter with the first twelve of Müller’s poems, composed four songs in triple meter: “Lindenbaum,” a “model” 3/4 setting; “Wasserflut,” one of the sarabande-like songs; “Rückblick,” one of the run-on-line settings; and “Irrlicht,” another sarabande. Then, when he set the twelve remaining poems, he seemingly balanced this earlier group with four more distinctive triple-meter songs: “Der greise Kopf,” “Letzte Hoffnung,” and “Nebensonnen” are all three sarabandes, and “Leiermann” is a second run-on setting. We don’t know how much time elapsed between Schubert’s work on the two parts of this cycle, but there is unanimous scholarly agreement on the proposition that these parts were composed with a time gap between them, despite the fact that there is no single airtight bit of evidence.¹⁶ However long or short that gap was, Schubert retained a predisposition for triple-meter songs and likely sought to find appropriate texts for such treatment in Part II.

* * * * *

One marvels at the austere beauty of Winterreise. Despite Schubert’s unavoidable rearrangement of Müller’s poems and his alteration of many textual details, the haunting spirit of Müller’s cycle is not only retained, but enhanced. While the poet transmutes the protagonist’s bitter, sad, and despairing experience into winter imagery, Schubert’s music sublimates that unrelenting verse into transcendent music. The idiosyncratic triple-meter settings of Müller’s poems make a telling contribution to the musical spell that this cycle casts, and their distinctive character is lessened neither by one’s inability to account for why Schubert employed them nor by their effect’s stubborn resistance to explanation.