Ian Bostridge - Schuberts Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2015 by Ian Bostridge

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Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: David Higham Associates Ltd.: Excerpt from Summertime by J. M. Coetzee, copyright 2009 by J. M. Coetzee (Vintage, London, 2010). Reprinted by permission of David Higham Associates Ltd., London. The Estate of Peter Porter: Excerpt from Lament Addressed to the People [Klage an das Volk (Schubert)] from Collected Poems Volume 2 by Peter Porter, translation copyright 1998 by Peter Porter. Reprinted by permission of Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd., London, administering on behalf of the authors estate. Harvard University Press: Those dying then from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, Mass., The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), copyright 1951, 1955 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College, copyright renewed 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright 1914, 1918, 1919, 1924, 1929, 1930, 1932, 1935, 1937, 1942 by Martha Dickinson Bianchi. Copyright 1952, 1958, 1963, 1965 by Mary L. Hampson. Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College.. Liveright Publishing Corporation: 1(a from Complete Poems: 19041962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage, copyright 1958, 1986, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust. Reprinted by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bostridge, Ian, author.
Schuberts winter journey : anatomy of an obsession / Ian Bostridge.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-30796163-1 (hardcover)ISBN 978-0-307-96164-8 (eBook)
1. Schubert, Franz, 17971828. Winterreise. I. Title.
ML410.S3B57 2015
782.47dc23 2014020088

v3.1

Der schnen Mllerin gewidmet

With a heart filled with endless love for those who scorned me, I wandered far away. For many and many a year I sang songs. Whenever I tried to sing of love, it turned to pain. And again, when I tried to sing of pain, it turned to love.

SCHUBERT , My Dream, manuscript, July 3, 1822

WinterreiseWinter Journeya cycle of twenty-four songs for voice and piano, was composed by Franz Schubert towards the end of his short life. He died in Vienna in 1828 aged only thirty-one.

Schubert was renowned, even in his own lifetime, as a song composer of matchless fecundity and a master of seductive melody; the Winter Journey apparently discombobulated his friends. One of the closest of these, Joseph von Spaun, remembered thirty years later how the cycle had been received by the Schubert circle:

For some time Schubert appeared very upset and melancholy. When I asked him what was troubling him, he would only say, Soon you will hear and understand. One day he said to me, Come over to Schobers today, and I will sing you a cycle of horrifying songs. I am anxious to know what you will say about them. They have cost me more effort than any of my other songs. So he sang the entire Winter Journey through to us in a voice full of emotion. We were utterly dumbfounded by the mournful, gloomy tone of these songs, and Schober said that only one, The Linden Tree, had appealed to him. To this Schubert replied, I like these songs more than all the rest, and you will come to like them as well.

Another close friend, with whom Schubert had shared digs some years before, was Johann Mayrhofer, government official and poet (Schubert set some forty-seven of his poems to music). For Mayrhofer, Winter Journey was an expression of personal trauma:

He had been long and seriously ill [with the syphilis he had first contracted towards the end of 1822], had gone through disheartening experiences, and life had shed its rosy colour; winter had come for him. The poets irony, rooted in despair, appealed to him: he expressed it in cutting tones.

Spaun confounded even more dramatically the personal and the aesthetic in his account of the cycles genesis. There is no doubt in my mind, he wrote, that the state of excitement in which he wrote his most beautiful songs, and especially his Winter Journey, contributed to his early death.

There is something profoundly mythologising about these accounts, especially Spauns, which has something of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane about itthe dejection, the friends who miss the point, the sense of a mystery that will only be understood after the death of its progenitor. As against the persistent legend of poor Schubertunappreciated, unloved, unsuccessful in his own lifetimeit is worth remembering that he earned well from his music, was welcomed into the salons of the well-connected (if not the aristocracy), and earned critical plaudits as well as his fair share of brickbats. Schubert was probably the first great composer to operate as a freelancer outside the security and restriction of a church position or noble patronage and, allowing for a certain youthful fecklessness, he did well for himself. His music was second only to Rossinis for its popularity on Viennese programmes; it was played by most of the great instrumentalists of the day; and his fees were substantial. Winter Journey itself did not fall still-born from the press. Here is one contemporary review, from the Theaterzeitung of March 29, 1828:

Schuberts mind shows a bold sweep everywhere, whereby he carries everyone away with him who approaches, and he takes them through the immeasurable depth of the human heart into the far distance, where premonitions of the infinite dawn upon them longingly in a rosy radiance, but where at the same time the shuddering bliss of an inexpressible pre-sentiment is accompanied by the gentle pain of the constraining present which hems in the boundaries of human existence.