Schubert: Winterreise

The singer does not take the first step alone in Winterreise. The piano establishes movement before the traveller begins to speak. Hearing Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s baritone together with Gerald Moore’s playing reveals more than twenty-four variations on sadness: memory, expectation and the surrounding landscape can pull against one another. What the voice hopes for and what the music subsequently establishes need not agree.

Schubert completed the cycle in two parts during 1827, setting poems by Wilhelm Müller. This is the EMI recording made by Fischer-Dieskau and Moore in Berlin in November 1962, preserved here in Warner’s delivery carrying 1963 and 2004 rights dates. Its complete twenty-four-song programme lasts about seventy-one minutes twenty-seven seconds. It must be distinguished from their 1955 recording and the singer’s later partnerships.

The piano interprets the landscape

Trees, rivers and birds are not merely invitations to add sound effects. A recurring figure can also represent how the traveller perceives his surroundings. The opening movement of Gute Nacht and the collision of dream and waking in Frühlingstraum do different dramatic work. When the voice stops and the keyboard continues, an instrumental ending can qualify what has just been said. Accompaniment is therefore an incomplete description of Moore’s task.

Not a steady emotional fade

The later songs still include the brief force of Der stürmische Morgen and the self-assertion of Mut! In this recording they last approximately fifty-two seconds and one minute twenty-four seconds. These compact episodes interrupt the proportions of longer songs. Treating the cycle as changing memories, dreams and responses is more useful than imagining a continuous plot or an emotion that simply drains away at a fixed rate.

Another musician at the end

Der Leiermann introduces a hurdy-gurdy player. The piano’s restricted repetition suggests a different kind of continuation from the opening walk. It need not be described as a complete absence of melody or a definitive statement of the traveller’s future. The encounter leaves room for interpretation. A full uninterrupted hearing is valuable, but learning the first and last songs before tracing their connections is also a legitimate way into this large work.