The song-cycle Winterreise [Winter Journey] by Franz Schubert (1797-1828) is considered one of the composer's supreme masterpieces. The songs, settings of a 24-poem cycle by Wilhelm Mnller, were among the last works of Schubert's short life and they represent one of the peaks in his development of the lied form. The Winterreise was also the second of Schubert's song-cycles--a form he was developing and which could have reached even greater heights if he had lived. Though the impact of the work is greater when it is considered as a whole--a whole which is truly greater than the sum of its parts--the individual songs demonstrate the great height to which Schubert had brought the art of setting texts to music. At the core of this art is the depth of feeling generated by the combination of words and music. A brief examination of two of the pieces will demonstrate how Schubert crafted songs that could evoke such a response.
Even when the listener understands little German the content of the content of the poems is realized in the sounds that the voice is directed to produce by Schubert's music. The two songs discussed here are the first of the cycle, Gute Nacht [Good Night] and the last, Der Leiermann [The Organ Grinder]. In these songs the musical settings evoke the meanings of the poems with an intensity that is not just true to them, but enhances them as well.
Schubert's first full song-cycle, Die sch÷ne Mnllerin [The Fair Maid of the Mill] (1823), was also based on a cycle of poems by Mnller. This was a narrative cycle in which a story of "youthful passion blighted by tragedy" was told (Brown 94). This theme was seized on by Schubert at a time when "he must have realized that his own recently contracted syphilis was certainly grave and possibly mortal" (Brown 94). When, a few years later, Schubert discovered the first half of the Winterreise cycle it must have struck him even more forcefully because of the sense of i...