Page 189 - Winterreise Coverage Book, 2021 - 22

see what you say. They attacked me more than they ever did with other
songs.' He now sang us with a moving voice through the whole 'winter

journey'. We were amazed by the gloomy mood of these songs, and Schober

finally said that he liked only one song underneath, namely the

'Lindenbaum'. Schubert said: 'I like these unfortunately more than anyone
else, and you will also like them.'"

Schubert's friends may have been, as it were, overwhelmed at first listening.

They were used to a completely different Schubert, melancholically
occasionally, certainly, but in the depths of a conciliatory tone. What they

now heard – and this also applied to much of Beethoven's late work –

accompanied the traditional Viennese audience with the disparaging word
"bizarre" – the ear was simply not prepared for such expansive and

anticipatory experiments of musical art.

For us, on the other hand, for posterity, the "Winter Journey" is nothing

less than the Holy Grail of the song repertoire, a cycle that has lost nothing
of its mysterious radiance and magnetic power in the 200 years since its

creation.

On the contrary: the passage of time that we have been suffering through

for years, the unsteady of history, a world that has become thoroughly

unreliable, they give the work its increasing relevance: war is knocking on

the door again, the refugee is once again becoming the cipher of the
present, a two-year wave of infection has alienated people from each other,

climate change is melting our certainties of creation. What could be more

modern than a gruesome tour de force called "Winterreise", a tumble

through the aberrations of time?