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aware that his time was short. “I am anxious to know what you will say about them. They have
affected me more than any of my other songs.”

The cycle, Winterreise (“Winter Journey”), set to music 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller, who died
young in September 1827. The pair, although they never met, had history. In 1823, Schubert
had used another collection of Müller’s poems for his Die schöne Müllerin (“The Fair Maid of the
Mill”) cycle. It tells the story of a journeyman miller and a miller’s daughter that he meets on
his travels. He falls in love and tries to seduce her, but she has eyes for another – a hunter.
Devastated, the hero ends up dead in a brook.

The emotional journey of Die schöne Müllerin is from promise to despair. Winterreise, however,
is an entirely bleak tale, best heard, and most often performed, at this time of year, when it’s
bitter outside. Here, we begin at the end of an affair: in the first song, “Gute Nacht”, a man
equally unlucky in love leaves the house of a woman who has spurned him and ventures into
the freezing, winter night to contemplate his fate. He cuts an increasingly hopeless figure,
wandering in a landscape rich with symbols until he reaches a cemetery. Believing he is being
denied death, he renounces his faith. In the final scene, he meets a hurdy-gurdy man grinding
away on his instrument in the cold. No one is listening. No one has tossed him a coin. Dogs
snarl at his feet. “Shall I go with you?” the protagonist asks. “Will you play your hurdy-gurdy to
my songs?”

Schubert’s friends were “dumbfounded by the gloomy mood of these songs”, according to
Spaun. He picked out just one song that he liked, “Der Lindenbaum” (“The Linden Tree”), a
moment of nostalgia in a major key from the less harrowing first half of the cycle. Schubert
must have been unsettled, but said confidently: “I like these songs more than all the rest, and
you will come to like them as well.”

A year later, aged 31, Schubert was dead. His illness was sexually transmitted – syphilis, a
death sentence until treatments were discovered in the 20th century. He remains a mysterious
figure. His career in Vienna, where he was born on 31 January 1797, has been pieced together,
but he didn’t leave much in the way of diaries or letters, forcing biographers to lean heavily on
recollections from others. Many of those reminiscences were recorded 40 years after he died,
when there was an overdue fever for his music and a recognition of his place among the
immortals. In his lifetime, he was known locally as a quality songwriter for hire, promoted and
encouraged by his influential group of bohemian friends. He made a living, but never had
church or court patronage. Only one of his 15 string quartets and three of his 21 piano sonatas
– and none of his nine symphonies – were published before he died.

It’s common to think of Schubert’s music, along with Beethoven’s later works, as forming a
bridge between the classical period (Haydn, Mozart, JS Bach’s children) and the full flourishing
of romanticism (the Mendelssohns, the Schumanns, Chopin and Liszt.) There’s some truth to
that, but his influence reaches further. You hear the sharpness and slashes of terror from
his Death and the Maiden string quartet in swathes of modernist and avant-garde music. He
was also far ahead of his time in finding a synergy between words and music in the concise
three-minute format familiar to us today. “Compressed lyrical insanity” was how Robert
Schumann described Schubert’s gift for melody. In The Story of Music (2012) Howard Goodall
writes: “The distance in form, intention, mood and expression between Schubert’s songs for
voice and piano and those of, say, Adele is remarkably short, considering they are separated by
200 years.”