Page 76 - Winterreise Coverage Book, 2021 - 22

Schubert, who never married, was outed in 1989 by Maynard Solomon, an American
musicologist. But no one can say for sure whether he was gay, straight, or bisexual. Most likely,
he was similar to the miller in Die schöne Müllerin – he’d fall hard for women, but was hopeless
with them. A short man at just over 5ft, he worked prolifically in the mornings – his output of
more than 1,000 works in his short life could be unrivalled – then stepped out in the
afternoons, to see friends and drink. At times he suffered from dark moods and a short temper.
To the annoyance of traditionalists, suspicious of such speculation, it has become voguish to
say that he may have been bipolar.

Friends described opposite impulses in Schubert’s personality. Johann Mayrhofer, a poet and
librettist, defined it as “tenderness and coarseness, sensuality and candour, sociability and
melancholy”. More dramatically Joseph Kenner, another acquaintance, said long after
Schubert’s death: “His body, strong as it was, succumbed to the cleavage in his souls, as I would
put it, of which one pressed heaven-wards and the other bathed in slime. Anyone who knew
Schubert knows how he was made of two natures, foreign to each other; how powerful the
craving for pleasure dragged his soul down to the slough of moral degradation.”

[See also: Stravinsky the shapeshifter]

The most austere works, such as Winterreise, Death and the Maiden, his Sonata in A
Minor and Quintet in C Major, were written after Schubert knew he was ill. But to suggest that
bleakness overtook him as death approached is to oversimplify an intensely complex man.
There is pathos in Schubert’s work from the beginning and, as his biographer Elizabeth
Norman McKay points out, “if his social activities are anything to go by, Schubert was in no way
depressed or sombre when he composed the first 12 Winterreise songs”. That was February
1827. By the time he wrote the second set in October, however, something in his mood had
changed. He was reported to be melancholy and distant, and you can hear this state of mind in
his songs. As the protagonist slips into something of an existential crisis – less immersed in his
physical surroundings and caught more in a forest of the mind – so the space increases
between the piano and vocal lines. Come the meeting at the end with the hurdy-gurdy man, the
piano provides the barest of accompaniments.

It’s tempting to imagine Schubert – a loser in love and a victim of fate – seeing himself in the
desperate hero of Winterreise. Perhaps he did, but he was careful to create distance in the work
in other ways. In his book Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession (2014), the tenor
Ian Bostridge notes that Schubert tampered with the order of Müller’s poems, for reasons of
musical sense and dramatic effect, and also abbreviated the title by removing the definite
article, so Die Winterreise became Winterreise. “He made it more abstract, less definite, more
open,” Bostridge writes. “Anyone can own this journey.”

Who is this man? Why was he rejected? A universal underdog is born, in a work that meditates
on all of our disappointments and retains the power to entrance and chill.

“Winterreise” will be performed at Wigmore Hall, London W1, featuring Benjamin Appl, and on
18 February and as part of the Leeds International Concert Season on 27 February