Wenwen Du Archives - Vancouver Recital Society

Program Notes: Ian Bostridge with Wenwen Du

Posted on May 6, 2016 by VRS

Gustave Mahler

Three Des Knaben Wunderhorn Songs

The collection of German folk poetry published between 1805 and 1808 under the title Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn) had an enormous influence on the development of German lyric poetry and song in the 19th century, and the artless simplicity of these verses was particularly attractive to Gustav Mahler. Over half of his solo songs derive from this collection, many in both chamber and orchestral versions, and some even found their way into his symphonies, the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Symphonies in particular.

Growing up in the Moravian garrison town of Jihlava, Mahler heard a great deal of military music when young and a number of his settings reflect his early fascination with this kind of music. There is, however, a tragic undertow in the military songs he chose to set from the Wunderhorn collection. Their mood is sombre, occasionally even macabre. They glint with an irony that pays tribute to the dark subtext lying beneath their childlike surface of story-telling.

Revelge (Reveille) marches to the tramping beat of a drummer wounded in battle who rouses the mortal remains of his fallen comrades to a ghastly advance against the foe. The mock-gleeful refrain of tralali, tralaley underscores the eerie ‘esprit de corpse’ of this grotesque procession.

Der Tamboursg’sell (The drummer boy) features another doomed drummer, this time marching to the gallows for the crime of desertion. Regular drum rolls mark the pace of this funeral procession while major-minor alternations in the harmony give voice to the boy’s wavering psychological state.

Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen (Where the splendid trumpets sound) is a variant of the medieval Tagelied, depicting the reluctant separation of lovers at dawn. Distant trumpet fanfares symbolize the soldier’s call of duty but the “green heath” of battle he must hasten to will be his new home, in death.

Rudi Stephan

Ich will dir singen ein Hohelied

The death of the promising 28-year-old composer-turned-soldier Rudi Stephan, victim of a sniper’s bullet on the Eastern Front, is one of the great losses that WWI inflicted on Western music. His song collection Ich will dir singen ein Hohelied (I want to sing you a high song) sets poems by Gerda von Robertus, the pseudonym of Gertrud Emily von Schlieben (1873-1939). Hohelied is the German term for the Song of Solomon and Stephan’s sultry and sensual settings attempt to express the power of love as both spiritual and erotic, in imitation of the Biblical text.

These songs, with their simple piano accompaniments, are exquisite miniatures that move forward in unhurried waves of emotion, luminously depicting in gently dissonant but firmly tonal harmonies the bittersweet yearning and imaginative wanderings of the lover’s heart.

The background strumming of the ancient lyre and the rippling of the ocean waves can be heard in the piano part of Kythere (Cythera), that describes a voyage to the perfume-scented isle of the love-goddess Venus. The pouncing potential of the lover-as-panther can be heard in the jumpy rhythms of Pantherlied (Panther song). Infinite delicacy in both the voice and piano parts of Abendfrieden (Evening peace) evokes the stillness of the twilight hours.

The mysterious exoticism of In Nachbars Garten (In the neighbours garden) paints the painful joy of witnessing love from afar. The steady pace of Glück zu Zweien counts the steps of a pair of lovers climbing ever higher to take in the vistas that their own togetherness presents to them. And finally, the unearthly stillness of Ich will dir singen ein Hohelied (I want to sing you a high song) evokes night as the geographic centre of love’s domain.

George Butterworth

A Shropshire Lad

Many a British soldier in the Great War carried with him to the front a copy of A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad and the attraction would be easy to see. The poems in this collection by Alfred Edward Housman (1859-1936), published in 1896, were written in the straightforward language of the English farmer, laid out in the simple rhythmic patterns of English folk song. They present an idealized picture of country life, used as a lens through which to view the harsh realities of war and death. The stark fatalism of these poems, studded with their nostalgic reminders of home, would have appealed to those living in the trenches in France, many of them destined to be, in Housman’s casually chilling phrase, “lads that will never be old.”

George Butterworth, a graduate of Eton, Oxford, and the Royal College of Music, was killed in the Great War. A few years before the outbreak of hostilities, he composed two sets of songs to the poems in this collection, the first of which we will hear this evening. These settings give pride of place to the voice, to which the piano offers an extremely sparse accompaniment, with many modal turns

of harmony that evoke a folk-song-like style of expression. None more so than the last and most celebrated song of the set, Is my team ploughing?, an almost speech-like rendering in dialogue of the meeting between a dead soldier’s ghost and his best friend, still alive, who is reluctant to reveal with whose sweetheart he now lays down at night.

Kurt Weill

Four Walt Whitman Settings

Kurt Weill is best known for his hit tune “Mack the Knife” from The Threepenny Opera, which he composed in collaboration with Bertold Brecht in 1928 as reworking of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera of 1728. As a successful Jewish composer of stage music he came to the attention of the Nazi regime and was forced to flee in 1933. He eventually settled in New York in 1935, where he took to his new home with relish and began to write for the Broadway stage.

Immediately after Pearl Harbour, he set to work on a contribution to the war effort: composing songs to texts by the American poet Walt Whitman. Three Whitman songs were completed in 1942. A fourth was added in 1947. All four deal with the most compelling event of Whitman’s time, the American Civil War.

Beat! Beat! Drums! is a vigorous call to battle that Weill sets as a stomping march in a modernist idiom very close to the polemical style of his earlier theatre works.

O Captain! My Captain! is Whitman’s tribute to the assassinated Abraham Lincoln. Its style is definitely Broadway, which gives this lament an all-the-more common touch as a tribute piece.

Come up from the Fields, Father tells the story of the arrival of a letter from the army to tell a family that their only son is dead. The fulsome piano accompaniment gives this tragic scene its full measure of dignity.

Dirge for Two Veterans commemorates the death of a father and son in the same battle, juxtaposing the beauty of a landscape at dusk with the sense of loss that these twin deaths brings. In painting the scene, Weill gives each sentiment a different harmonic colouring.

Benjamin Britten

Four Songs from Who Are These Children Op. 84

Scottish poet William Soutar (1898-1943) wrote poetry in Scots dialect in his poems for children, and in standard English in his more serious verse. Benjamin Britten used both kinds of poems by Soutar in his Who Are These Children, a work that jarringly contrasts the wide-eyed innocence of childhood with the destructive power of war. It is this latter power, the power to destroy, that occupies the four songs in standard English from this song cycle being presented by Mr. Bostridge and Ms. Du this evening.

Nightmare is ostensibly about the chopping down of a tree by “a dark shape,” but its symbolic resonance is much more powerful. Britten paints the tree’s dreamlike existence in the piano’s right-hand ostinato figures, the “murderer” of that dream in ominously low left-hand octaves.

Slaughter pits the voice, struggling to tell its tale, against a restless toccata- chatter of piano cuts and thrusts ranging widely over the keyboard, emblematic of the disconnect between the power to destroy and the power of bearing witness to that destruction. This is a scene in which “wise men are made dumb.”

Who are these children? paints a country scene as absurd as it is gallingly immoral: an elegant fox-hunting party rides through town on horseback during a world war that sees bombs falling on cities. Britten first paints the prancing procession of rich folk before switching his musical sympathies to the children onlookers, recently escaped from “fire and smoke,” whose uncomprehending stare sums up the poet’s indignation.

An eerie calm pervades The Children, a song that pictures the bodies of children lying in the streets after a bombing raid. The world seems unconcerned, and “the stars move to their places” as if nothing unusual had happened. Britten’s use of a rippling ostinato figure in the treble of the piano part represents the moral bewilderment that such a horrific scene would provoke in any thinking person.

Donald G. Gíslason 2016

Program Notes: Caroline Goulding & Wenwen Du

Posted on October 28, 2015 by VRS

Johann Sebastian Bach
Sonata in A major, BWV 1015

Before taking up his post as Cantor of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig in 1723, Bach served as Kapellmeister to Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Köthen (1694-1728). The young Prince was of the Calvinist persuasion, and thus had little need for church music, but he was also an avid music-lover and a competent viola da gamba player who spent lavishly on a musical establishment, his Kapelle, that Bach directed from 1717 to 1723. And so it was that during his tenure there Bach composed the majority of his works for violin, including a good half-dozen sonatas for violin and keyboard.

The four movements of the Sonata in A major are laid out in the slow-fast-slow-fast pattern of the ‘church’ sonata (sonata da chiesa), so named for its generally abstract style, considered more suitable for performance in a solemn setting than the dance-dominated ‘chamber’ sonata (sonata da camera). In this work Bach writes in the prevailing style of the trio sonata—normally featuring a lead solo instrument accompanied by clearly subordinate harmonic in-fill on the keyboard and bass reinforcement by some low-sounding instrument—but he enriches the genre by creating three independent melodic lines on two instruments: the violin and the two hands of the keyboard player.

This is evident in the warmly gracious first movement (without tempo indication) which opens with a luxuriantly long-limbed melody, deliciously ambivalent in its rhythmic pulse (is it 6/8 or 3/4?), answered immediately in the keyboard’s right hand, and then again in the left. The deliberately varied mixture of note lengths and beat patterns encourages you to forget the passage of time while gracious details such as simultaneous chains of trills in both instruments add a decorative element of Roccoco refinement to the texture.

The Allegro assai second movement is much more strongly rhythmic and features the propulsive motoric rhythms of the concerto grosso, with the keyboard often taking the lead in a constant chatter of 16ths while the violin trots blithely along commenting in a uniform pattern of 8ths. The violin’s breathless volley of rapid-fire arpeggios in the middle section is reminiscent of a Brandenburg Concerto cadenza.

Gentle pathos and lyrical introspection mark the Andante un poco third movement in the minor mode. Plaintively vocal in style, this movement is nevertheless structured with astonishing rigour. Listen for the strict two-voice canon between the violin and keyboard’s right hand.

The final Presto is in two-part form (with repeats) like a dance movement, but elaborated in a free three-voice fugue texture in each half. In this concluding movement Bach manages to gift his pleasure-loving prince with a finale that combines regal dignity and courtly decorum with the toe-tapping cheerfulness of a folk tune suitable for whistling.

Ludwig van Beethoven
Sonata in C minor, Op. 30 No. 2

In this sonata we catch Beethoven at the top of his game in a work of remarkable coherence, despite its wide variety of moods and wildly divergent styles of expression. Its outer movements, in particular, are chock-full of emotional mood swings while its inner movements simply wade ever deeper and deeper into the emotional tone they establish at their outset.

The piano is more than a full partner in the proceedings and its tone dominates the sonata as a whole. All four movements open with solo statements from the piano, and while the violin participates fully in the presentation and development of themes, it merely adds to, but never overshadows, the piano’s potential to create sonic theatre on its own terms. The piano purrs and growls in this work. It skips, it hops. By turns it whistles a merry tune and then tenderly pleads for understanding. The work of giving a place to the keyboard in the violin sonata, begun by Bach, is complete in this C minor sonata.

Of course, the key signature of C minor in Beethoven is tantamount to an in-flight announcement to fasten your seat-belt and expect turbulence. And Ludwig van B. does not disappoint. The work opens in a mood of mystery and quiet urgency with a furtive chordal motive in the piano that turns into a menacing murmur surging up from the bass at the entry of the violin. Strident, sabre-slashing chords mark the transition to the second theme that (anticlimactically) turns out to be a pert little military march, reminiscent of Non più andrai, the bass aria from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro evoking Cherubino’s future life in the army. The opera parallel continues as this theme then moves to the bass to rumble around in classic opera buffa style. Throughout the movement high drama plays out next to good-natured buffoonery, interspersed with passages of sheer rhythmic exhilaration. Beethoven clearly loves his material here and won’t let it go, plunging into an almost developmental coda of some length before the final chords of this movement.

The Adagio cantabile that follows paints a noble portrait of deep-seated emotion lacquered over, and held in check, by aristocratic restraint, its opening gesture of pleading repeated notes suggesting far more than the elegant, balanced phrases of its melody can express. Violin and piano become ever more texturally entwined as the movement progresses, with the piano eventually contributing a rich carpet of sweeping and swirling figurations beneath the cantilena of the violin above.

The Scherzo simply oozes with personality of a goofy, knuckle-headed sort that wins you over immediately. Its chirpy high spirits and galumphing rhythm, with phrases neatly cut up into bite-size pieces, bespeaks the country yokel but its playful toying with the metrical accent gives a hint of a winking intelligence lurking behind this pose, especially when the trio turns out to be in canon.

The sonata-rondo finale returns to the arena of high-tension theatre, beginning with its very first bars: a bass rumble that crescendos to explode into an exclamation point in the higher register, followed by hushed chords tiptoeing through the mid-range. It is hard not to think that in the many contrasting sections of this rondo, in its quicksilver alternations of major and minor mode, its deadpan changes of mood between high drama and skippy-dippy cheerfulness, Beethoven might well be having a laugh at the expense of sonata form itself.

Claude Debussy
Sonata in G minor

The sound of Debussy’s music confounded many of his contemporaries. How, they asked, could what he composed actually be called music? After all, it had so little of what, since the 1600s, had been the operating principle of Western music: tonal tension. Tonal tension was that feeling that certain chords wanted, needed, felt the inner urge to proceed to other chords, and that when they did so the music went from a state of tension to one of relaxation—in other words, that dissonance had resolved to consonance.

Debussy didn’t just break the established rules of harmony. He ignored them. His use of parallel streams of identically structured chords blurred the distinction between harmony and melody. His textures seemed like lush exotic gardens of sound, with each melodic phrase a flowering plant swaying in the breeze, combining with others to create an overall impression. The comparison with the emerging school of Impressionist painters was all too obvious.

And yet, for all his painterly credentials as a musical pictorialist, we find Debussy at the end of his life writing sonatas, the most rule-laden form (apart from fugue) that Western music had produced, the genre most associated with the musical Establishment. The Sonata for Violin and Piano, Debussy’s last major work, was composed in 1917 as part of a projected set of six sonatas for chamber instruments, of which only the first three were completed before his death.

It has been suggested that the title ‘sonata’ is equivalent here to ‘Untitled’ as the title of a painting. It simply refers to an absence of acknowledged subject matter, meaning that there was no ‘picture’ in mind when writing it. Others see Debussy as returning to the time of Rameau, when the term ‘sonata’ was used to mean simply a purely instrumental piece, something played rather than sung, but not necessarily a work following a prescribed formal plan.

Whatever the significance of the label, we find Debussy’s trademark sense of understatement everywhere in this work, which unfolds in a subdued atmosphere of soft to medium-soft dynamic levels, imbued nonetheless with considerable emotional warmth. Phrases tend to be short and often unpredictable, either coquettishly playful or tender and pensive.

The Allegro vivo first movement opens in a manner strikingly similar to that of the Franck Violin Sonata in A major, laying down a reflecting pool of keyboard colour over which the violin enters with a melodic motive of slowly rocking 3rds. This melodic rocking motion—in 3rds, in 4ths and then in 5ths— repeats often in the more active sections of the movement, which on the whole is nevertheless warmly melodic in tone.

The second movement tips its hat to the traditional sonata scherzo in a playful movement of wide melodic leaps and their opposite: insistent patterns of repeated notes.

The finale, Très animé, opens with a display of piano bravura, answered in the violin with the opening melody of the first movement. The breathless pace continues throughout, relieved only briefly in its middle section by the appearance of what one commentator has called a “drunken waltz”.

Béla Bartók
Rhapsody No. 1 Sz. 87

Bartók was not only a gifted composer and an accomplished pianist but also a dedicated ethnomusicologist who travelled deep into the rural outback of his native Hungary and surrounding regions to make recordings of villagers singing and playing the traditional music of their local areas. The authentic, raw-edged musical culture of turn-of-the-century peasant life in the Austro-Hungarian Empire is captured in these recordings, but it is also heard in the many works that Bartók composed based on the melodies and rhythms collected on these ethnomusicological field trips.

His first Rhapsody for Violin and Piano, composed in 1928, is one of these. Structured in two movements in the slow-fast (lassú-friss) pattern of Hungarian folk music, this work seeks to meld the disparate worlds of Eastern European village fiddling and Western European concert life. The style of violin playing is heavily influenced by the capricious improvisatory showmanship of Gypsy fiddle-playing while the piano, resonant with dense tone clusters, jangles with the metallic timbre of a rag-tag village band.

The first movement Lassú presents a strutting rising-scale melody in the Lydian mode (think: C major scale with F# instead of F) over a plodding piano part rife with drone tones, often more a sonic drum-beat than a melodic line. A middle section offers lyric contrast with a plangent lament derived from a Transylvanian folk tune, full of rhythmic ‘snaps’ in a quick short-long pattern.

The Friss is a series of dance tunes with no overall formal structure other than that of continually building up excitement, accelerando, till the end. The violin in this movement is pushed to ever greater exertions of virtuosic showmanship in pursuit of its rhapsodic goals. (Is it just me, or is the first tune not a dead ringer for the Shaker tune “Simple Gifts”?)

Donald G. Gíslason 2015

Program notes: Ian Bostridge & Wenwen Du

Posted on April 13, 2015 by VRS

Franz Schubert
Winterreise

It is a fact of musical life that there are commonly accepted ‘right’ ways (and even more ‘wrong’ ways) of performing the great works of past. These works arrive on our music stands embedded with notions of ‘stylistic correctness’ that guide our first attempts at interpretation, serving the same function as the lines in a colouring book beyond which aspiring daycare Dürers and kindergarten Caravaggios, crayons in hand, are admonished not to stray.

In the musical world such stylistic guidelines have massive inertia, acquired through the respect that a long performing tradition grants, and so shifting them is not a task for dull minds. And yet, it has been done. Glenn Gould sent powder flying from the wigs of the Baroque establishment with his startling new vision of how Bach should be performed. More recently, fortepianist Robert Levin has attempted to liberate Mozart from the plaster cast of ‘elegant prettiness’ in which he believes this composer has been mummified since the Romantic era.

And now something similar may also be happening to Schubert.

Schubert has always been thought of as a ‘nice’ composer, the sort that you could bring home to meet your mother and tell her you were taking up with, without awakening the kind of worries that an interest in, say, late Scriabin might provoke in the mind of a fretful parent. No, rosy-cheeked Schubert, the composer of blithe and radiant mood, has always remained a kind of Julie Andrews avant la lettre, whistling a happy tune in the face of the challenging circumstances of his life. Was there a care in the world that the soothing balm of the G flat Impromptu could not dissipate? A reversal of fortune that the Ave Maria could not banish from present thought? Generations of Schubert venerators have thought not.

Yet if ever there were a work to challenge the view of Schubert as a composer of buoyant good spirits, light but not deep, it is his song cycle Winterreise, which, with its themes of lost love and the imminent approach of death, would be hard to mistake for a pep talk from a Rogers & Hammerstein musical. Its dark psychological probings and often sombre tone truly shocked the group of Viennese friends before whom Schubert first performed these schauerliche Lieder (horrifying songs), as he called them. And it still has the power to shock us today.

Few musicians have taken their interpretive flashlights into its dark corners quite so fearlessly as Ian Bostridge has done. He stands apart from the crowd of Winterreise performers for the degree of modern anxiety and psychological urgency that he pulls from the score, an approach that has even caused his interpretation to be called ‘expressionist’.

Bostridge performs these songs in heightened psychological relief, as it were, and this approach has much to recommend it, for while simple melodies in balanced four-bar phrases are not lacking in this collection, more striking and memorable by far are the dramatic declamatory monologues that approach in psychological intensity the Sprechstimme of Pierrot Lunaire.

It should not be surprising, then, that shades of Samuel Beckett, Arnold Schoenberg and other modernist innovators haunt Bostridge’s interpretation of this work. He brings notes of biting sarcasm and palpable anger to the score, as well as an occasionally rasping quality of voice not typically found in ‘art song’. And by so doing, he expands our idea of the range of real, intense, lived emotions which this composer was capable of expressing.

Those wishing to gain a deeper understanding of this work through Ian Bostridge’s extensive historical research into its origins and meaning, may wish to consult his newly published tome entitled Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession (Faber & Faber, 2015).

Conceived as a journey into the cold of winter, Schubert’s Winterreise is a musical setting of poems selected from those published in 1823 and 1824 by German Romantic poet Wilhelm Müller under the title Seventy-Seven Poems from the Posthumous Papers of a Travelling Horn-Player. The narrative thread is sketchy, at best, resembling more a slide show than a plot, since all the important action has taken place before the narration begins.

We know that the singer’s journey is prompted by a love affair gone wrong but one of the more vexing questions bedevilling this musical slide show is that of the singer’s status within the house from which he announces his departure as the cycle opens. He leaves in the dead of night, while everyone else is sleeping. What, enquiring minds will ask, was he doing in the family home of his beloved so late at night? Here Ian Bostridge steps forward with a brilliant suggestion that finds much resonance in the social customs of the time: our protagonist is a private live-in tutor of low economic status who had developed feelings for, and perhaps even an understanding with, his young student. (Schubert had at one time been employed as just such a live-in tutor.) Marriage, we learn from the text of the second song, was a live possibility until the young woman’s mother switched her allegiance to a wealthier potential son-in-law.

In the course of the work, the narrator-singer is heard in conversation with his own heart, by turns reflective, questioning, ironic, and finally resigned. In this speculative frame of mind, he drifts fluidly between the world of his dreams and the bitter reality he faces. Despairing and alone with his thoughts, he travels through dark emotional territory, traversing a wide range of village and country settings before finally encountering the forlorn organ-frinder at the end of his journey, symbolic of the death that awaits him. The poems from Wilhelm Müller’s collection provide apt imagery for such a bleak journey, with their recurring themes of loneliness and isolation, watchwords of the emerging Romantic movement in art.

This work was composed in two separate parts in 1827, the year before Schubert’s death, making the terminal illness from which he was suffering one obvious point of reference. The cast of characters with whom the narrator interacts are elements of the natural landscape (sun, wind, trees and leaves, flowers, rivers and snow, crows and ravens), elements that form symbolic company for his journey. Schubert’s achievement in setting these poems is to give musical life to these images, not only in the contours of the singer’s melody, but especially in the pictorial vividness of the piano writing, in a score that is both richly allusive and unusually austere.

Gute Nacht (Good Night)

Our traveller’s grim journey begins at an even walking pace, punctuated by recurring sudden off-beat accents in the piano, emblematic of his inner turmoil. The narration drifts between his present unhappy state (in the minor mode) and happier thoughts (in the major). The poetic theme tying the song cycle together, alienation from emotional fulfillment and earthly existence, is summarized in the very first line: “A stranger I came, a stranger I depart.”

Die Wetterfahne (The weather-vane)

The piano imitates a weather-vane spinning atop his beloved’s house as the singer wonders about those inside. Do their affections also change with the wind? The musical texture is brilliantly evocative, with unisons between piano and singer making you feel the bitter chill in the air and trills evoking the wind blowing the weather-vane around on its spindle.

Gefrorne Tränen (Frozen tears)

This song mixes an eeriness and daintiness, anger and irony. Against a steady backdrop of drip-drip sounds
in the piano, often punctuated by a sudden sforzando accent, the singer asks how his tears can have frozen to his cheek so soon. They were hot enough to melt ice when they poured from his heart. Alternating major & minor harmonies evoke both the warmth of feeling and the chill in the air of this scene.

Erstarrung (Numbness)

Stunned by the loss of his love, he searches frantically for any piece of green grass beneath the snow to remind him of happier times. But all is dead around, like his frozen heart. In this strange take on the classic Petrarchan figures of fire and ice, the agitated piano accompaniment portrays the protagonist’s raging inner turmoil.

Der Lindenbaum (The linden tree)

We hear the first intimation of death in this song. As a chill wind blows through the fluttering leaves evoked by the piano, he passes by a tree into which he once carved words of love. Once the emblem of his happiness, it now offers him eternal rest beneath its branches. Bostridge has pointed out that the linden tree was popular meeting place for townsfolk, giving this song a resonance of German nationalism. It is not surprising, then, that this simple tuneful melody lives on outside of Schubert’s song cycle as the well-known German folksong, Am Brunnen vor dem Tore.

Wasserflut (Flood)

In this eerily calm, almost stately song, the protagonist muses on how the snow will absorb his tears, then thaw in the spring and flow with them into the stream. The flow of this stream will feel their warmth once again as it passes his beloved’s house. Here we find a classic example of the ‘pathetic fallacy’ in Romantic poetry, in which Nature is imagined as reflecting and experiencing human emotions.

Auf Dem Flusse (On the river)

The strange tiptoe pace of this song gives it an aura of mystery, or perhaps merely tentativeness. The ice covering the river, on which he has carved the story of his love affair, is like his heart: it rages with a torrent beneath. Changes from minor to major and back again are chilling, and near the end, the piano pulses with signs of his inner torment.

Rückblick (A backward glance)

Pursued by crows as he breathlessly escapes, the wanderer casts a nostalgic glance back at the town he is leaving, once so pleasant to his memory. And looking back, he still longs to stand in front of her house once again. Like many of the songs in this cycle, this one is divided clearly into major- and minor-mode sections.

Irrlicht (Will-o’-the-wisp)

The flickering light of a will-o’-the-wisp, imitated in the fast repeated notes in the piano, leads him astray into
a mountain chasm. He has no worries, though, for as rivers lead to the sea, so human miseries, like will-o’-the- wisp, are but a game, all leading to the grave.

Rast (Rest)

A drowsy opening piano introduction finds him pausing from the fatigue of his journey. He shelters in a little hut, but this bodily respite from the cold and wind only allows him to feel more keenly the burning sting of jealousy in his heart. The concentration of thought that has overtaken the singer is conveyed in an often speech-like, un-’melodic’ vocal line.

Frühlingstraum (Dream of Spring)

In one of the happiest of Schubertian melodies, we find our protagonist lost in a dream of springtime, then awakened by the rooster’s call and the shrieking of crows. Drifting between a dream state and harsh reality, he longs to feel once again the warmth of love. The piano score paints in turn the sudden shrieks of birds and the torpor of his drowsy eyelids. The change of mode from major to minor at the very end conveys his hopelessness. When will the ice-flowers in the window turn green? When will he hold her in his arms? The answer to both questions is: never.

Einsamkeit (Loneliness)

The slow trudging pace of the piano’s opening paints his despair as he travels on his way, lonely as the cloud drifting overhead above the tops of the trees. The stillness in the air, the brightness of the scene, are no help to his pain. When storms raged he was less miserable than this.

Die Post (The mail-coach)

The gallop of horses’ hooves and the triadic call of the post-horn sets the second half of the song cycle in motion as our wanderer’s heart leaps with the arrival of the mail-coach. Does it bring a letter from her? The upbeat tone of this song is an ironic set-up for emotional travails to follow.

Der Greise Kopf (The hoary head)

Eeriness returns in a song shrink-wrapped around the text rather than arranged in stanzas. The frost on his head has made him look like an old man, a welcome thought. Then horror sets in as he realizes he is still young, with so very far yet to travel to the grave. The sparseness of the piano part creates a chilling stillness as sonic backdrop to these dark thoughts.

Die Krähe (The crow)

Circling overhead, a crow has been following the wanderer. Is it waiting to feast on his carcass? Will this crow, unlike his beloved, stay with him till he dies? The piano, brilliantly imitating the circling path of the crow, twinkles and wafts above the singer, who stoops very low in his range, creating a pictorial image in music of the two figures, one in the sky, the other walking below on the earth.

Letzte Hoffnung (Last hope)

The traveller identifies with a lone leaf hanging on a barren tree, waiting to fall. If it falls, so too do his hopes fall to their grave. The piano paints a vivid picture of leaves falling all around him. There is so little rapport between the piano and the voice, the piano seems so convincingly exterior to the singer’s concerns, that one thinks of the tone and texture of Pierrot Lunaire.

Im Dorfe (In the village)

As he passes through a village, dogs growl at him from the lower regions of the piano texture, rattling their chains. Everyone is in their beds, dreaming. Why should he stay with these dreamers, when his own dreams are all over?

Der Stürmische Morgen (The stormy morning)

With the courage of desperation, the traveller faces an early morning storm that tears the heavens apart. Raging in the cold of winter, it is the very image of his own heart. Unisons between piano and singer again evoke the blowing of the wind and bitter chill in the air.

Täuschung (Delusion)

He sees a light dancing in the distance, which might be a warm house with a loving soul inside. In the dream world he inhabits, even a delusion brings him some comfort.

Der Wegweiser (The signpost)

Avoiding the busy byways, he heads for wild and desolate places, ignoring every signpost but one: the one leading him to a place from which no one returns. Here is another foreboding of approaching death: the path indicated to him is one “from which no one returned.”

Das Wirtshaus (The inn)

Liturgical solemnity, combined with a grim determination, pervades the scene as the traveller stops at a cemetery filled with garland-bedecked graves that beckon him like a welcoming inn. All its rooms, however, are taken and he is turned away, so he resolutely resigns himself to continue on his journey.

Mut (Courage!)

A plucky spirit overtakes him, as he dispels defeatism to face wind and weather, feeling like a God on earth. Quick changes between major and minor tonalities from phrase to phrase embody the difficulties he faces and the courage he uses to face them.

Die Nebensonnen (Phantom suns)

He sees three suns in the sky, and stares at them. He, too, had three suns once, but having lost the two he cherished most (her eyes), he now has only one, and he wishes that would go dark, too.

Der Leiermann (The organ grinder)

A drone in the piano announces the forlorn figure of an old organ grinder playing with numb fingers, barefoot in the cold, his begging plate lying empty as dogs growl at him. This is the only human being the traveller meets on his winter journey. Shall he go with this strange man? Will the organ grinder play his songs? The symbolic resonance of this final scene is quietly shattering.

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