Wintry passions

Schubert’s Winter Journey: An Anatomy of an Obsession. By Ian Bostridge. Knopf; 544 pages; $29. Faber and Faber; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

I came a stranger
I depart a stranger
May was good to me
With many a garland of flowers.
The girl, she talked of love,
The mother even of marriage—
Now the world is so gloomy,
The way is shrouded in snow.

The opening of “Winterreise” sets the tone. This is one of Franz Schubert’s most famous compositions: a cycle of 24 songs (Lieder) for voice and piano, written in 1827-28. It is set to a collection of poems by Wilhelm Müller, a contemporary of Schubert’s, about a winter journey undertaken by an enigmatic wanderer. The mood is mostly dark, though the hero also reminisces about happier times, especially in “The Linden Tree”, which subsequently became a much-loved folk song.

The desolate, freezing weather (at a time when continental European winters were much colder than they are now) reflects the wanderer’s state of mind. With a love affair apparently behind him, he hides from other people and sees rejection and forebodings of death everywhere. But is he just an isolated misfit, or a symbol of a more widely felt sense of alienation?

Ian Bostridge, one of Britain’s foremost tenors, has performed “Winterreise” more than 100 times. He knows every last nuance of the work and has given it a great deal of thought. His beautifully produced book offers many new insights that will inform the enjoyment of both old admirers and newcomers to the music. Each of the songs has a chapter devoted to it, which at first sounds like a device that might quickly pall; but, like Scheherazade in “1001 Nights”, Mr Bostridge is a good storyteller and keeps the reader in constant suspense.

A man of deep intellectual curiosity, he offers explanations of many of the strange sights the wanderer encounters on his journey, from the design of snowflakes to the physics of the will-o’-the-wisp and from the special qualities of the crow family to the story of the waltzing craze in the Vienna of Schubert’s day. More important, as a historian who came late to his singing career (his PhD thesis was on witchcraft c. 1650-1750), Mr Bostridge has an acute understanding of the historical context of the time and how it may have influenced Schubert’s reading of the poems.

The composer was about 30 when he wrote “Winterreise”, and enjoying a prolific and successful career. He was one of a new breed of musicians who were able to live on their talent without the need to find a job at court or in the church. That allowed him a measure of independence, but also involved some financial ups and downs. He had a large circle of friends, mostly artists, writers and thinkers, with whom he liked to engage in what became known as “Schubertiads”, lengthy drinking sessions accompanied by lively intellectual discussions. In Metternich’s post-Napoleonic Austria such intellectual exchanges were not without their dangers. Censors were everywhere, trying to keep down political and religious dissent.

Schubert understood the coded messages in many of Müller’s poems and reflected them in his music, which required some careful judgments. The frozen landscape mirrored a repressive political regime. Even the wanderer’s seeking refuge in a humble charcoal-burner’s hut was fraught with meaning: it was a hint at the carbonari, an Italian secret society which Austria’s Habsburg rulers suspected of subversion.

On a personal level, the composer was deeply affected by a new marriage law the regime introduced in 1815, requiring men to take a means test before they were permitted to wed. He applied, but as a freelance worker failed the test. He subsequently contracted syphilis, probably caught from a prostitute, which caused him much suffering and killed him at just 31. Some authorities take the view that he may have been gay. In any event, he never married. All that snow and ice in “Winterreise” might also be read as a symbol of repressed sexuality, Mr Bostridge suggests.

Certainly the poems and their musical settings reflect the Romantic obsession with death. On his journey through the wintry landscape the wanderer is often tempted to rest, and thus die from cold. A signpost invites him down a path from which no one has ever returned. He meets a crow which already seems to look upon him as carrion. Later he stumbles upon a cemetery which in his benighted state he sees as an inn welcoming guests with green wreaths, but it has no room for him. In the last song he comes across an old hurdy-gurdy player, grinding away at his instrument without anyone listening, and considers joining forces with him.

When Schubert was working on “Winterreise”, he sang it to a group of friends and accompanied himself on a small piano. At first hearing, his friends were sceptical. Now famous singers perform the work in large concert halls the world over, accompanied by well-known pianists playing very grand instruments. The context is quite different, yet the Lieder still seem to hit home with today’s audiences.

“Winterreise” is a long work; it takes 70 minutes or so to perform. Mr Bostridge explains that when it has ended, with the hurdy-gurdy man’s plain and oddly inconclusive song, the audience usually sits in stunned silence for some time. That is just what happened when he sang it at the Barbican in London this week.