The Cambridge Companion to Schubert’s Winterreise

Abstract

Indefatigable Lied scholar Susan Youens concludes the first paragraph of her 1991 book, Retracing a Winter’s Journey: Schubert’s Winterreise, with this: “more than 150 years after its birth, Schubert’s eighty-ninth published opus still compels the fascination due a masterpiece.” That enthrallment continues thirty years later, a fact made clear by The Cambridge Companion to Schubert’s Winterreise, a provocative new study edited by Marjorie W. Hirsch and Lisa Feurzeig. The book’s fourteen chapters, dedicated to Youens, are organized into five parts: the musical heritage of Schubert’s Winterreise, Wilhelm Müller’s poetic cycle Die Winterreise (Schubert’s title omits Müller’s definite article), cultural and historical contexts, Schubert’s musical response to Müller’s cycle, and reception and influence. Part I contains three chapters that provide the groundwork for the remaining eleven. Andrea Lindmayr-Brandl offers a comprehensive yet succinct summary of Schubert’s Vienna that begins with political and economic concerns before moving on to the city’s rich cultural milieu. Hirsch explores how Schubert’s song approach relies on and departs from that of his predecessors, using as an analytical lens Schubert’s two settings of Goethe’s nine-stanza poem “An den Mond” (“To the Moon,” 1815 and 1820?), D259 and D296, together with renderings of the same poem by six previous composers, the earliest from 1778, the last likely from 1815. Whereas previously, some scholars have insisted that after Schubert’s “first tentative experiments” his songs “annihilate all that precedes” (Charles Rosen, The Classical Style [New York: W. W. Norton, 1972], 454), Hirsch prudently avoids this type of unfounded assertion. Instead, she informs readers how Schubert built on existing Lied traditions while also moving beyond them. In the process she makes the important point that changes in German poetry beginning in the 1770s played a part as well. In stressing the how, her discussion is valuable not only for the light it sheds on Winterreise, but on Schubert’s songs more generally. Feurzeig’s survey of Lieder before Winterreise devoted to winter and solitary wanderers dovetails nicely with Hirsch’s chapter. In it Feurzeig ponders why Romantics were drawn to the wanderer topos, both in verse and song. Although Feurzeig adduces a number of persuasive answers, one goes unmentioned: the Enlightenment Bildungsweg—the path of self-cultivation—as formulated by, among others, Lessing, Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, a path M. H. Abrams in his still-essential Natural Supernaturalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971) calls the “circuitous journey.” As Hegel reflected in his 1807 Phänomenologie des Geistes, the individual seeking self-understanding “must travel a long way” to attain “genuine knowledge,” a journey not accomplished “like the shot from a pistol,” but “as stages on a path that has been made level with toil.” Have not Müller and Schubert inverted an eighteenth-century archetype and recast it for a new age that no longer had faith in Enlightenment thinking? The “circuitous journey” always ends with homecoming and self-recognition, making the lack of both in Schubert’s cycle all the more disconcerting. Two chapters constitute Part II. Kristina Muxfeldt focuses on the poet’s biography, Die schöne Müllerin (the first of Schubert’s two song cycles to Müller poetic cycles), the