Retracing a Winter's Journey

Franz Schubert's "Winterreise"

Susan Youens

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780801468278
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

I like these songs better than all the rest, and someday you will too, Franz Schubert told the friends who were the first to hear his song cycle, Winterreise. These lieder have always found admiring audiences, but the poetry he chose to set them to has been widely regarded as weak and trivial. In Retracing a Winter's Journey, Susan Youens looks not only at Schubert's music but at the poetry, drawn from the works of Wilhelm Müller, who once wrote in his diary, "perhaps there is a kindred spirit somewhere who will hear the tunes behind the words and give them back to me!"

Youens maintains that Müller, in depicting the wanderings of the alienated lover, produced poetry that was simple but not simple-minded, poetry that embraced simplicity as part of its meaning. In her view, Müller used the ruder folk forms to give his verse greater immediacy, to convey more powerfully the wanderer's complex inner state. Youens addresses many different aspects of Winterreise: the cultural milieu to which it belonged, the genesis of both the poetry and the music, Schubert's transformation of poetic cycle into music, the philosophical dimension of the work, and its musical structure.

PART I

THE POET AND THE COMPOSER

CHAPTER 1

Genesis and Sources

Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise, D. 911, is one of the most famous representatives of the genre, the beauty and power of its twenty-four songs widely acknowledged. Most twentieth-century writers on music, however, have scorned the poems by Wilhelm Müller which Schubert chose for the cycle, although some critics in the last century and literary scholars both then and now have believed otherwise. Song begins with a composer’s responses to a poet’s words, and Schubert responded to these words with some of his best and most intense music. Those who characterize Müller’s text as second-rate verse that happened to inspire a great composer ignore, I believe, the genuine virtues of the poetic cycle and Müller’s original use of then-current literary themes. A closer look at both the poet and his poetry reveals much to admire.

In fact, Müller conceived much of his verse as poetry for music. Shortly after his twenty-first birthday in 1815, he wrote in his diary: “I can neither play nor sing, yet when I write verses, I sing and play after all. If I could produce the melodies, my songs would be more pleasing than they are now. But courage! perhaps there is a kindred spirit somewhere who will hear the tunes behind the words and give them back to me.”1 A few years later, when the composer Bernhard Josef Klein (1793–1832) published his settings of six poems by Müller (including “Trock’ne Blumen” from Die schöne Müllerin) in 1822, the poet wrote in a letter of thanks, “For indeed my songs lead but half a life, a paper existence of black-and-white, until music breathes life into them, or at least calls it forth and awakens it if it is already dormant in them.”2 Elsewhere, he wrote that the “dormant melodies” exist, he believed, in one ideal embodiment: “Strictly speaking, for every melody there is only one text, for every text only one melody. Naturally I am speaking here of the best in each art. Mediocrity has everywhere a wide range.”3 Some would argue that Müller’s desire for musical setting was a defense against his realization that his poems were insubstantial as literary creations, but his interest both in folk song and art song is known fact. His musical friends and other composers beyond his circle of acquaintances obliged his desire for song composition,4 but Müller never knew that his true kindred spirit (gleichgestimmte Seele, a beautifully apposite term) was a younger Viennese contemporary. Perhaps strangely, there is no evidence that Müller ever encountered Schubert’s 1823 cycle Die schöne Müllerin, D. 795, or that Schubert ever heard the news of young Müller’s death on the night of 30 September 1827. Schubert had just returned from a vacation in Graz and was probably completing the last of his compositional labors on Winterreise when the poet for whom he had such a great affinity died. Ironically, Müller might not have approved entirely of Schubert’s setting, had he lived to hear it. Despite his veneration of music and his desire for musical settings of his own works, he believed that the two arts, poetry and music, should remain distinct in certain respects and not encroach upon each other’s boundaries. In particular, he disliked word-painting in music and “musical” onomatopoeia in poetry, practices he compared to painting or coloring a marble statue. Yet he approved of Klein’s songs, and Klein, although he was not a particularly adventurous composer, took pains to interpret his chosen texts in music, to attempt matching musical gesture to poetic sentiment or image. Whether Schubert’s far richer musical means would have received a similarly favorable response is something we shall never know.

Johann Ludwig Wilhelm Müller was born in 1794 in Dessau, at that time a quiet little town just north of Leipzig, and was the only surviving child of a tailor, Christian Leopold Müller (1752–1820), and his wife, Marie Leopoldine Cellarius Müller (1752–1808). His parents’ cottage at 53 Steinstraße was only a few steps from the Mulde River, along whose banks the city was founded. In his charming memoirs, Auld Lang Syne, Müller’s son, the distinguished Oxford scholar Friedrich Max Müller, named for the hero in Karl Maria von Weber’s Freischütz, describes Dessau—”a small German town in an oasis of oak trees where the Elbe and the Mulde meet”—as it looked when he was a boy:

It was a curious town, with one long street running through it, the Cavalierstraße, very broad, with pavements on each side. But the street had to be weeded from time to time, there being too little traffic to keep the grass from growing up between the chinks of the stones. The houses had generally one storey only; those of two or three storeys were mostly buildings erected by the Duke of Anhalt-Dessau for his friends and higher officials. Many houses were mere cottages, consisting of a ground floor and a high roof. Almost every house had a small mysterious looking-glass fastened outside the window in which the dwellers within could watch and discuss an approaching visitor long before he or she came within speaking distance…. All this is changed now.5

Several of the images in Die Winterreise seem like evocations of Dessau, its one-story cottages with their high peaked roofs the perfect perches for crows in winter (“Rückblick”). Wilhelm Müller’s memories of boyhood strolls on the banks of the Mulde could be one source for a wanderer who walks alongside a river in “Erstarrung” and “Auf dem Fluße” and remembers when he did so in the past. The wanderer’s evident feeling for trees and greenery could have originated in lifetime impressions of an oasis in the riverside plain, and it is possible to imagine the tears in “Wasserflut” flowing down the Cavalierstraße in Dessau. Despite his interest in Greek and Italian folk poetry, Müller believed that the best German poetry was rooted in native soil, that poets should not seek models for their own verse in Persian, Oriental, Nordic, or other cultures. He would later base his second novella, Debora, written in 1826, in part on his own experiences—the principal character is a young, headstrong German medical student named Arthur, whose childhood resembles Müller’s and who accompanies an elderly marquis to Italy, just as the twenty-three-year-old Müller traveled with a Baron von Sack to the land “wo die Citronen blüh’n” on the way to Greece, beginning in August 1817.6 The landscapes and villages of Die Winterreise suggest, in their immediacy and wealth of detail, painting from life.

The young Müller’s studies in philology, history, and literature at the University of Berlin in 1812–1813 were sponsored by Duke Leopold Friedrich of Anhalt-Dessau, who in 1820 gave the twenty-six-year-old writer a post as ducal librarian and in 1824 appointed him privy councillor (Hofrat). As such, he became eligible to take part in court society; the honor notwithstanding, Müller did not ever think highly of the aristocracy. His university stay was interrupted after one year by the War of Liberation in 1813, the Prussian war against Napoleon’s armies in retreat from the disastrous Russian campaign; on 10 February 1813 the newspapers published an appeal from the king for army volunteers, and Müller joined the ranks two weeks later. Of his wartime experiences we know only that he fought in four battles with the French at Lützen, Bautzen, Haynau, and Kulm and escaped injury. After a brief stay in Brussels, where he had an affair with a woman we know only as Thérèse, he returned to Berlin in late November 1814. The episode, according to Müller’s own report, caused his father much concern and apparently ended badly. The chastened youth a year later characterized the affair in his diary for 1815 as “a time of sensuality and freethinking that held me in its chains all too long.”7 When Müller wrote those words, he was once again in Berlin and in love, but this was an idealized love for a different sort of woman, the seventeen-year-old Luise Hensel (1798–1876). A gifted poet, she was the sister of Müller’s artist friend Wilhelm Hensel and was courted as well by the great Romantic writer Clemens Brentano and the Berlin composer Ludwig Berger. She never married, and after her conversion to Catholicism in December 1818 devoted her life to religious good works and spiritual poetry.8 Two years earlier, when Müller was recording his love for her in his diary, she was preoccupied with Brentano’s passionate suit for her hand, recurring religious crises, and grief over her elder sister’s death on 23 December 1816. Although she probably knew of Müller’s feelings for her and may even have encouraged them somewhat, she did not respond in kind.

Between January 1815 and August 1817, Müller resumed his studies at the university and then departed for two years of travel in Austria and Italy. From the evidence of the semiautobiographical novella Debora, his professors may have recommended the restless youth, unable to settle down to disciplined work in any field of study, as a traveling companion for Baron von Sack in order to remove him from his dilettante’s life in Berlin. On his return to Dessau in January 1819, he wrote the delightful Rom, Römer und Römerinnen (Rome, Roman men, and Roman women) about his experiences in that city9 and then launched a sixfold career as town and ducal librarian, teacher, editor, translator, critic, and poet. The limitations of his duties conflicted with his creative ambitions and his innate restlessness; by June 1820 he was already chafing against the boundaries of his existence: “Although my situation is certainly not unpleasant and my occupation as a librarian not in opposition to my studies, rest does not agree with me; I sit as if on burning coals and cannot feel at home,” he wrote.10 He was to feel “nicht heimisch” (not at home, by extension, not at peace) for the duration of his brief life, and wandering is the foremost theme of his prose fiction and his poetry.

Despite this restlessness, there is nothing at all in Müller’s life or the lives of those closest to him that can be linked directly to the experiences he invents in Die Winterreise; those looking for immediate bonds between life and art are doomed to disappointment. In fact, 1821, the year in which he wrote the first twelve poems of the cycle, was also the year in which he married the twenty-one-year-old Adelheid von Basedow (1800–1883), to whom he had become engaged in November of the preceding year and who shared his interest in music: she played the piano and was an accomplished contralto singer. Adelheid was the granddaughter of Johann Bernhard Basedow, an important reformer of public education in Germany, and a daughter of one of the leading families in Dessau, and the marriage, although a love match, was therefore an advantageous one for a poor tailor’s son. The couple had two children, a daughter, Auguste (1822–68), and a son, Friedrich Max (1823–1900), and from the evidence of Müller’s letters to Adelheid, the marriage was a remarkably secure and happy one. So, largely, was Müller’s entire short life. Despite his problems with the censors, a bitter feud in 1823 with his immediate superior in the Dessau school system (Müller, who was apparently an excellent if unorthodox teacher, won a fight with the pedantic Christian Friedrich Stadelmann), and the hypochondria that darkened the last year of his life, he seems to have led, on the whole, an untroubled existence, filled with friends, family, music, writing, and travel to appease his Wanderlust. To cite only a few of the most notable events, he visited Dresden in 1823 and there heard the famous bass Eduard Devrient sing Ludwig Berger’s Gesänge aus einem gesellschaftlichen Liederspiele “Die schöne Müllerin,” Op. 11, composed in late 1816–early 1817 and published in 1818. In July 1824, Adelheid Müller was one of the soloists in a festival held in Quedlinburg to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the poet Friedrich Klopstock’s birth. In 1826, Müller became director of the court theater in Dessau and in 1827 fulfilled a desire he had harbored since he was a young man: to make a “pilgrimage to the hoard of the Nibelungen”11 by traveling down the Rhine River from 31 July to 25 September. Five days after his return from the Rhine expedition he died in his sleep, according to his widow and his first biographer Gustav Schwab, of a sudden heart attack. The rumors of political skullduggery at the ducal court and poisoning have never been proven, and it is likely that he died of natural causes.

Müller was a prolific writer whose works reflect the interests of many German intellectuals and poets in the second and third decades of the century: medieval German literature, folk poetry, Italian travellore, Homeric studies, opera and drama criticism, contemporary English and German poetry, and philhellenism. Like many in post-Napoleonic Europe, Müller’s frustrated liberal ideals found a convenient vent in the cause of Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire. His allegiance to the Greek cause b...