Les Journées Messiaen - Franz Schubert: Winterreise - The Winter Journey

Die Winterreise, composed in 1827 by Franz Schubert to poems by Wilhelm Müller, is the epitome of Romanticism in music, an absolute expression of "Sehnsucht", existential nostalgia. Arguably Franz Schubert's finest collection of Lieder, it surpasses, in density and drama, anything he produced in the genre. Müller's poems correspond perfectly to the composer's state of mind at се time: discouraged, exhausted by illness and the isolation of the last weeks of his life, he recognized himself in the narrator as soon as he discovered the poems. Travel and solitude are the main themes, and what belongs to happiness appears only as memory and illusion. In this cycle, one of the most extensive and poignant of the Romantic period, Schubert evokes the wanderings of a traveler who flees the city, crosses a snowy landscape, meets a hurdy-gurdy player, a weather vane, a crow, stops at an inn, remembers his loves, waits for a letter, evokes a lost lime tree. Schubert was thirty-one when he completed Winterreise in the last weeks of his life, staying with his brother in a small room in Kettenbrückengasse 6. It was here, ill and feeling his end approaching, that he wrote the second part of the cycle, completing it a few days before his death on November 19, 1828. A few streets away, at Mariahilfstrasse 43, piano maker Cyrill Demian was perfecting his new invention: a small bellows instrument called an accordion, for which he registered a patent a few weeks later on May 6, 1829... and which would enjoy worldwide success until the development of the concert accordion. Did Schubert hear the first sounds of this instrument, its haunting chords, as he concluded his famous "Leiermann", the hurdy-gurdy player? If we can't prove it, the accordion, a child of Viennese Romanticism, brings its moving poetry and depth to the Winter Journey cycle, and becomes the singer/narrator's accomplice, marrying the vocal line or transfiguring orchestral colors.