Retracing a Winter Journey: Reflections on Schubert's "Winterreise"

Author(s): Susan Youens

Reviewed work(s):
Source: 19th-Century Music, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 128-135
Published by: University of California Press
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Retracing a Winter Journey:
Reflections on Schubert's
SUSANYOUENS
The meaning of Wilhelm Miiller's Die Winter-
reise, the source for Schubert's second Miiller
cycle, has long been a matter of contention. It is
ironic that a poet who is often described as
"simple and naive" should have createda figure
so baffling that different commentators see him
variously as a whining and slightly contempt-
ible jilted lover-a dated and two-dimensional
cardboardcut-out of a bereaved Romantic,' an
atheist,2 a secular Christ-figurewhose journey
parallels the Stations of the Cross, someone
'H. Lowen-Marshall,in "Symbolism in Schubert'sWinter-
reise," Studies in Romanticism 12 (1973),607-32, says that
the cycle is "mediocre"poetry that has to do with no more
than the "downfallof a young man aftera greatdisappoint-
ment," "little more than the descriptionof a ratherweak in-
dividual pining aftera lost love" (p.630).
2SeeJacquesChailley, Le Voyaged'hiverde Schubert(Paris,
1975),originallypublished as two studies.
19th-CenturyMusic IX/2 (Fall 1985). ? by the Regents of
the University of California.
128
Winterreise
haunted by Doppelgiinger at every bend in the
road,3an alienated being who undergoesan exis-
tential death of the soul,4 and an enigmatic,
tragic creature who eventually goes mad and
dies.5 Capell complained that Miiller did little
more than sketch the outline of a mysterious
and unhappy man:
Wedonot trulyknow[him],thoughwe hearthe tale
of his soliloquyfromthe ironicalfarewell,through
3KlausGiinther Just, "Wilhelm Miillers Liederzyklen'Die
sch6ne Miillerin' und 'Die Winterreise',"Zeitschrift ffir
deutsche Philologie 83 (1964),452-71. Justfeels that the cy-
cle is full of Doppelgiingerfigures, that it is a deeply tragic
secular Passion-storyin twenty-fourstations.
4Alan P. Cottrell in The Lyrical Song Cycles of Wilhelm
Miller (ChapelHill, 1970), interpretsDie Winterreiseas a
tragictale of self-alienation,very unlike my own views, but
he arguesconvincingly fora restoredrecognitionof Miiller's
originality and worth.
SRichardCapell, The Songsof Schubert,2nd edn. (New York
and London, 1957),p. 231.
stormsof reproaches, regrets,andplaints,to the final
fanciesof theunhingedmind.Weguessat a character
moremature,moreintrospectiveandegotisticthan
the youngmiller.Butwe couldsee the miller.Here
only an outline is visible of the form that goes off
staggeringinto the snowstorm.6
But surely we know more than that after
twenty-four songs.
Until the final lines of the cycle, the wan-
derertalks only to himself or to animals and ob-
jects in the surroundinglandscape-a crow, the
river, barking dogs, the "town of inconstancy."
The creaturesand the inanimate elements func-
tion both as extensions of himself (the pathetic
fallacy is alive and well in Die Winterreise)and
as indices of his isolation-the reliance that he
cannot, until the end, place in other human be-
ings is transferredto the world of nature. Only
in the last verse of the last song does the wan-
dererapproachanother human being.
In twenty-three of the twenty-four songs,
then, in almost total solitude, the wandererre-
veals each passing question, hope, sorrow, fear,
fancy, and thought that occurs to him, subject-
ing everything he does and every emotion he ex-
periences to intense scrutiny and analysis. Over
and over again, he explains his actions to him-
self and asks "Why do I feel and act this way?"
In this respect, Die Winterreise is the forerun-
ner of those expressionist works in which a sin-
gle characterinvestigates the labyrinth of his or
her own psyche in search of self-knowledge or
escape from unbearablepain-a flight inwards,
as in Marie Pappenheim's and Schoenberg's
Erwartung.These later monodramashave their
roots in Romantic soul-searching and the nine-
teenth-century fascination with lunacy, genius,
solitary outcasts, and the inner life of creatures
in extremis. Perhaps a felt, if not consciously
observed, relationship between Miiller's work
and its twentieth-century successors has in ret-
rospect influenced the views of those who find
only insanity and despair at the end of
Winterreise.
Miiller's cycle is a monodrama,and the wan-
dererspeaks as if completely alone; he is alone,
except for us, and our presence is unknown to
him. The reader or listener feels disquietingly
like an eavesdropperwho hears at great length,
6Ibid.
unable and finally unwilling to tear himself SUSAN
away, things he was never intended to hear.One YOUENS
Schubert's
of the principal sources of the cycle's power is Winterreise
surely this uneasy sense of spying on someone's
private agony, of intruding on someone who
does not realize he is being overheard.In indi-
vidual lyric poems, this tension between out-
ward revelation and the most inward content is
often quite strong, but a succession of twenty-
four such poems, with no breakor accession to a
more "public"persona, makes of that tension a
major element.
As in later monodramas,time is measured(or
even measurable)only rarely, and then only be-
cause two or three poems arelinked in a certain
order. I am referringto the night/next-day rela-
tionship of Im Dorfe and Der stiirmische
Morgen and the late evening/night/next-day se-
quence that is perhaps inferrablefrom the last
three songs in part I, Rast, Friihlingstraum,and
Einsamkeit.7 We seldom know how much time
passes from one song to the next or even within
a single song-at the end of Der Lindenbaum
how far is the wanderer from the spot where,
hatless, he "didnot turn back"?We never know
what distance he has travelled. The journeyun-
folds in what might be called "private time,"
that of the wanderer's own ontological clock
(perhapsthis is one reason why the cycle is so
musical). The wandererdescribes what he sees,
thinks, and feels at each stage of the journey,of-
ten in great detail, but we never know his name,
or any name at all for that matter, whether his
sweetheart's or those of the towns along the
way. We must even infer what he sees written
on the signpost in Der Wegweiser. For why
should he tell himself these things, and in what
better way could Muillermake clear the inward
and intimate nature of Die Winterreise?
The constant self-questioning, the analyses
7In Miiller's final version of the poetic cycle, Rast is the
nineteenth poem, while Friihlingstraumand Einsamkeit
are paired as the twenty-first and twenty-second poems.
The publication history of both the poetic cycle and Schu-
bert's setting is complex; see Arnold Feil, Franz Schubert:
Die sch6ne Miillerin; Winterreise(Stuttgart,1975),pp. 26-
31. For some, Mfiller's final orderingis more logical and
more dramatically convincing than the orderingin op. 89,
the result of Schubert'sdiscovery of the poetic texts in two
different sources, but it is possible to arguethat Schubert's
is the better, the "right"order,and that the haphazardcir-
cumstances of composition provided the means to derive
from Mfiller'ssources the arrangementtruest to the subject.
129
 19TH of every emotion, are rooted in the wanderer's
CENTURY sense of estrangement from the world and from
MUSIC
himself. The bereavement in love representsfar
more to him than the loss of one beloved per-
son: it is confirmation of his complete isolation
from the world.8 While "the maiden spoke of
love, the mother even of marriage"("Das Miid-
chen sprach' von Liebe, / die Mutter gar von
Eh'"in Gute Nacht), the wanderercould believe
himself no longer a stranger, as he had been
when he came to the town. The first word of the
cycle, "Fremd,"is repeatedlest anyone miss its
significance.9 With the loss of her love, he be-
comes so conscious of his alienation from ev-
eryone, not just her, that he imagines himself
driven from the town like a pariah and meets
that fear with a moment of defiance: "Why
should I remain longer, until I am driven out?"
REALISM
Throughout Die Winterreise the wanderer
records what he sees with a realist's, almost a
naturalist's, exactitude. Muller had a great gift,
at its best in this cycle, for descriptions of Nat-
ure; an artist could easily paint each of the
twenty-four scenes, so vividly are they de-
scribed. It is in this constant, insistent realism
that the poet strikes one of his most original
notes. The writers that Mifller most admired,
E. T. A. Hoffmann, LudwigUhland, and Ludwig
Tieck, wrote Marchen, tales of the supernatu-
ral, fantastic, and exotic, and poetry and prose
about other-worldly realms of the imagination,
as did Miullerhimself on occasion. But Die Win-
terreise has none of the fantastic/fairy-tale ap-
paratuspopularat the time. When the wanderer
speaks to the river,the crow, the dogs, the snow,
no one expects them to reply, as animals and ob-
jects might do in Miirchen. The precisely delin-
8Capellwrites, p. 231, that "the songs in Winterreiseare
hardlylove songs" and that "something other than an amo-
rous misadventure ... might almost as well have started
this outcry of scorchedsensibility."
9Miillerwas adeptat variouspoetic formsandmeters.InDie
Winterreise,he often changes the poetic rhythm when he
wants to emphasize a particularpartof the text. One exam-
ple occurs at the beginningof Gute Nacht: the firsttwo lines
begin as if in trochaic rhythm beforeone discoversthat the
poem is actually written in iambic trimeters.
130
eated surroundings are quite unlike the misty,
indeterminate landscapes ("die weite Welt")
that stretch unendingly about the central char-
acters in works by Eichendorffand Tieck.
The wandereris an unremitting realist: of all
the aspects of Miiller's characterizationthis is
among the most important. The cycle is in fact
the tale of a realist who confronts his lack of
self-knowledge until the puzzle of his destiny is
solved and an answer is vouchsafed him. The
wanderer never attempts to transcend reality.
(One remembers Goethe, annoyed by what he
considered to be altogether too much of this
trend, saying late in his life that one day the
Germans would wake up and find that they had
done nothing for thirty years but transcend.)He
is not even religious, although his "atheism"
has at times been over-emphasized. The two
brief but significant "atheistic" statements in
the cycle:
Die Liebeliebt dasWandern--
Gotthat sie so gemacht.
Willkein GottaufErdensein,
SindwirselberG6tter!
are demonstrations that the wanderer cannot
appealto any higher power for consolation or in-
tervention on his behalf, that he lives entirely
on an earthly plane.
Even the wanderer'sdreams and waking fan-
tasies are composed of elements from the real
world; there is nothing magical, supernatural,
or surrealistic about them. The dream in
Friihlingstraum and the momentary fantasy in
Tiiuschung are much like the wanderer'smem-
ories in Riickblick: in all three, the idyllic vi-
sion consists of flowers, birdsong, and recipro-
cated love in some beautiful and friendly
setting, a field in springtime or a warm, brightly
lit house. If the dream in Friihlingstraum and
the will-o'-the-wisp's illusion in Tiauschung
seem a trifle unreal, it is because they are too
perfect. Still, neither dreaming nor awake does
the wanderer look for anything grandiose,like
mystic knowledge, art, or realms of the spirit;
he seeks only humble, human peace and love.
Furthermore,his few dreams are short-lived.
Because he is a realist, he cannot find more than
momentary escape in illusions or dreams,as he
realizes in Im Dorfe. Able to banish reality only
for brief periods, he finds the return to full
awareness of the present a wrenching experi-
ence and eventually renounces all dreams ("Ich
bin zu Ende mit allen Triiumen").They are not
worth the price he must pay. Justafterhe makes
this resolution (in Schubert'sordering),he once
again follows a will-o'-the-wisp, as he had ear-
lier in Irrlicht; but this time the illusion offers
no respite, not even for a moment.
Many of the scenes and images in Die Win-
terreise seem like evocations of Miiller's native
Dessau, a little town north of Leipzigwhere his
parents had a small home in a row of similar cot-
tages on the Steinstratie, just a few steps from
the Mulde river. In his charming memoirs Auld
Lang Syne, Mfiller's son FriedrichMax Miiller,
named for the hero of Der Freischiitz, describes
Dessau as it looked when he was growing up:
It was a curioustown, with one long streetrunning
thoughit, the Cavalierstrage,
verybroad,with pave-
ments 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 story
only; those of two or three storys were mostly build-
ings erected by the Duke of Anhalt-Dessau for his
friends and his higher officials. Many houses were
mere cottages, consisting of a groundfloor 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 ap-
proaching visitor long before he or she came within
speaking distance. All this is changednow; few peo-
ple remember the old streets, with distant lamps
swinging across to make darkness more visible at
night, and with long waterspouts frowning down on
the pavement like real gargoyles, and not frowning
only, but duringa thunderstormpouringdown buck-
ets of water on the large red and green umbrellas of
the passers-by.10
He also describes it as "a small German town in
an oasis of oak-trees where the Elbe and the
Mulde meet.""I
10F[riedrich] Max Miiller,Auld LangSyne (New York,1898),
p. 5. In the first part of his memoirs, entitled "MusicalRec-
ollections," he writes (p.4) that his musical educationbegan
very early: "As long as I rememberI could play, and I was
destined to become a musician, till I went to the University,
and Mendelssohn advised me to keep to Greek and Latin."
He also says (p.48) that he could hardlyrememberever hav-
ing seen his father,"andI came to know him chiefly through
his poetry."
"Ibid.,p. 4.
The high roofs of the one-story cottages all SUSAN
lined up in a row would be perfect perches for YOUENS
Schubert's
crows; in the winter, as they shifted about on Winterreise
the rooftops, their feet would displace lumps of
ice and snow to fall on the heads of passers-by
(Riickblick). The wanderer'sfeelings for green-
ery could have its origins in Miiller's youthful
impression of an "oasis" in the riverside plain,
and it is easy to imagine the tears in Wasserfluth
flowing down the broad Cavalierstrage in Des-
sau. The wanderer's memories in Erstarrung
and Auf dem Flusse of walking along a river-
bank might come from Miiller's memories of
boyhood strolls along the banks of the Mulde.
There is, however, no actual evidence that the
poet drew on autobiographicalmaterial for his
winter journey-certainly the characterin the
cycle is quite unlike his creator--only the intui-
tive perception of well-loved landscapesthat re-
appearin print and the knowledge that Muller
elsewhere based other works on personal expe-
rience.12
MADNESS
The realism neither disappearsnor changes
at the end. According to most interpretations,
the wanderer is either close to death or goes
mad, usually the latter; one writer even claims
to find clinical evidence of schizophreniain Der
Leiermann.'3 The wanderer's troubles are sup-
posedly apparentwhen he "hallucinates," see-
ing multiple suns in Die Nebensonnen. Solitary
madmen fascinated Romantic writers, but Miil-
ler's character in Die Winterreiseis not one of
these. In Die Nebensonnen, he merely does
what he has done through the cycle: observes
something in nature, describes it, and sees in it
an aspect of his own experience. What he sees
here is parhelia ("sun dogs" or "mock suns"),
reflected neighboring images of the sun on ei-
ther side produced by the refraction of sunlight
'2Thehero of his novella Debora is a young Germanstudent
who accompanies an elderly, wealthy Germannobleman to
Italy, just as the nineteen-year-old Miiller had travelled
with one Baron von Sack to the land "wo die Citronen
bliih'n." Debora was not published until after the author's
death, in the Uraniafiir1828, pp. 1-136.
'3Gunther Baum, "Schubert-Miiller's 'Winterreise'--neu
gesehen," Neue Zeitschrift fiir Musik 78 (1967),78-80.
131
 19TH at a certain angle through ice-crystals in the
CENTURY clouds. This is a somewhat unusual optical-at-
MUSIC
mospheric winter phenomenon, one that the
wanderer is bound to notice, but not so rarein
northern countries that it would be a mystery to
him. It is decidedly not a hallucination.
Nor does the languagechange towardthe end
of the cycle. The tone, syntax, vocabulary,and
atmosphere are no different than at the begin-
ning, when he is incontestably sane. The de-
scriptions of the landscape areclearthroughout.
In both Die Nebensonnen and Der Leiermann,
he reports what he sees without hyperbole and
almost entirely without self-pity; even when he
wishes for darknessat the end of Die Nebenson-
nen, he does so in a characteristically direct
way, saying only, "Iwould be better off in dark-
ness" ("Im Dunkeln wird mir wohler sein").
Similarly, the description of the hurdy-gurdy
player is extraordinaryin its detail and lack of
sentimentality. The scene in Der Leiermannis
almost exactly like those in Gute Nacht and Im
Dorfe-snow, ice, a nearbytown, a pack of dogs.
If he were really insane, he ought to see and
speak differently than before,in a distortedway.
Those who think the wandererbecomes mad
find the "hallucination" in Die Nebensonnen
followed by an even more pitiful sight in Der
Leiermann, a lunatic accosting a half-frozen
beggar-the final and most tragic tableau in the
series. The hurdy-gurdyplayer is undeniably a
strange creature, grinding away at this instru-
ment out beyond the village where no one can
see or hear him, in circumstances of the utmost
desolation and isolation.14 To seek his services
as an accompanist might seem like a very ec-
centric, desperate, or crazy thing to do. But the
key to the entire cycle lies in understanding
what the wanderer finds so compelling about
the elderly musician and why.
There are a surprising number of details for
14Much has been made of the fact that the old man plays a
hurdy-gurdy.According to some, the drone sounds and
mechanized action of this humble instrument, by the eigh-
teenth and nineteenth centuries a beggars' instrument,
scarcelydeservesthe designation"music";the hurdy-gurdy
is thus a propthat addsto the grimnessanddesolationof the
scene. Actually, of course, the hurdy-gurdyis only partly
mechanical. The drone strings are set into vibration by a
wooden wheel revolving in the middle of the soundboxand
turnedby a crankat its tail end; the melody stringsor chan-
terelles are operated by a keyboard mechanism or set of
stoppingrods.
132
such a short poem (this is characteristicof all of
Die Winterreise).The hurdy-gurdyplayer is old
and barefoot, his beggar'scup is empty, and he
sways to and fro on the ice. His fingers are fro-
zen, and no one listens except the wanderer,but
he plays on as best he can, ignoring the pack of
dogs that snarl at him. The wanderer,far from
being so dispirited that he withdraws entirely
into himself, observes the "odd old man" in-
tently and catalogues his every trait. This is the
first time that the wanderer notices, let alone
speaks to, another person. In Einsamkeit, he
dismisses the "bright, happy life" ("helles,
frohes Leben"), the people he sees along the
way, en masse without particularizing any of
them, but he is fascinated by the sight of the
hurdy-gurdyplayer and the sound of his music.
The likeness between the two characters
helps explain the immediate bond the wanderer
feels with the old man. Both are outcasts, "out-
side the town," poor and lonely, yet compelled
to continue their journeys; in twenty or thirty
years, the wanderer will be much like the
hurdy-gurdy player. There is neither pity nor
hope nor judgement of any kind in Miiller's
minimal, carefully chosen words, but rather a
sense of companionship, admiration, and-
clearly visible behind the dispassionate obser-
vation-wonder.
All of the descriptive details hinge about one
central point: that the old musician keeps on
playing his instrument despite the cold, the
snarling dogs, and the lack of an audience. This
is neither obsession nor insanity, but the depic-
tion of music, no matter how humble, as a
means of survival in a hostile world and a bond
between men who, until that point, were ut-
terly alone. When the wanderersees the elderly
beggarand hears his music, he realizes that the
pain of life, even such extreme misery as the old
man must bear,can be sublimated in music, and
that he, too, can make "small songs from my
great sorrows" ("Aus meinem grossen Schmer-
zen / mach ich die kleinen Lieder"),issongs ac-
companied by the "wunderlicher Alter." We
take for granted that the old man and the wan-
derer leave the cycle together. Schubert joins
the hurdy-gurdy melody in the right hand to the
S'Heinrich Heine, SamhtlicheSchriften (Munich, 1968):
Buch der Lieder,"LyrischesIntermezzo,"no. 36, p. 89.
wanderer's vocal line for the first time as the
wanderer asks, "Shall I go with you? Will you
grind away on your hurdy-gurdyto my songs?"
THE WANDERERAS MUSICIAN
Muiller's wanderer is a musician-this is
surely what he discovers written on the sign-
post in the last verse of Der Wegweiser.He does
not say exactly what it is he sees, only that the
signpost marks the road he must take "from
which no one returns" ("die noch keiner ging
zuriick"). Previous commentators have taken
what seemed to be the path of least resistance
and interpreted the road as either the route to
death or-a slight variation-individual destiny
leading to death. There is a problem with that
reading of the poem, however, which has to do
not so much with Der Wegweiseritself as with
the poem that follows, Das Wirtshaus.
By this point in the cycle, the wandererhas
said several times that he wants to die. Werethe
signpost really to death, the awe he feels at the
sight would be understandablebut would surely
be accompanied by relief, even joy, at the pros-
pect of peace. (He has equated death and "Ruh"'
ever since Der Lindenbaum, where he found
the temptation of death very hard to resist, and
he longs for that peace once again in Der Weg-
weiser.) But the wandereris not relieved by the
signpost, he is bothered by it. Logically, if the
signpost says anything about death, it must be
to withhold the promise of final rest from the
wanderer longer than he wishes. Whatever it
says, he can hardly believe it and hopes to evade
its directive until his path bringshim to a ceme-
tery ("Auf einen Totenacker / hat mich mein
Weggebracht"), where he is turned away by the
"unmerciful host," or death. The implication is
that he has been brought there for one purpose:
to confront and relinquish, finally, the death-
wish that has dominated the journey in part II,
from Der greise Kopfto Das Wirtshaus.
The signpost pertains somehow to the wan-
derer'slife; on it the wanderer sees his destiny
identified. He does not say what the destiny is
in Der Wegweiser itself, but thereafterhe twice
speaks of singing-he has never mentioned be-
fore that he sings. If his fate is to be a musician,
then certain details of the story suddenly fall
into place and acquire a completed and fully
comprehensible context.
Artists in Romantic literature are often de- SUSAN
YOUENS
picted as eccentric geniuses who go their own Schubert's
way apart from the "helles, frohes Leben" and Winterreise
are compelled to do so, no matter how great the
desire for a more normal life.16 In the second
verse of Der Wegweiser,the wandererasks him-
self what "foolish longing" ("t6richtes
Verlangen") drives him out into difficult and
deserted places, even though he has done noth-
ing culpable for which he should shun people-
not that they should avoid him, but the reverse.
He has spoken before of the "versteckte Stege"
he travels: when he does so for the first time, it
is because a will-o'-the-wisp has beckoned him
into the "tiefsten Felsengriinde"of Irrlicht, but
later, that same explanation no longer accounts
for the "inhospitable roads" he chooses ("auf
unwirthbarem Wege" in Rast). By the time of
Der Wegweiser, he is angry, mystified, and per-
haps even somewhat frightened, at a phenome-
non that he does not understand but that com-
pels him to act as he does. He bearsthe stigmata
of the Romantic artist without knowing it.
Indeed, all he wants are a Biedermeier vie
quotidienne, domestic tranquility, and love.
Now he sees a prison sentence, an edict that
condemns him to travel on in continuing mis-
ery, and solitude. So far from being the Roman-
tic artist's cloak, his loneliness has been a con-
stant grief: in Friihlingstraum, after his dream
"von einer sch6nen Maid," he laments "Nun
sitz' ich hier alleine" and asks "Wannhalt' ich
mein Liebchen im Arm?" In Einsamkeit, he
continues to mourn his isolation and solitude,
and in Tizuschunghe breaks off his fantasy after
the words "und eine liebe Seele d'rin"-he lit-
erally cannot continue. In both Tiduschungand
Die Nebensonnen, Schubert's abbreviation of
the music that returns from the beginning cor-
responds to the wanderer'sgrief-strickeninabil-
ity to go on singing; in such loneliness, he
would be better off in darkness ("Im Dunkeln
wird mir wohler sein"). Until he sees and hears
the hurdy-gurdyplayer in Der Leiermann-mu-
sic itself is the catalyst-and discovers that he is
not alone in the world, the road "fromwhich no
one returns" seems very grim indeed.
16GeorgeC. Schoolfield, The Figureof the Musician in Ger-
man Literature(ChapelHill, 1956).
133
 19TH The first time he mentions music is in Mut
CENTURY when he tries to drown out the inner voice of
MUSIC
lamentation with "brightcheery song," ending,
however, in defiance: "If there is no God on
earth / then we ourselves are gods!"Since there
is no God to dispel pain, men must somehow
create cheerfulness from their despair; only
fools lament what cannot be changed. The at-
tempt is valiant, but does not work because the
grief he feels is real. When he tries to deny the
lamentation in his heart, he denies a part of
himself and cannot sustain the enormous effort
it takes to do so; in Die Nebensonnen, he ad-
mits and expresses the grief he has tried to sup-
press in Mut. The second time he speaks of mu-
sic is at the very end of the cycle: "Willst zu
meinen Liedern / deine Leier dreh'n?"
The few reticent but importanthints that the
charactersare musicians come late in both Die
sch6ne Miillerin and Die Winterreise.At first,
they sing of their hopes and sorrows without
seeming to notice that they do so, or calling the
listener's attention to the fact. Only in Pause do
we discover that the miller-lad plays the lute
and sings, when he hangs his instrument on the
wall and says that his "heartis too full" to sing
any longer. Even before tragedystrikes he is too
overcome by emotion to transform any of his
feelings into music. He is therefore over-
whelmed by them, not because he lacks the
means with which to mitigate and mold the ef-
fects of adverse circumstance, but because he
lacks the resolution, the steel in the soul, to
make use of those means-music. The wan-
derer similarly says nothing about songs and
singing until the cycle is almost at an end, in
Mut and Der Leiermann.But he seems to under-
stand instinctively that music can be an instru-
ment of change, a way to sublimate sorrow,
even if he uses it mistakenly andfutilely at first.
The power of music to transformexperienceis a
common theme in the two Miiller-Schubertcy-
cles, but the outcomes are diametrically op-
posed. The miller, unable to sing, has no re-
sources with which to bear his grief and drowns
himself, while the wanderer, for all the misery
he endures and can doubtless expect in the fu-
ture, discovers companionship and a way to
continue the journey.
The wanderer's destiny as a musician is fore-
shadowed in Die Post, the sixth poem in Miil-
ler's final version and the midpoint of Schu-
134
bert's ordering.'7 The wanderer hears the
posthorn, the signal for the imminent arrivalof
a mail coach, and for no reason, his heart leaps
at the sound. He knows there is no letter for
him, and yet he, or ratherhis heart, is drawnir-
resistibly to the posthorn fanfares: "Was
dringst du denn so wunderlich, mein Herz?"
The only answer he can find to his own question
is that the strange sense of compulsion has its
origins in the past, a logical assumption in
Schubert's ordering since the wandererdwells
on his memories of a happier past so often in
part I. Since the coach comes from the "town
where I once had a sweetheart," the tug at his
heartstrings,he thinks, must have something to
do with her.
The supposition does not seem quite right,
though, because he asks his heart still another
question, a singularly tentative one. There is a
qualitative and quantitative differencebetween
the strength of the tug he feels at his heart and
the ratherdiffident, almost indifferent,and rhe-
torical query at the end of the poem, "I wonder
what it might be like one day to go back there
and just see how things are?"What if the wan-
derer'sheart--not yet his faculties of reasonand
understanding, but his heart, the seat of the
emotions-were respondingto the music itself?
The postillion fanfares are announcements--to
the rest of the world, of letters and travellers;to
the wanderer, of the power of music, even such
humble music as the posthorn calls or a hurdy-
gurdy.There is no answer to the question "Was
driingst du denn so wunderlich?"until the last
song.
CONCLUSION
In E. T. A. Hoffmann's works, fellow musi-
cians recognize one another instinctively and
without words. "Secret bonds" or geheime Be-
'7Capell(p.231), feels that the lightness of Die Post is out of
keeping with the tragic nature of Schubert's setting, al-
though it "does well enough in Miiller's sequence."Actu-
ally, the wanderer's steps have slowed so much from ex-
haustion and despair that Die Post serves admirably to
revive the tempo and the "gehendeBewegung"of the jour-
ney, to provide the impetus for the resumption of the jour-
ney in part II. In Miiller's ordering,the lackadaisicalrefer-
ence to the sweetheart seems oddly placed so near the
beginning (the sixth poem in the final version),where Die
Post first appears. It works much better in Schubert's
ordering.
ziehungen unite them in mutual experience.
The bond that the wanderer feels with the el-
derly beggar,evident in the detail and the lack of
pity with which he describes the old man, is
also, in a more universal sense, the unspoken
bond that springs into being between any two
people who have until that moment felt them-
selves to be alone and without hope. An early
nineteenth-century German writer like Miiller
would be likely to express such a profoundhu-
man connection in terms of music, which was
for Romantic writers the elite of all the arts. But
Die Winterreise and Schubert's op. 89 would
not have such a profoundattraction for so many
if it spoke only to a privileged few, if it lacked a
broadersignificance. Miiller uses the musician
as the highest common denominator,as the par-
ticularized (andtypically Romantic)symbol of a
universal experience-the sense of being alone
with our individual fate, "the roadI must take,"
and cut off from others. The marvelous and
hopeful statement at the end is that the wan-
derer does not remain that way. After a long
time in isolation, hating his loneliness but un-
able to be otherwise, he says to another person,
"Should I go with you?", and the moment is a
wonderful one. The cold, the poverty, and the
bleak surroundingsmake it all the more power-
ful: it is easy to reach out to another person
when one is loved, warm, and sheltered, but not
when cold, alone, and without hope.
This is not to make excessive claims for Mill-
ler as a great poet. His rhymes are often quite
poverty-stricken, and he is no doubt a little too
reticent about what it is that lies at the cross-
roads. But there is far more of profundityin the
poetry than one might suspect from the fre-
quent characterization of Miiller as inept, as a SUSAN
poetaster whose mediocrity (or worse) is re- YOUENS
Schubert's
deemed from oblivion only by Schubert's mu- Winterreise
sic. Psychologically the depiction of someone
who first mourns the past and then must relin-
quish his grief with the passage of time in order
to continue the journey/life foreshadows later
Freudiandiscoveries about the workings of the
soul-Mourning and Melancholy in verse some
seventy years earlier. (In Schubert's ordering,
the reminiscences about the past almost disap-
pear with the Fortsetzung, or part II.)The tragic
discrepancy between the wanderer'sdesire for
ordinary happiness and the hardships imposed
on him by destiny leads not to the more obvious
ending in death or insanity, but to a hard-won
accommodation with fate.
The Kiinstlerberufung,the moment an artist
first becomes aware of his calling, is a conven-
tion in Romantic prose. Although he would
have known it from Eichendorff and Tieck,
Miiller, a lesser writer, treats it with striking
originality. Here the Kiinstlerberufungis un-
sought and unwanted because it is in conflict
with the wanderer's longing for peace, happi-
ness, and love; he is reconciled to the inevitable
only when he realizes that through this me-
dium he may actually rejoin the human com-
munity ratherthan exist in perpetualexile from
it. Beforehe knows that he is an artist, he is out-
side of life and apartfrom people. When he ac-
cepts his fate, he takes the first step to forging
human bonds once again. It no longer seems in-
explicable that Schubertshould have responded
to Miiller's words with music such as this: for
universal human experience, what
other music would do? ,"
135