“Come over to Schober’s today, and I will sing you a cycle of terrifying songs,” Franz Schubert said to his friend Joseph von Spaun in late 1827. Schubert, suffering from a fatal illness, was aware that his time was short. “I am anxious to know what you will say about them. They have affected me more than any of my other songs.”
The cycle, Winterreise (“Winter Journey”), set to music 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller, who died young in September 1827. The pair, although they never met, had history. In 1823, Schubert had used another collection of Müller’s poems for his Die schöne Müllerin (“The Fair Maid of the Mill”) cycle. It tells the story of a journeyman miller and a miller’s daughter that he meets on his travels. He falls in love and tries to seduce her, but she has eyes for another – a hunter. Devastated, the hero ends up dead in a brook.
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