“Come to Schober's today and I will play you a cycle of terrifying songs; they have affected me more than has ever been the case with any other songs.” He then, with a voice full of feeling, sang the entire Winterreise for us. We were altogether dumbfounded by the somber mood of these songs, and Schober said that one song only, “Der Lindenbaum,” had pleased him. Thereupon Schubert leaped up and replied: “These songs please me more than all the rest, and in time they will please you as well.”
– Joseph Spaun

Winterreise was composed late in Schubert’s short life when his health was in serious decline when, according to his friend Mayrhofer, “life had lost its rosiness and winter was upon him.”

It might seem odd to program Winterreise at this time of year. However, the early days of spring can be unsettling—not fully one season or the other. Müller’s poetry is full of powerful and unsettling opposition: cold snowflakes and hot misery; fiery soles of the feet on ice- and snow-covered pathways; the dreamer mocked for seeing blooms in winter; hot tears melting ice; turbulent waters beneath hard, frozen surfaces; and pleasant dreams and harsh, cold reality—the examples are many. This allegorical journey of the outcast searching for belonging, for rest and comfort, and ultimately for the release of death, can teach each of us something about our own path, the signs we encounter along the way, and our sense of relating to others and to the world around us.

Schubert discovered Müller’s poetry in 1821, in the anthology “Seventy-seven Poems from the Posthumous Papers of a Traveling Horn Player.” In this publication, Schubert found “Die schöne Müllerin,” which he set in 1823. He was later introduced to the poetry of Winterreise in the journal Urania für 1823, in which the poet published the first twelve poems. In February 1827, Schubert set these poems in the order they were published.  When Schubert finally discovered the complete set of twenty-four poems, he completed the cycle in October 1827, a little more than a year before his death. (Here is a comparison of the two orderings.) Although composer and poet were almost exact contemporaries, there is no evidence the two ever met. Müller was not fond of word painting in music—he believed that the arts of poetry and music should remain distinct. Had he ever encountered Schubert’s settings, he may very well have disapproved!

My own journey with this music began in the late 1980s, when I learned “Der Lindenbaum” for a masterclass with pianist Martin Katz. Then, in 1997, I performed eight of the songs with pianist Laura Ward at the Charles Sumner School Museum and Archives in Washington, D.C. Finally, in early 2012 on the occasion of my fiftieth birthday, I prepared and performed the complete cycle four times in the Washington region with my dear friend and musical partner Michael Adcock. I revisited it with Washington, D.C.-based pianist Carla Hübner in January 2021, a dark and unsettling time in our collective journey through a global pandemic. When John O’Conor mentioned the work to me, I knew it was time to take the journey again. Thank you for coming with us.

– Byron Jones