He leaves in the dead of night, while everyone else is sleeping. What, enquiring minds will ask, was he doing in the family home of his beloved so late at night?
Here Ian Bostridge steps forward with a brilliant suggestion that finds much resonance in the social customs of the time: our protagonist is a private live-in tutor of low economic status who had developed feelings for, and perhaps even an understanding with, his young student.
Schubert had at one time been employed as just such a live-in tutor. In the course of the work, the narrator-singer is heard in conversation with his own heart, by turns reflective, questioning, ironic, and finally resigned. In this speculative frame of mind, he drifts fluidly between the world of his dreams and the bitter reality he faces.
Despairing and alone with his thoughts, he travels through dark emotional territory, traversing a wide range of village and country settings before finally encountering the forlorn organ-frinder at the end of his journey, symbolic of the death that awaits him.
The cast of characters with whom the narrator interacts are elements of the natural landscape sun, wind, trees and leaves, flowers, rivers and snow, crows and ravens , elements that form symbolic company for his journey. The narration drifts between his present unhappy state in the minor mode and happier thoughts in the major. Do their affections also change with the wind? The musical texture is brilliantly evocative, with unisons between piano and singer making you feel the bitter chill in the air and trills evoking the wind blowing the weather-vane around on its spindle.
This song mixes an eeriness and daintiness, anger and irony. Against a steady backdrop of drip-drip sounds in the piano, often punctuated by a sudden sforzando accent, the singer asks how his tears can have frozen to his cheek so soon. They were hot enough to melt ice when they poured from his heart. Stunned by the loss of his love, he searches frantically for any piece of green grass beneath the snow to remind him of happier times.
But all is dead around, like his frozen heart. We hear the first intimation of death in this song. As a chill wind blows through the fluttering leaves evoked by the piano, he passes by a tree into which he once carved words of love. Once the emblem of his happiness, it now offers him eternal rest beneath its branches. Bostridge has pointed out that the linden tree was popular meeting place for townsfolk, giving this song a resonance of German nationalism. In this eerily calm, almost stately song, the protagonist muses on how the snow will absorb his tears, then thaw in the spring and flow with them into the stream.
The strange tiptoe pace of this song gives it an aura of mystery, or perhaps merely tentativeness. The ice covering the river, on which he has carved the story of his love affair, is like his heart: it rages with a torrent beneath. Changes from minor to major and back again are chilling, and near the end, the piano pulses with signs of his inner torment.
Pursued by crows as he breathlessly escapes, the wanderer casts a nostalgic glance back at the town he is leaving, once so pleasant to his memory. And looking back, he still longs to stand in front of her house once again. Like many of the songs in this cycle, this one is divided clearly into major- and minor-mode sections.
A drowsy opening piano introduction finds him pausing from the fatigue of his journey. He shelters in a little hut, but this bodily respite from the cold and wind only allows him to feel more keenly the burning sting of jealousy in his heart.
Drifting between a dream state and harsh reality, he longs to feel once again the warmth of love. The piano score paints in turn the sudden shrieks of birds and the torpor of his drowsy eyelids. The change of mode from major to minor at the very end conveys his hopelessness. When will the ice-flowers in the window turn green? When will he hold her in his arms? The answer to both questions is: never.
The stillness in the air, the brightness of the scene, are no help to his pain. When storms raged he was less miserable than this. Does it bring a letter from her? The upbeat tone of this song is an ironic set-up for emotional travails to follow. Eeriness returns in a song shrink-wrapped around the text rather than arranged in stanzas. The frost on his head has made him look like an old man, a welcome thought. Then horror sets in as he realizes he is still young, with so very far yet to travel to the grave.
Just as time is metaphorical, so, too, is movement. All that which voice and piano conjure as a feeling of walking is inextricably linked to the ebb and flow of the human heartbeat in its excitement and depression. Both musical and metaphysical progressions are manifestations of the psychological journey.
The metaphysical voyage is one toward reintegration; yet the stages of the journey are fraught with contraries. Piano and voice, like the two selves of the Wanderer, enter into dialogue, the vocal line often declamatory, sometimes interspersed with lyrical folk-like melodies or dance rhythms. A long and bitter road still lies before him after this climactic epiphany.
The road, he realizes, ultimately ends in death, but, now it is not the outcome, but rather, the process, which takes on supreme meaning. In his increasing acceptance of destiny and his rebellious, even fearless confrontation with the dark unknown, the Wanderer is granted the final revelation of his journey. In the grim vision of the old beggar musician, the Wanderer finally accosts his alter-ego.
They are equal poets of converging paths whose now creative journey promises a long winter of suffering. The cycle ends with a kind of unanswered question to which the reply is an existential given.
Who my partner? What the songs? He leaves it all very much up to the performers. Do their affections also change with the wind? Why should they care about him, when their daughter is marrying a rich man?
To the drip-drip sounds of the piano, he asks how his tears can have frozen to his cheek so soon. They were hot enough to melt ice when they poured from his heart. Stunned by the loss of his love, he searches frantically for any piece of green grass beneath the snow to remind him of happier times. But all is dead around, like his frozen heart.
The agitated piano accompaniment portrays his inner turmoil, while the avoidance of cadence at the end paints his inability to let her memory go.
As a chill wind blows in the fluttering piano accompani- ment, he passes by a tree into which he once carved words of love. Once the emblem of his happiness, it now offers him eternal rest beneath its branches.
The simple tuneful- ness of this melody has made it into a well-known German folksong, Am Brunnen vor dem Tore. He muses on how the snow will absorb his tears, then thaw in the spring and flow with them into the stream.
The ice covering the river, on which he has carved the story of his love affair, is like his heart: it rages with a torrent beneath. Near the end, the piano pulses with signs of his inner torment. Pursued by crows as he breathlessly escapes, the wanderer casts a nostalgic glance back at the town he is leaving, once so pleasant to his memory.
And looking back, he still longs to stand in front of her house once again. Pausing from the fatigue of his journey, he shelters in a little hut, but this bodily respite from the cold and wind only allows him to feel more keenly the burning sting of jealousy in his heart.
Drifting between a dream state and harsh reality, he longs to feel once again the warmth of love. The piano score paints in turn the sudden shrieks of birds and the torpor of his drowsy eyelids.
He travels on his way, lonely as a cloud drifting over the tops of the trees. The stillness in the air, the brightness of the scene, are no help to his pain. When storms raged he was less miserable than this.
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