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

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to 19th-Century Music.The meaning of Wilhelm Miiller's Die Winterreise, 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 created a figure so baffling that different commentators see him variously as a whining and slightly contemptible jilted lover-a dated and two-dimensional cardboard cut-out of a bereaved Romantic,' an atheist,2 a secular Christ-figure whose journey parallels the Stations of the Cross, someone haunted by Doppelgiinger at every bend in the road,3 an alienated being who undergoes an existential 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: Romanticism 12 (1973), 607-32, says that the cycle is "mediocre" poetry that has to do with no more than the "downfall of a young man after a great disappointment," "little more than the description of a rather weak individual pining after a lost love" (p. 630). 2See Jacques Chailley, Le Voyage d'hiver de Schubert (Paris, 1975), originally published as two studies. 19th-Century Music IX/2 (Fall 1985). ? by the Regents of the University of California. 3Klaus Giinther Just, "Wilhelm Miillers Liederzyklen 'Die sch6ne Miillerin' und 'Die Winterreise'," Zeitschrift ffir deutsche Philologie 83 (1964), 452-71. Just feels that the cycle is full of Doppelgiinger figures, that it is a deeply tragic secular Passion-story in twenty-four stations. 4Alan P. Cottrell in The Lyrical Song Cycles of Wilhelm Miller (Chapel Hill, 1970), interprets Die Winterreise as a tragic tale of self-alienation, very unlike my own views, but he argues convincingly for a restored recognition of Miiller's originality and worth. We do not truly know [him], though we hear the tale of his soliloquy from the ironical farewell, through 'H. Lowen-Marshall, in "Symbolism in Schubert's Winterreise," Studies in

EMOTIONAL AMBIVALENCE AND THE MUSICAL CANON: ELFRIEDE JELINEK'S RESTAGING OF SCHUBERT'S SONGS IN WINTERREISE (2011)

“…22 Susan Youens identifies here 'an uneasy probing of [the lyric subject's] alienated state and questions about the mystery of his emotional being', questions which ultimately remain open. 23 Müller juxtaposes hot and cold, inside and outside, evoking the power of the wanderer's feelings through contrast with the frozen landscape. The subjunctive in the penultimate line signals a vain desire for the outside world to feel the burning force of his emotions.…”

Michael Cherlin, Varieties of Musical Irony: from Mozart to Mahler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). xvii + 282 pp. £64.99 (hb.). ISBN 978‐1‐107‐14129‐2.

“…' (p. 258) JULIAN JOHNSON NOTES 1. On which topic see Reed (1978), Youens (1991), andTaruskin (2010), among others.…”