`The Grim Journey Again'

Radio in Houston, as in most of the country, is loud, witless and vulgar, the sonic equivalent of a shopping mall. This holds even for public radio, despite its commercial-free, high-culture pretensions. Good music is rare, intelligent talk nonexistent. I solved the dilemma last weekend by buying a car equipped with a CD player – for me, a first, and the only thing about owning a car that I enjoy. My trip to work, not counting the part when I’m taking the kids to school, totals about 45 minutes of city driving. That was long enough Thursday morning to listen to the first 13 songs in Schubert’s Die Winterreise, and I listened to the final nine on the way home. The experience is interesting. Alone, with the windows closed, I felt an almost unmediated connection with the baritone, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and the pianist, Daniel Barenboim, but also with Schubert and Wilhelm Müller, the minor German poet whose lyrics Schubert set to music. The only thing that could have heightened the experience was darkness – another layer of sensory distraction removed.

The music is ravishing. My command of the lyrics is inadequate, even after reading several translations, but they never seem more than conventional – a sensitive soul brooding on lost love, visiting a graveyard, contemplating death, and so on. But Schubert seems to have peered through these Romantic sentiments into something altogether more terrifying. He composed Die Winterreise in 1827, the year of Müller’s death at age 33, and died himself the following year at age 31. Thirty years later, Schubert’s friend Joseph von Spaun wrote of the first time he heard Winterreise:

“For some time Schubert appeared very upset and melancholy. When I asked him what was troubling him, he would say only, `Soon you will hear and understand.’ One day he said to me, `Come over to [Franz von] Schober’s today, and I will sing you a cycle of horrifying songs. I am anxious to know what you will say about them. They have cost me more effort than any of my other songs.’ So he sang the entire Winterreise through to us in a voice full of emotion. We were utterly dumbfounded by the mournful, gloomy tone of these songs, and Schober said that only one, `Der Lindenbaum,’ had appealed to him. To this Schubert replied, `I like these songs more than all the rest, and you will come to like them as well.’”

Die Winterreise is simultaneously beautiful and terrible, a rare artistic hybrid that has appealed to many listeners, including another master of that mode, Samuel Beckett. According to James Knowlson in Damned to Fame:

“Beckett adored Franz Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise (Winter Journey), based on twenty-four melancholic poems by Schubert’s contemporary, Wilhelm Müller. He used to listen spellbound to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s stunning recording of the songs, marveling at Gerald Moore’s sensitive accompaniment.”

In 1975, in a letter to his cousin John Beckett, he likened listening to Die Winterreise to “shivering through the grim journey again.” That’s a fair description of listening to Schubert’s songs after many earlier listenings -- finding unlikely comfort in the certainty of hopelessness and extinction. The final song in the cycle is “Der Leiermann,” translated by William Mann for the CD version I have as “The Organ Grinder,” though I’ve also seen it as “The Hurdy-Gurdy Man.” The young wanderer of the poems is a proto-Beckett figure, and so is the old organ grinder:

“There beyond the village
stands an organ grinder,
and with numb fingers
he grinds as best he can.

“Barefoot on the ice,
he staggers to and fro,
and his little plate
stays ever empty.

“No one wants to hear him,
no one gives him a glance,
and the dogs snarl
round the old man.

And he lets it all go by,
as it will do;
he grinds, and his organ
never stands still.

Strange old fellow,
shall I go with you?
Will you grind your organ
To my singing?”

The start of my drive to campus winds through tree-lined residential streets, some of Houston’s prettiest, but most of it is along Kirby Drive, a commercial district of shiny blight and planned ugliness. With the transcendental gifts of Schubert, Müller, Fischer-Dieskau and Barenboim as companions, however, the journey is a little less grim.