fight for a song: Franz Schubert: Winterreise

Bartosz Gorzkowski tenorAleksander Mocek pianoforte

The winters that we know from recent years have little to do with those that the authors of “Winterreise” knew. Franz Schubert and Wilhelm Müller lived in the Little Ice Age. It was already moving towards the end, but it made itself felt more acutely than usual. When Müller published the first part of “The Winter Journey” in the periodical “Urania”, only seven years had passed since the fateful year 1816, called “the year without summer” or “the year without the sun”. Today, it is believed that two factors were to blame for it: the eruption of the Tambora volcano on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa in 1815, combined with extremely low solar activity between 1790 and 1830. The high concentration of dust made Vienna especially gloomy and cool.

What the cutting frost did not accomplish was completed by summer but cold rains. The witness of the era, meteorologist Luke Howard, saw with his own eyes what was happening in Germany at that time: “Not the meadows and villages themselves, but also the neighborhoods of towns and big cities, lay under water for a long time: dams were broken, bridges destroyed, crops were wet or swept away by streams, and the harvest was ruined by the lack of sun, without which they did not grow and do not grow. ripe fruit.” Hunger has become an overwhelming problem.

As if that were not enough, glaciers also grew, which soon, due to the return of normal temperatures, began to pose a mortal danger (the case of the Alpine glacier Giétro and the disaster of 1818, when an ice dam burst under the pressure of accumulated water; flood-avalanche, carrying ice, mud, stones and trees, killed more than forty people warned too late and razed numerous villages in its path). There was therefore a quite apocalyptic mood, but for exactly the opposite reasons than now, when we fear the debilitating heat.

The winter described by the poet is not only a metaphorical winter of the soul and heart, but also something very real, a record of a certain era, very different from ours, with rivers covered with a thick crust of ice, tears falling on the face and frost tightly covering the hair. Even ravens (in Müller and Schubert there is a generic word “Krähe”, which does not allow a clear determination of the bird's identity; even Mrongovian's dictionary of the era leaves a choice between a crow and a gull — that is, a rook) are an increasingly rare winter sight. In Poland, over the past dozen years, the population of rooks has decreased by as much as 41 percent, with crows the situation looks much better so far. Let us hope that Schubert's song will not remain for some time only the epitaph of these wonderful, intelligent animals.

— Krzysztof Dix

tickets 30/20 zł (normal/reduced) click here

Bartosz Gorzkowski photo by Zbigniew Malak