This version of Schubert's grim song cycle Winterreise (Winter Journey), the second by Austrian baritone Wolfgang Holzmair, comes with notes by one Gerhard Persché suggesting that rather than the chronicle of the world's worst breakup that the work has always been taken to be, Schubert and Wilhelm Müller actually intended a political meaning. The song cycle, in his view, is a coded protest against the restoration of the European monarchies in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. Persché makes the interesting point that the ...
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This version of Schubert's grim song cycle Winterreise (Winter Journey), the second by Austrian baritone Wolfgang Holzmair, comes with notes by one Gerhard Persché suggesting that rather than the chronicle of the world's worst breakup that the work has always been taken to be, Schubert and Wilhelm Müller actually intended a political meaning. The song cycle, in his view, is a coded protest against the restoration of the European monarchies in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. Persché makes the interesting point that the girl who causes the entire crisis virtually disappears from the last third of the cycle, and another attraction of the idea is that Schubert was probably not planning on dying at the age of 31, rendering autobiographical interpretations suspect. Some of the songs (Auf dem Flusse works well) indeed could be read as depictions of suppressed social currents, although Persché's notion of the marvelous image of the double sundog in Die Nebensonne (track 23) as representative of the...
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