Winterreise: Schubert and Zender

[micrologus]

Notes on my Arragement of Winterreise by Hans Zender

"Since the invention of musical notation, music has been divided into the text set down by the composer and the reality actualized in sound by the performer. I have spent half of my life attempting to deliver performances that are as true as possible to the original text - especially of Schubert's works, which I love deeply - only to have to admit to myself that no interpretation can ever be really true to the original. Apart from the fact that I changed a great many things in Winterreise - instruments, concert halls, the importance of marginal notes, etc. - one must understand that each note in a manuscript is primarily a challange to action and not an explicit description of sound. The creative effort, temperament and intelligence of the performer, as well as the sensitivity formed by the aesthetics of his of her own time, are necessary to create a lively and exciting performance. Thus something of the nature of the performer is transferred into the works performed, and the performer becomes a co-author.
Falsification? I call it creative transformation. Musical works as well as works for the theatre can be rejuvenated through great performances. They not only offer an insight into the performers themselves but also bring new aspects of the work to attention.
A work such as Winterreise is an icon of our musical tradition, one of Europe's great masterpieces. Is it enough to present it in the manner customary today - two men in tuxedos, a Steinway, and usualy a very large concert hall? Many people treasure performances that sound closer to the historical original. This "sacred" original is often pursued nowadays on the fortepiano, Schubert's grand piano, shortnecked violins and wooden flutes. And although this is a good thing, we should not delude ourselves that performing with historically authentic instruments can of itself bring back the spirit of the era in which the music was composed. Our listening habits and our ears have changed too much, and our consciousness is too influenced by the music composed since Schubert's time. A "historically accurate" performance is often felt to be a departure from that to which we are accostumed.

My interpretation of Winterreise does not seek a new expressive meaning but rather makes use of the liberties that all composers intuitively allow themselves: the slowing or quickening of tempi, the transposition onto different keys, and the revealing of more characteristic and colourful nuances. To this, we must add the potential of "reading" music; moving around within the text, repeating certain lines of music, interrupting continuity, comparing different readings of the same passage... In my version, all these possibilities remain subject to compositional discipline and thus create autonomous formalistic passages layered over the original Schubert manuscript. The transformation of the piano sound within the multicoloured possibilities of the orchestra is only one of the many consequences of this method: this is definitely not a matter of a one-dimensional "colouring", but rather of permutations of tone colour arranged in a manner fully independent of the formal rules relating to Schubert's music.
The appearance, in a few parts, of "contrafacta" (that is, the addition to Schubert's music of invented sounds as introductory, epilogue of bridge passages, or as simultaneous parallel music) are but one extreme of this methodology. One is reminded that at the turn of the century several of the greatest pianists were fond of improvising small bridges between the different pieces they performed during a concert... Another possible extreme I make use of is the shifting of the sounds within the room: thus it becomes clear that all normative and therefore formal creative actions hve a poetic-symbolic aspect.Musicians themselves are made to travel, sounds "travel" through the room, even outside the room, and such interventions into the original text highlight the poetic idea of individual songs.
In order to achieve a magical fusion of text and music - a feature especially apparent in the later song cycles - Schubert used sound "ciphers" in his lieder. He would match the "key word" in every poem with a germinal musical figure, out of which the entire song would develop. The structural transformations in my versions always arose from these germinal figures bur developed beyond their original Schubertian form: the steps in Nos. 1 and 8, the blowing of the wind (Nos. 2, 19 and 22), the crunching of ice (Nos. 3 and 7), the desperate searching for the past (Nos. 9, 11 and 19), the flight of the crows, the trembling of falling leaves, the snarling of a dog, the sounds of an approaching mail coach...
Seen from the stylistic point of view, Schubert's later works wontain "seeds" or musical figures which, decades after their original composition, appear in the works of Bruckner, Wolf and Mahler; one is tempted to say that a good many passages of Winterreise foreshadow the expressionism of our century. My own Winterreise version attempts to bring out Schubert's forward-looking perspectives as well as his roots in folklore.Thus, in the very first lied, several aesthetic perspectives are blended: the archaic references of accordion and guitar, the "Biedermeier" salon culture of the string quartet, the extroverted drama of late romantic symphonic style, the brutal symbolism implicit in modern sound forms... An individual solution had to be found for every single song so that the unity os the cycle became more of an adventurous journey than a precise walk.

A last thought should be mentioned briefly. The second part of Winterreise becomes more and more meditation on death (the parting from the loved one symbolizes taking leave of life itself), and it was necessary to come up with a special strategy for shaping the conclusion. The clear relation to the historical original text which, despite all estrangement, is evident at the beginning of my version, becomes gradually weaker; the "ideal world" of tradition disappears increasingly into the distance from where it cannot be recalled. In No. 18, "A Storming Morning", Schubert's structures are weakening in analogy with the text - they are only (cloudy) wisps "spread about in a weary struggle"; and the friendly melody in No. 19, "Delusion", is deceiving and becomes a recurring single tone, like an idée fixe; in "Courage", the winter storm blows so strongly into the reader's (i.e. the listener's) ears that he (or she) is time and again thrown back to the original position. The strange song of the three "Mock Suns" seems to be the final break with reality: at this point, the musical notation appears simultaneously in three different tempi, and it is not possible to use one of the tempi as a means to co-ordinate the other two... In the "Hurdy-urdy Man", in addition to the loss of the orientation offered by metre, the harmonic and thus spatial stability also disappears. By continuously adding diminished fifths (derived from the fourth measure of the Schubert song), the musical figures seem to lose contact with the "ground" and in the end simply "sink into the earth".
While composing Winterreise, Schubert is reputed to have visited his friends only rarely and in a seemingly disturbed state. The first performances must have caused shock rather than pleasure. Is it possible to break through the aesthetic expectations inherent in our reception on classical music (which make experiences like the "shock" caused by the first performance of "Winterreise" practically impossible today), and simply reinvigorate the initial impulse, the existential force fo Schubert's original?"

[micrologus]

Remarks concerning Hans Zender's composed interpretation of frnaz Schubert's Winterreise by Konrad Paul Liessmann

"What do listeners to Hans Zender's composed interpretation of Franz Schubert's Winterreise actually listen to? Is it quite simply an interpretation, or an instrumentation, an acoustic illustration, a highly original approach, a remake, an adaptation or a new creation? None of these terms would be wrong, and yet none truly corresponds to the complexity of this work.

First of all, Hans Zender's stance vis-à-vis Schubert's second lied cycle based on poems by Wilhelm Müller raises questions concerning the aesthetic position of this endeavour. While the definition chosen by the artist himself, i.e. "composed interpretation", indicates a direction, its very ambivalence renders it puzzling as well. In fact, the work does constitute a Winterreise interpretation whose radical approach not only indentifies new, hitherto unheard aspects in the lied cycle but actually explodes and transformes them into something else. For undoubtedly more and other things have been achieved than merely changing simple lieder accompanied on the piano into orchestra songs; Zender did not orchestrate Schubert's Winterreise in the straightforward style adopted by e.g. Maurice Ravel for Mussorgsky's Pictures from an Exhibition. Neither did Zender merely translate Schubert's work into another, contemporaly musical language in the way of Emerson, Lake & Palmer when they tried to remake Mussorgsky/Ravel as pop music at a time when nobody knew what cross-over meant. On the basis of Schubert's composition, Hans Zender has developed a universe of sounds that recovers the original, deeply troubling experiences of a disturbed romantic subject of the early 19th century from a confrontation with the awfull history of the 20th century.

Already the first song, the ambiguous "Gute Nacht" (Good Night), introduces this tension. "A stranger when I came here/A stranger, I must away"; this complaint of the lonely, despairing lover is no longer the evocation of unfulfilled erotic love and yearning. While this lied had always expressed a basic mood that might be described as "unworldliness" or "strangeness", the condition of unfamiliarity, of strangeness has become ubiquitous in the 20th century. It is not only philosophical anthropology as sketched by Günther Anders in the 1920s and lately by Peter Sloterdijk that generally views modern man as an outcast, a homeless being. Rather, the strange, the unfamiliar has become a political and even existential category. Beyond all romanticism, the stranger, the refugee, expelled, outcast and homeless, has become an emblem of our century that shows us where we stand and what we have wrought. Hans Zender's interpretation of Schubert recalls that strangeness, loneliness and isolation are not idyllic pieces of cultural history but the reverse of the medal of bourgeois lifestyles.

For the listener, it almost seems as if Hans Zender were returning to the lyrics and content of Winterreise via the detour of Schubert's music. Making use of the tone colours of different and sometimes unorthodox instruments, Zender endows the substance of his material with a colourful richness that derives not only from Schubert's piano score but also - and maybe even more - from Wilhelm Müller's poems.For their poetic language evokes accoustic images Zender actually makes us hear. The isolation of the lonely wanderer is already audible in the lyrics. When the wind plays with the weather vane, mocking the refugee, when the frozen tears keep falling to shatter with a soft clink, when the branches of the lime-tree rustle and call, when the ice breaks into pieces, when the gally rushing river assumes a hard, silent, unbroken crust of ice, when the cocks are crowing, the ravens croaking and the storms raging, when the post-horn sounds, the dogs are barking and the chains are a-clatter, and last but not least when the hurdy-gurdy man grinds his organ, the poems generate an acoustic space that Hans Zender systematically transforms into a reality of sounds. As promised in the poem, the orchestra knocks, and drops and hisses and rattles, the wind and rain machines are working at full blast, and the rages and screams of nature are clearly heard. The cast-out stranger of Winterreise experiences the poignancy of his situation in relentless isolation; the hapless, homeless wanderer is at the mercy of an inclement nature thet, made audible in Zender's orchestration, becomes the expression, refuge and symbol of his loneliness.

However, such illustrative emphases may themselves assume the aspect of strangeness, of unfamiliarity and alienation. Zender's composed interpretation of Schuberts walks the tightrope between bold interpretation and simplistic illustration, both sensitive and shrill, smooth and distorting, intimate and drastic. However, the intimacy of the lied singer accompanied on the piano is transformed into an orchestra version whose instrumental voices not only underline but also create meaning. In the same way as Wilhelm Müller's lyrics are not limited to the mere description of groaning and raging nature, instead making nature the symbol of the inner state of the suffering protagonist, Zender's version of Schubert's work does not limit itself to fleshing out a compositional skeleton but instead discloses a multi-faceted, multi-layered acoustic space in which the nearly unchanged human voice seems for the first time to become fully aware of its loneliness and isolation.

However, the contemporary compositional language of Hans Zender not only highlights the anticipatory power of Schubert's music but returns the lonely wanderer to his historical dimension as well. For he is also a wanderer through the history of sounds and thus through history per se. Perhaps the essential greatness of this composed interpretation lies in the fact that Hans Zender does not force this time aspect onto, but develops it out of, Schubert's work. As an interpretation, Hans Zender's Winterreise thus remains strictly related to Franz Schubert. It presupposes that the audience is aware with the lied cycle because only this knowledge permitts the listener to appreciate what is unfamiliar, urgent, contoured, bold and fragile in Zender's work. However, as a compositiontaking its raw material from Schubert's lieder, this Winterreise becomes an autonomous creation that may also be read as a code for contemporary alienation, for the loss of familiarity, home and certainty.

So what do listeners to Hans Zender's composed interpretation of Franz Schubert's Winterreise listen to? They listen to something they have listened to many times before, but they hear as if it were the very first time."