Un voyage d'hiver

What makes Schubert’s piece so moving is its ambivalence: emotion stems from the conjunction between a popular, almost cheerful theme, and a play on tonalities which makes it dark. Such darkely tinged cheerfulness gives A Winter Journey its climate.

The creation of A Winter Journey helps questioning the baroque musical and choreographic heritage in the pre-romantic period. It seems that there was no rupture but a soft evolution. Such strong cycles such as Schubert’s A Winter Journey are composed with a succession of simple and regular tunes. The form of these strophes evoque the structure of baroque dances, and the movement still seems to be at the origin of the music’s rhythmic writing. Here, the march, a recurring element of the Winterreise, becomes the symbol of a quest.

The seven dancers and the two musicians (a barytone and a pianist) form a friendly group akin to the “Schubertiades” of old; an exclusive audience for Schubert’s work in the master’s lifetime. They tell a story without a real hero. They travel together in a fairy land called “music” that initiates the journey materialized by the mobility of the piano. Its symbolic journey transforms the theatrical and choreographic space.

The abstraction of this musical journey opens the imaginary and helps for the removal of the lyrics’ narration. A nostalgic climate settles, playing with the ambivalence of a soft-coloured choreography, as well as a music which inexorably crosses over to dark lands. 

“Schubert was surely a double nature. His Viennese cheerfulness was ennobled by a trait of deep melancholy. So he was: inwardly poet whereas externally he seemed a sort of jovial fellow. And as people mostly judge on the external appearance and because this one did not fit to the usual and traditional savoir-faire in society, the daily companion could seem to some people much better than the bad-polished bard of the Müllerlieder or of the Winterreise.”

Bauernfeld

Franz Schubert, Brigitte Massin, Paris, Edition Fayard, 1993, p. 259