Winterreise

“I must travel a road where no one has ever yet returned…” In Franz Schubert’s Winterreise, a traveller wounded by unrequited love treks through a desolate winter landscape, longing for the restfulness of death. This song cycle is one of the composer’s last and one of his most poignant. In the concentrated format of the lied, he succeeds as no one else in suggesting a wide spectrum of emotions, from intense desire to a bottomless sense of conflict and abandonment. Baritone Matthias Goerne and pianist Markus Hinterhäuser, who have been performing the cycle together for many years, take on these 24 dramatic songs while a video by visual artist William Kentridge further explores the cycle’s emotional depth.