Winterreise (German pronunciation: [ˈvɪntɐˌʁaɪzə], Winter Journey) is a song cycle for voice and piano by Franz Schubert (D. 911, published as Op.

After his beloved falls for another, the grief-stricken young man steals away from town at night and follows the river and steep ways to a charcoal burner's hut, where he rests before moving on.

The mysterious and ominous nature of the musician, along with the question posed in the last lines, leave the fate of the wanderer open to interpretation.

[1] The two parts were also published separately by Tobias Haslinger, the first on 14 January 1828, and the second (the proofs of which Schubert was still correcting days before his death on 19 November) on 30 December 1828.

Schubert's original group of settings therefore closed with the dramatic cadence of "Irrlicht", "Rast", "Frühlingstraum" and "Einsamkeit", and his second sequence begins with "Die Post".

The piano supplies rich effects in the nature imagery of the poems, the voices of the elements, the creatures and active objects, the rushing storm, the crying wind, the water under the ice, birds singing, ravens croaking, dogs baying, the rusty weathervane grating, the post horn calling, and the drone and repeated melody of the hurdy-gurdy.

It is argued that in the gloomy nature of the Winterreise, compared with Die schöne Müllerin, there is a change of season, December for May, and a deeper core of pain, the difference between the heartbreak of a youth and a man.

It is not surprising to hear of Schubert's haggard look in the Winterreise period; but not depression, rather a kind of sacred exhilaration... we see him practically gasping with fearful joy over his tragic Winterreise – at his luck in the subject, at the beauty of the chance which brought him his collaborator back, at the countless fresh images provoked by his poetry of fire and snow, of torrent and ice, of scalding and frozen tears.

However, he had heard the whole cycle performed by Vogl (which received a much more enthusiastic reception),[13] though he did not live to see the final publication, nor the opinion of the Wiener Theaterzeitung:Müller is naive, sentimental, and sets against outward nature a parallel of some passionate soul-state which takes its colour and significance from the former.

Schubert's music is as naive as the poet's expressions; the emotions contained in the poems are as deeply reflected in his own feelings, and these are so brought out in sound that no-one can sing or hear them without being touched to the heart.

"[13] In his introduction to the Peters edition (with the critical revisions of Max Friedlaender), Professor Max Müller, son of the poet Wilhelm Müller, remarks that Schubert's two song-cycles have a dramatic effect not unlike that of a full-scale tragic opera, particularly when performed by great singers such as Jenny Lind (Die schöne Müllerin) or Julius Stockhausen (Winterreise).

The intensity and the emotional inflections of the poetry are carefully built up to express the sorrows of the lover, and are developed to an almost pathological degree from the first to the last note, something explored (along with the cultural context of the work) by the tenor Ian Bostridge in Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession.

[15] Over the course of the cycle, grief over lost love progressively gives way to more general existential despair and resignation – the beloved is last directly mentioned only halfway into the work – and the literal winter's journey is arguably at least in part allegorical for this psychological and spiritual one.

Schubert's Winterreise has had a marked influence on several key works, including Gustav Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen[35] and Benjamin Britten's Night-piece.

[37] In 1994 Polish poet Stanisław Barańczak published his poems, entitled Podróż zimowa, which – apart from one translation of a work by Müller – were inspired by Schubert's music.

In the program Atelier neuer Musik it says: "Hardly any other recording of the Winterreise cycle deals with Müller's texts and Schubert's music in such a radically different way than the reading of the composers and interpreters Oliver Augst and Marcel Daemgen.