OTTO LIEDER (from Schubert’s Winterreise) for tenor, piano and string trio
The eight Lieder from Schubert’s Winterreise were realized for a project included in Estovest Festival 2013, dedicated to the different forms of the voice expressions of which I was the curator that comprised Lieder by di György Kurtag, György Ligeti and Wolfgang Rihm too on texts by Friederich Hölderlin and Jacob Lenz. That of the Winterreise is an allegorical journey in which the central element is the unavoidability of the fate that leads to the dismay of the self and to the desertion of reality perceived as unbearable and inconceivable. In the poem cycle by Müller the triggering event is the loss of the beloved, last connection remained with the reality; the protagonist leaves for a long trip in the Winter, metaphysical season, during which the relationship with life gets ‘frozen’ and the subject progressively detaches himself from the ‘known world’ to bring him on the borders of the ‘universe’ and to watch into the absolute Void. The milestones of this path are provided by a selection of Lieder from the cycle that, in my version, gradually move towards the transfiguration of themselves with the progressing of the journey and that, in reaching every next stop, detach themselves from the ‘real’ of the original more and more and go along with the traveller to the final destination, towards which he will be guided by a grim and spectral character: the man with the barrel organ of the last Lied ‘Der Leiermann’. He is a bizzarre hero, indifferent towards everything around him, detached from the worldly things and from the passions, to whom the journeyman addresses his last and sturdy requests that, by now, he is not able to sing anymore but only whisper (in the ‘new’ expressive medium of the sprechgesang): ‘Wunderlicher Alter, soll ich mit dir geh’n? Willst zu meinem Liedern deine Leier dreh’n?’ (‘Strange old man, shall I go with you? Will you play your hurdy-gurdy to my songs?).
