Festival Clàssics l'Escala-Empúries: Winterreise

Winter Journey is the second cycle of lieder composed by Schubert on poems by Müller, after the Die Schöne Müllerin cycle, composed 4 years earlier. It is a continuous narrative in 24 episodes: a man speaking in the first person, leaves, on a gloomy winter’s day, the town where he has lived as a stranger and where he thought he had found love. He wanders aimlessly, living through various unhappy experiences; at the end, he meets an old hurdy-gurdy player, perhaps a figment of his imagination, whose ritornello seems not to belong to the world of the living. The theme of wandering, which is also that of The beautiful Miller-Girl, is a familiar one in German Romantic poetry.