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Dohnányi moved to Berlin in 1905 to accept a professorship at the prestigious Hochschule für Musik. The first composition that he completed upon arriving there was Winterreigen Op 13, subtitled ‘Ten Bagatelles’, which served as his farewell to Vienna. With the exception of the first and last bagatelles, each movement bears a titular reference or a printed dedication to a specific friend he had made in Vienna. An Ada even pays musical tribute to its dedicatee through repetitions of the pitches A-D-A. Dohnányi also used the work as a whole to reinforce his status within the great lineage of composer-pianists. The title Winterreigen (Winter Round Dances) is reminiscent of Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise (Winter Journey), and the subtitle ‘Bagatelles’ alludes to Beethoven’s masterworks in the same genre. The most obvious references, however, are to Schumann. Dohnányi himself explained: ‘The dedication of the piece as a whole to the spirit of Robert Schumann is revealed in the first piece, Widmung (Dedication), by its use of the first melody from Schumann’s Papillons.’ Widmung is also the title of the beloved first movement of Schumann’s song cycle Myrthen. Other composers referenced in Winterreigen include Brahms, Chopin, Liszt and Mendelssohn, but the Postludium returns to a Schumannian technique by spelling out in pitches the word A-D-E, the German version of ‘Adieu’.

from notes by James A Grymes © 2012