‘I think the fact Schubert wrote Winterreise when he did, at that time in his life, means there’s a horrible truthfulness to the sorrow,’ remarks soloist Allan Clayton. ‘None of us knows—because we’ve not gone there and come back—but it feels like someone who knows he’s dying, and this means it speaks to us. It’s honest, it’s raw and it’s horrible. It’s truthful about love and loss and hope and despair.’

In February 1827 Schubert invited a group of friends to listen to his latest collection of songs. The composer had set a sequence of verses by Saxon poet Wilhelm Müller and commented to his friend, Joseph von Spaun: ‘I am anxious to know what you will say about them. They have affected me more than any of my other songs.’ Spaun later documented the gathering in his memoirs: ‘[Schubert] sang the entire Winterreise through to us, in a voice full of emotion. We were dumbfounded by the mournful, gloomy tone of these songs and [Franz von] Schober said that only one, ‘Der Lindenbaum’, had appealed to him. To this Schubert replied, ‘I like these songs more than all the rest, and you will come to like them as well.’

Schubert’s musical account of a lost and solitary soul struggling across a frozen landscape is one of grief, beauty and perhaps unparalleled emotional depth. The work has long captured the imaginations of musicians and audiences. Yet while composers from Brahms to Britten have arranged individual Schubert songs for instrumental ensembles, Hans Zender’s epic ‘composed interpretation’ of 1993 is surely the boldest of such projects, with a score that sits somewhere between instrumental arrangement and orchestral fantasia. The vocal part is largely unchanged but Zender’s chamber writing is richly divergent from Schubert’s original piano line. The result is a kaleidoscopic, instinctive response to the song cycle. At times the folk-like quality of Müller’s tale is captured in intimate scoring for guitar, accordion and harmonicas, while other passages recall a Mahlerian carnival or the expressionism of Alban Berg.

As Clayton observes, ‘the instruments Zender uses could almost sound comic in places but, for instance, with all the melodicas, they actually sound like broken accordions or broken woodwind instruments, which gives you this fractured, broken-down sense of the character’s experience. His journey is fractured; it’s not moving from A-B, he’s constantly going back and revisiting moments, and I think this almost schizophrenic quality is highlighted beautifully by Zender’s writing.’

The work begins with a characteristically free interpretation of ‘Gute Nacht’ (Good Night). The shuffle of the wanderer’s feet is conjured by sandblock and crisp col legno strings, before the distinctive descending melody chimes hazily across the woodwind. The fierce winds of ‘Die Wetterfahne’ (The Weathervane) are then heard in the full sweep of the orchestra, complete with interludes from a wind machine. In ‘Gefrorne Tränen’ (Frozen Tears), the fall of icy droplets is evoked by the near-pointillistic scoring of the ensemble, while the urgent ‘Erstarrung’ (Frozen Stiff) snarls with muted brass.

‘Der Lindenbaum’ (The Linden Tree) follows, folk-like in character and supported by unadorned diatonic harmony. Opening to warm major tonality, the wanderer’s reverie gives way to cold reality in the third verse, where the ‘kalten Winde’ (cold wind) is enacted by shivering sul ponticello strings. In ‘Wasserflut’ (Flood) the dissonance of ‘Weh’ (grief) at the close of the first verse is punctuated by the full ensemble. The strong contrasts in pitch and dynamics which introduce ‘Auf dem Flusse’ (On the Stream) are boosted by Zender through timbral variations of expressionist intensity, before the thrilling ‘Rückblick’ (Backwards Glance). The song recalls ‘Die Wetterfahne’ in its agitated syncopation, while the central section’s mention of ‘runden Lindenbäume’ sparks a return to the tranquility of ‘Der Lindenbaum’.

Zender plays with the mysterious call of ‘Irrlicht’ (Will-o’-the-Wisp) with a small off-stage ensemble. The sense that the protagonist slips towards the unhinged is here supported by Zender’s use of accordion and scattered pizzicato to create a strange, antic backdrop to ‘Rast’ (Rust). The blithe, parlour-like opening melody of ‘Frühlingstraum’ (Dream of Spring) is aptly set to harp and string quartet. Here the major-minor relationship between contented past and grief-struck present mirrors ‘Der Lindenbaum’, with the final verse showing strains of both tonalities as the wanderer’s dreams meet the hardship of the present, before ‘Einsamkeit’ (Loneliness) marks the end of the cycle’s first part.

‘Die Post’ (The Post) offers an invigorating opening to the cycle’s second half, with Zender’s extended introduction revelling in the nearing calls of the post horn. ‘Der greise Kopf’ (The Old Man’s Head) sees madness creep once more through the protagonist as he longs for his grave, before the fantastical ‘Die Krähe’ (The Crow). Here Zender sustains the song’s sense of magical bewitchment with solo woodwind and brass tracing the voice’s melody (between intermittent caws from the oboe).

The dropping leaves of ‘Letzte Hoffnung’ (Last Hope) are neatly evoked in the precise division of the melodic line in Zender’s score. This tentative texture is however contrasted with glorious romantic swells across the ensemble as the protagonist spies ‘many a coloured leaf’ (‘Manches bunte Blatte’). The menace of rattling chains in ‘Im Dorfe’ (In the Village) is captured in the scraped first violins and drum, before the full threat of ‘Der stürmische Morgen’ (Stormy Morning) is unleashed in Zender’s unruly percussion scoring.

‘Täuschung’ (Delusion) opens with an expanded introduction featuring mysterious flickers of harp and string harmonics, before the score gives way to a menacing Viennese waltz. There follows ‘Der Wegweiser’ (The Signpost), the second verse’s noble plea of innocence accompanied by chorale-like woodwind. Echoes of Mahler are heard in the rich brass scoring (prefigured in Schubert’s own affecting chordal introduction) to ‘Das Wirtshaus’ (The Inn).

In ‘Mut!’ (Courage!) the impulsive protest of the text is mirrored in Zender’s hectic stop-start interpretation of the song, while in ‘Die Nebensonnen’ (The Mock Suns) the quasi-canonic scoring of the theme captures the sense of these three ‘echoing’ suns. ‘Der Leiermann’ (The Hurdy-Gurdy Player) is fantasia-like in its creative scope. Zender’s arrangement places fragmented reiterations of the theme across the plaintive simplicity of the vocal line, until the wheeze and strain of the simulated hurdy-gurdy at last swells then fades across the ensemble.

Kate Wakeling © 2026