The poet Wilhelm Müller would have all but sunk into oblivion — if not for the fact that the famous composer Franz Schubert of Vienna set two of his most important poem cycles to music: Die schöne Müllerin (The Beautiful Miller’s Daughter) and Die Winterreise (The Winter Journey). It would have been an ill-deserved oblivion, for Müller was not only a superb poet, but also an interesting figure from the historical point of view. He studied philology in Berlin, participated in the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon, and was a regular guest at the salons of Berlin. In his Greek Songs, he later championed the Greeks’ struggle to free themselves from Turkish occupation. Those of his contemporaries who championed the ideals of freedom thus came to regard him as an important orientation. In Dessau, where he lived, he not only worked as a secondary school teacher and librarian, but also published early German poetry.

In his poems, Wilhelm Müller devoted himself to typical themes of Romanticism — love, hope, disappointment, and the affinity for nature — , but also the feeling of wandering through the world as a stranger and outcast, homeless, driven, but without a goal. In Winter Journey, a lover who has loved in vain sets out on foot, alone and lonely, through inhospitable wintry landscapes. He sharpens his perception of unusual characters and strange natural phenomena until he finally encounters a solitary hurdy-gurdy man singing his songs barefoot on the ice.

The Viennese composer Franz Schubert found the twenty-four poems of the Winter Journey in two paperbacks of the Urania series and set them to music in 1827. Schubert was a master of the romantic song. The human voice and the piano accompaniment are interwoven in his works in a manner as artful as it is expressive. The cycle is one of the last and most famous works the composer wrote before his death the following year, at the age of just thirty-one. His contemporaries found the expressiveness and tonal language of his songs “eery”.

Even if the lyrics and music are of Romantic origin, they have lost none of their topicality. The Winter Journey could also be set in the present — indeed, in any age and any place.