Les Journées Messiaen – Franz Schubert : Winterreise – Le voyage d'hiver

Die Winterreise, The Winter Journey, composed in 1827 by Franz Schubert on poems by Wilhelm Müller, is the embodiment of Romanticism in music, the ultimate expression of "Sehnsucht," existential nostalgia. Arguably Franz Schubert's finest collection of lieder, it surpasses, in its density and drama, anything he produced in the genre. Müller's poems perfectly correspond to the composer's state of mind at that time: discouraged, exhausted by illness and the isolation of the last weeks of his life, he recognized himself in the narrator as soon as he discovered the poems. Travel and solitude are the main themes, and what belongs to happiness appears only in the form of memory and illusion. In this cycle, one of the largest and most poignant of Romanticism, Schubert evokes the wanderings of a traveler who flees the city, crosses a snowy landscape, meets a hurdy-gurdy player, a weather vane, a crow, stops at an inn, remembers his loves, waits for a letter, evokes a lost linden tree. Schubert was thirty-one years old when he completed Winterreise in the last weeks of his life, staying with his brother in a small room at Kettenbrückengasse 6. It was there that, ill and feeling his end was near, he wrote the second part of the cycle, completing it a few days before his death on November 19, 1828. A few streets away, at Mariahilfstrasse 43, the piano maker Cyrill Demian was perfecting his new invention: a small bellows-operated instrument called an accordion, for which he filed a patent a few weeks later on May 6, 1829… and which would enjoy worldwide success until the development of the concert accordion. Did Schubert hear the first sounds of this instrument, its haunting chords, as he concluded his famous "Leiermann," the hurdy-gurdy player? Although there is no proof, the accordion, a child of Viennese Romanticism, brings its moving poetry and depth to the Winter Journey cycle, and becomes the singer/narrator's accomplice, embracing the vocal line or transfiguring orchestral colors.

Concert-aperitif: €40.

Dinner concert: €150