Schubert: Winterreise D911

Winterreise is perhaps the greatest song cycle ever written. Franz Schubert set to music the evocative poetry of his contemporary, German lyricist Wilhelm Müller. It is a heart-rending portrayal of a winter journey full of misery and woe. It took great courage for Schubert to set Müller's poetry to music, because he saw in it his own possible fate, one of unimaginable bleakness. Andreas Schmidt writes: “The “Winter Journey” is to the Liedersänger what the great oratorios of J.S. Bach are to the oratorio singer and Mozart's or Wagner's operas are to the opera singer: a continuous challenge, a warm feeling of ‘coming-home’ time and again, and a familiar, dear friend, with whom one has seen the good, the bad and the ugly sides of life. “ Schmidt returns to this greatest of song cycles at the height of his powers and with a lifetime of experience.

When he sadly died in 2012 the great singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau left behind an amazing legacy of recordings. This 3CD set features him in the area in which he was most renowned, the lieder repertoire, and is devoted to music by the composer to whom he is most closely linked, Franz Schubert. Included in the release are Fischer-Dieskau’s first recordings of Die Winterreise and Schwanengesang from 1948, as well as his 1951 performance of Die Schöne Müllerin. The pianists are Gerald Moore and Klaus Billing.

There is no doubt that in his time Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was the most influential interpreter of the lieder repertoire, particularly that of Schubert. In 1948 as part of a Berlin Radio production his first recording of Winterreise was made. As accompanist in this performance as well as that of Schubert’s last lieder, Schwanengesang, Berlin Radio engaged the pianist Klaus Billing. The recording of the latter was produced in the same year and is also the first of this work that the singer made. Die schöne Müllerin is presented here in a 1951 recording with the legendary Gerald Moore at the piano.