Four years after 'Die schöne Müllerin', Schubert began, still to poems by Wilhelm Müller, his 'Winterreise', a 'Winter Journey‘ that started where the earlier work had ended. The same words, the same poet and the same themes: wandering, solitude, lost love.
And yet what a gulf between the two cycles: 'Die schöne Müllerin' was indeed inspired by the despair of a young miller getting to grips with the discovery of love, but despite this amorous chagrin, hope endures because innocence persists. 'Winterreise' seems on the contrary to touch the limits of life; the feeling of lost love ends up by dissolving and itself becoming lost, forgetful of invigorating memory. Schubert offers us an inner journey at the heart of a symbolic winter, relating the story of a rejected lover abandoning the places associated with his love for a journey without a destination, heading perhaps for his own death or for liberating delirium.
Often the preserve of male singers, this absolute summit of the Romantic Lied is rarely performed by women and only a few great feminine voices have tackled it. Barbara Hendricks, after waiting many years, put this major work in her concert repertory before recording it with her fellow traveller, Love Derwinger. And as Amélie Nothomb stresses in her dedicatory notice for this disc, "In listening to it, you do not care that this voice is that of a woman: it is pure emotion. Anyone who has known the sorrows of love – in other words everyone – will find in it the inner sound of heartache".
