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| (c) Jean-Pierre Maurin |
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A WINTER JOURNEY
What makes Schubert’s piece so moving is its ambivalence : the emotion comes from the conjunction between a popular theme, almost cheerful, and a play with tonalities which makes it dark. This cheerfulness with dark colors gives the climate of A Winter Journey.
The creation of A Winter Journey helps to question the baroque musical and choreographic heritage in the pre-romantic period. It seems that there was no rupture but a soft evolution. The strong cycles such as A Winter Journey of Schubert are composed with a succession of simple and regular tunes. These strophes’ forms evoque the baroque dances’ structures, and the movement still seems to be at the origin of the music’s rythmic writing. Here, the march, recurrent in the Winterreise, becomes the symbol of a quest.
The seven dancers and the two musicians (a barytone and a pianist) form a friendly group such as the « Schubertiades » were ; an exclusive audience of Schubert’s work in the master’s lifetime. They tell a no-hero-story. They travel together in e faery land called « music » that initiates the journey materialized by the mobility of the piano. Its symbolic journey transforms the theatrical and choreographic space.
The abstraction of this musical journey opens the imaginary and helps for the removal of the lyrics’ narration. A nostalgic climate settles, playing with the ambivalence of a soft colors’ choreography, as well as with a music which inexorably goes to obscur lands.
Intentions de la chorégraphe
" Schubert was surely a double nature. His Viennese cheerfulness was ennobled by a trait of deep melancholy. So he was : inwardly poet whereas externally he seemed a sort of jovial fellow. And as people mostly judge on the external appearance and because this one did not fit to the usual and traditional savoir-faire in society, the daily companion could seem to some people much better than the bad-polished bard of the Müllerlieder or of the Winterreise."
Bauernfeld
Franz Schubert, Brigitte Massin, Paris, Edition Fayard, 1993, p. 259
"In these Frebruary days that Schubert partly devoted to the composition of A Winter Journey, the society is intense in the group of the Schubertians. In this period that precedes the Lent, bals are numerous, parties take place either in Schober’s place, or in Spam’s, always in the center of these sorts of meetings. Man danses, man gets the rap, man eats small saussages."
Franz Schubert, op. cit., p. 373
« And for the second time, I walked elsewhere and, my heart heavy with the infinite love for those who ignored it, I wandered again in a far land. During years and years, I sang lieder. If I wanted to sing love, it would be transformed for me into pain. And if I wanted to sing only pain again, it would be transformed for me into love. So was I, shared betweend love and pain ». |
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