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Michael Besack:
Winterreise: Reflections on a winter journey,
Regent Press, Oakland, 1998
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I’m at a loss to
find words to adequately describe this book, though ‘incomprehensible’,
‘strange’, ‘odd’ and ‘peculiar’ spring
to mind. For the first time in my life a Schubert book has left me
feeling totally inadequate. There is a story, perhaps apocryphal,
that Albert Einstein’s mother was asked her opinion on her son’s
book on the special theory of relativity. Her reply was that she
understood all the words, but found the sentences rather difficult.
This book left me feeling pretty much the same, except that I
struggled with some of the words as well.
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It is the second volume in the series
'Esoteric journeys through Poetry and Song', the first volume being
entitled Vocal Arts: The Hermeneutic Dimension. It is
an analysis of Winterreise (more so the poetry than
the song cycle), which claims that its deepest roots drill down to
ancient Greece and feed on a long forgotten esoteric tradition.
Apparently, "The esoteric elements scattered throughout this
composition point to a sophisticated awareness of the hermetic
symbolism associated with ancient journeys".
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The first chapter on Interpretation
seems to the uninitiated such as myself, to be a rambling discourse
on the esoteric, alchemy, Freemasonry, mythology and the hermetic
spiral. The next chapter, on Critical Perspectives, gives
background information on Müller and the cycle, and the
following chapter, Franz Schubert and the Viennese Connection
treats Schubert similarly. The Passions of Wilhelm Müller,
which follows, provides a reasonably comprehensible positioning of
Besack’s main point: that the explanation of Winterreise
lies in accepting that Müller continued to love Luise Hensel
even after his marriage to Adelheid von Basedow, and the cycle is
full of coded references to this.
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The next chapter is a
commentary on the poems themselves. These vary from several pages,
to a single paragraph (Einsamkeit). In Der
Leiermann, we are told that the organ grinder is Saturn, AND
is the mill owner and thus father of Die schöne Müllerin.
Finally, and totally unexpectedly considering what has gone before,
we have the poems themselves with an English (or, rather, American)
translation in doggerel of the worst kind. Thus the first verse of
Frühlingstraum is given as:
I
dreamed of beautiful daisies
which often bloom in May
I
dreamed of green growing prairies
Of birdsong merry and gay.
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I’ve thought of another
appropriate word: weird.
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© Richard Morris September 1998 |
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