Schuberts „Winterreise“

„As a stranger I arrived here“. Yes. But who is „I“? A lonesome wanderer about 200 years ago, who makes his way through a winter landscape after the dashing of his hopes in unrequited love? Franz Schubert’s „Winterreise“ is based upon poems by Wilhelm Müller and was composed in 1827 in a time following the years after Austrian State Chancellor Metternich’s conservative restorationist policy in 1815. A sense of collective resignation is very subtly expressed: as a private romantic drama. With his “compositorial interpretation” in 1993, Hans Zender attempted to make the force of the original composition perceptible again to a contemporary audience. In 2020, the Dutch video artist Aernout Mik takes it up by adding a further dimension. In his production, he focuses on the dissolution of the individual between the virtual and the real world which for Mik represents modern man’s “Winterreise”.