Winterreise and the Lamp: On Inheriting a Tradition

Every song-cycle about a man walking into the dark is in conversation with one other work, whether it wants to be or not: Schubert’s Winterreise. The wanderer, the snow, the linden tree, the hurdy-gurdy man at the edge of town — these are not just images but a grammar, and to write a cycle of solitary descent at all is to write in that grammar.

I have never tried to escape it. Das Verlöschen is a winter journey by another name: not a man crossing a frozen landscape but a man crossing a series of dying lights, which amounts to the same loneliness. What Schubert gave the form, and what I have tried to keep, is the refusal to console. The wanderer is not redeemed at the end of Winterreise. He simply keeps walking. My cycle ends the same way — not with a resolution but with a withheld one.

Between Schubert and now stands Mahler, who taught the song-cycle to breathe orchestrally — Das Lied von der Erde, the Kindertotenlieder — and who showed that a farewell could last half an hour and still feel too short. The long orchestral works in this catalogue, the symphonies and the choral summit that closes it, owe him everything: the terraced climbs, the brass that arrives like weather, the ending that asks a question instead of answering one.

To inherit a tradition is not to repeat it. It is to keep the one thing it knew that the present has forgotten — here, that grief does not need to be resolved to be made beautiful — and to find your own dark to walk into. Mine happens to be lit by candles.