THE LIBRARY | SONGS

Winterreise begins at the end, with the protagonist leaving his love in the night while she sleeps. The text is light on the details of what exactly happened in this relationship, besides that it ended in this abrupt way.  Throughout the work the piano accompaniment represents the gait of our unnamed protagonist.  Here it is almost march-like to show the purposefulness with which he sets out on his journey. Two expressive gestures are key to this song.  The first are the Fortepianos, which mark the music at key moments.  They are pangs of emotion that break through the otherwise stoic feeling of this song.  The second is the shift between Major and minor.  In each verse such a shift occurs in the penultimate lines of text where there is always a shift in the mood of the text.  The structure of each verse is reflected in the form of the song as a whole, with the entire last verse shifting abruptly to the major before returning somberly to the original minor key for the postlude.