Next week, I will be joined the wonderful pianist Sue Goessling to perform a couple of recitals on board the Carnival Luminosa, as part of the 2024 BRAVO Cruise of the Performing Arts. One recital will be a mix of Chinese and English language songs (art music and popular song), showcasing the musical and cultural cross-pollination over the 20th century. The other will be a staged version of Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise! Not your ordinary cruise ship fare, I grant you, but variety is the spice of life!

After Snow, by Yan Wenliiang (1893-1988). This painting encapsulates my entire program for the cruise - a Chinese painting, influenced by western style, depicting the beautiful melancholy of a winter's journey.

Schubert’s “Winter’s Journey” is truly a dark night of the soul. Written in 1828 while the composer was dying of syphilis, the music is imbued with the crystalline grief that only one facing their own mortality could truly understand. “No one can sing or hear these songs and not be moved to the heart”, said the Wiener Theaterzeitung review of the premiere performance.

When I first heard Winterreise at 16 years old, I loved it with the intense fervour of a teenage emo classical music enthusiast. And yet, if I’m truly honest with myself, I found it difficult to focus my attention beyond about eight songs (there are 24 in total). I mostly chalked this up to my own inadequacies, both as a listener and as a cultured human being. This is a common thought pattern for those with a pretense to cultural appreciation(!).

Yet, this inability to focus during the cycle continued to gnaw at me. Why could I only sustain full-blooded attention up to Rückblick (song 8), before being lulled into a misty torpor of general sadness, until the horn calls of Die Post (song 13) momentarily snapped me into the present? But then it was on to more very noble German moroseness until the unexpected energy of Mut (song 22) roused my attention, signalling that we’re nearly up to Schubert’s stunning and eldritch finale Der Leiermann (song 24). Individually, these songs knocked my little cotton socks off – but as an entire cycle, I found myself drifting in a sea of unfocussed sadness.

Eventually, I came to realise that the issue is one of dramatics. The cycle begins sadly, then unfolds into more sadness, then by journey’s end an hour later, the mood is (you guessed it!) … very sad. Traditionally, the dramatic arc has been characterised as beginning with sadness, moving on to resignation, and ending with “madness”. Perhaps these shades of cold and grey are too subtle for me. Ultimately, this is not enough of an arc to sustain my undifferentiated attention.

And yet, this traditional view seems at odds with Wilhelm Müller’s poetry. There is an extravagance to the protagonist’s sadness in the early cycle, that seems to have been either missed in translation, or lost to the starched-collar seriousness of established canon repertoire. To me, Müller seems to be demonstrating a fierce intention to be as sad as possible.

Take, for example, this excerpt from Gefrorne Tränen (Frozen Tears):

Frozen tears fall from my cheeks

How did I not notice I’ve been crying?

Oh tears, my tears, are you so luke-warm

that you could freeze into ice-blocks like the cold dew of morning?

Or this verse from Erstarrung (Numbness):

I want to kiss the ground,

force myself through ice and snow

with hot tears till I see the earth.

This could be straight out of your high school diary, right? There is real melodrama here. Perhaps it rang true in 1828 at the height of European romanticism, but in 2024 it seems a little performative.

This was the key to unlocking the cycle for me: what could make sense of such extravagant sadness?

The answer was to view Winterreise through the prism of toxic masculinity.

The first clue was the undercurrent of misogyny and incel-flavoured creepiness of the protagonist. It has long been observed that the protagonist’s love object is rendered as utterly generic. She is given no distinguishing characteristics or personality, and is notable only for the fact that she has rejected the protagonist’s romantic advances. It’s interesting to note that after the tender declarations of love in song 1 - Gute Nacht (Good Night), we launch immediately into some aggressive misogyny in song 2 - Die Wetterfahne (The Weather Vane):

He should have noticed it earlier –

the sign stuck to the house –

then he would never have sought

the image of a faithful woman here.

Schubert has the singer spit the words out in some of the most angular music of the cycle. This is not nobility. And it is certainly not noble to sneak up in the middle of the night to the home of the girl who broke up with you and write “Good Night” on her front door! Creepy, much?!

Then there is this extravagant sadness, epitomised by the frozen tears, quoted above. If we accept that this emotional expression is a bit OTT, it becomes a little disingenuous, and could be read as a kind of weaponised sadness.

“Weaponised emotion is when a person uses their emotional reactions to try to manipulate or control someone else’s behaviours and emotions,” says Dr Chris Pepping, Associate Professor of Psychology at Griffith University in a recent article.

To me, the protagonist is showing a sheer determination to be as depressed and sad as possible in the early cycle, and that this is an attempt to manipulate of the beloved into ‘rescuing’ him. He is forcing her to put her needs aside and tend to his more ‘pressing’ ones – i.e. his total inability to cope. In Australian masculine culture, this kind of weaponised emotion often involves alcohol-abuse and self-destructive behaviours. It is manipulative, and subtly abusive.

These ideas have informed my staging of the early parts of Winterreise for the BRAVO Cruise.

However, all this is not to say that the protagonist is merely an unsympathetic villain. Dr Pepping notes that weaponised emotion “can be a deliberate thing that people do, but people can also be somewhat unaware that they are using their emotional responses to manipulate their environment.” And the narrow practices of traditional masculinity in this country have little to offer by way of self-soothing or self-regulation. Likewise, there little room for enough self-love to allow yourself to grieve, process, learn and move on. If alcohol and “whatever bro, I’m good” can’t cut it, what is a “man’s man” left to do, but utterly fall apart until he gets what he wants?

Here, in Winterreise, the beloved does not come to the protagonist’s aid. And so he is left to journey deeper into the wilderness, where his performative sadness gives way to genuine torment and emotional instability. This leads to him becoming homeless and, eventually, seriously mentally ill, without a support network around him.

To me, this is a much more tragic arc, which honours the truth and depth in Schubert’s exquisite music.