False Spring

Yesterday, after lunch, I sat at the piano and played my favourite Schubert song, 'Frühlingsglaube'. As so often with Schubert, there's something double-edged about his setting of Johann Ludwig Uhland's poem. The promise that winter will pass and that spring will come, more fecund than ever, is undercut by the gently descending line within the piano accompaniment. It's a sad faith in spring if a faith at all.

It was a particularly lovely day yesterday. The sun was shining, the snowdrops flapped in the breeze and there was a palpable promise of a new season. How cruel then that it was only an imago, according to the old English song: 'If Candlemas be fair and bright, Come, Winter, have another flight; If Candlemas brings clouds and rain, Go Winter, and come not again.' The Scots back up such pessimism with their claim that, 'If Candlemas Day is bright and clear, There'll be two winters in the year.'

For all our faith in spring, propped up by the scent of hyacinths and forced-growth daffodils, the season is still a long way off. Rather than Uhland's poem, Wilhelm Müller's 'Frühlingstraum' from Winterreise seems more apt:

Doch an den Fensterscheiben
Wer malte die Blätter da?
Ihr lacht wohl über den Träumer,
Der Blumen im Winter sah?

[But who painted those leaves
On the window-panes?
Are you mocking the dreamer
Who saw flowers in winter?]

For those more realistic readers among you, there are two rather tempting accounts of Winterreise on the way. One is from Jonas Kaufmann with Helmut Deutsch at the piano, the other is sung by Gerald Finley with accompanist Julius Drake. And, if you were lucky enough to grab a ticket, Jonas Kaufmann's performing Schubert's cycle at the Royal Opera House in April, by which time winter will hopefully be a thing of the past... but at least we have a soundtrack to get us through the second winter, if or when it comes.

Tweet