Winterreise for String Quartet

In his groundbreaking Lieder cycle Winterreise, Franz Schubert brought to the fore the dark side of the yearning for happiness that channels into obsessions, fears, a sense of danger, feelings of forlornness, bleakness and exposure in hitherto unknown dimensions and with a sense of urgency. His instrumental-like songs can be

viewed as the dissolution of Classical genre boundaries. Repetitions that create, rather like pauses, both stasis and endlessness, facilitate the present as both an experience and a consolidation of existence. Something that initially one can barely imagine soon develops into an addictive nature: we begin to understand this aural picture even without the singing - a true work of art. A kind of intellectual sorrow pervades the richly varied treatment.