Listening to Winterreise

I listened this afternoon to Schubert's Winterreise (sung this time by Christine Schäffer). A young man, rejected in love, travels from society, from sanity, into the desolation. There is no hope anywhere in the cycle, nothing but the most intense despair over the human condition. There's no concession to optimism, only a ruthless inevitabliity. The music is by a young composer who knew himself to be dying of a terrible disease.

This music ought by any rational analysis to be quite unbearable: but it's not. It's deeply emotional but somehow very positive.

Is this the greatest music ever written? I think of Bach, but Bach was writing solely for the glory of a God I don't believe in (and yet his music still speaks to me). Perhaps no music other than Winterreise so fully accepts the hopelessness of life in a godless universe and makes it tolerable.

Drüben hinterm Dorfe
Steht ein Leiermann,
Und mit starren Fingern
Dreht er, was er kann.

Barfuß auf dem Eise
Schwankt er hin und her;
Und sein kleiner Teller
Bleibt ihm immer leer.

Keiner mag ihn hören,
Keiner sieht ihn an;
Und die Hunde brummen
Um den alten Mann.

Und er läßt es gehen
Alles, wie es will,
Dreht, und seine Leier
Steht ihm nimmer still.

Wunderlicher Alter,
Soll ich mit dir gehn?
Willst zu meinen Liedern
Deine Leier drehn?