Harmonia, polifonia czy zgrzytliwy dysonans? O samotności w Winterreise Wilhelma Müllera, Franza Schuberta i Stanisława Barańczaka

Abstract

Harmony, polyphony or a jarring dissonance? On loneliness in Müller, Schubert and Baranczak's „Winterreise”

In the article Harmony, polyphony or a grapy dissonance? About loneliness in Müller, Schubert and Baranczak's ‘Winterreise’, Anna Leśniewska juxtaposes different views on the process of experiencing the state of loneliness and despair: an exalted Werther romantic confronted with the cold-hearted rationalism of a 20th century cosmopolitan. The first stance is presented in Winterreise, a cycle of songs by Franz Schubert from 1827 to the lyrics of Wilhelm Müller, which is an extremely expressive demonstration of man's existential problems in the 1820s – including loneliness, a crisis of subjectivity, the failure of love, a sense of individual isolation, and attempts to gradually accept the approaching death without a certainty of existence of afterlife. The romantic view is contrasted with the poetic counterfactual Winter Journey. Poems to the music by Franz Schubert (Podróż zimowa. Wiersze do muzyki Franza Schuberta) written by Stanisław Barańczak in 1994 – a volume of poems strongly associated with Schubert's songs through explicit and implicit references, but remaining an autonomous creation.
These two incompatible epochs condition the development of completely different crises related to an individual's infirmity towards the problem of loneliness, his social maladjustment and isolation caused by it, and his doubts about the meaning of human existence in the sense of metaphysical emptiness. Assuming a comparative perspective, one can feel a constant tension between Winterreise and Winter Journey. Evidently, Barańczak's Journey is an idiosyncratic response to the 19th century work, but the comparison of these shots and the study of their interrelations is made possible by the musical layer – the compositions of Franz Schubert – that links the two works and creates the "effect of mutual references in the Müller-Schubert-Barańczak triangle" described by Anna Węgrzyniakowa. Barańczak's Winter Journey, considered as a poetic counterfactual, grants a possibility of approaching the three texts comparatively; in this way, it allows us to confront Müller's and Barańczak's visions to answer the questions formulated by men of the 19th and late 20th centuries, accompanied by Schubert's compositions.