Winterreise

Franz Schuberts Winterreise is one of the masterpieces in the history of music and a milestone in the development of the German Lied. The cycle is sung by the German baritone Matthias Goerne, of whom Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant wrote: 'Only a few singers have studied Franz Schubert's songs so extensively as Matthias Goerne.' Goerne will be accompanied by pianist Markus Hinterhäuser.

Schubert completed his song cycle Winterreise in 1827, a year before his untimely death. Schubert was 30 years old and at a very productive stage in his career, as if he had been set free by the death of the great Beethoven, who had dominated the musical life in Vienna for so long. He wrote to a friend after having finished the cycle: 'Please come to Schober today. I will sing you a cycle of harrowing songs. I'm very curious as to what you think of them. They have had a greater impact on me than any other songs I've written.' The Winterreise consists of 24 songs based on the dark, melancholic poems by Wilhelm Müller, a poet whose work Schubert had previously set to music in his Die schöne Müllerin.

With a complex psychological scope, the Winterreise tells the tale of a young man who has been rejected by the one he loves and starts to wander through a wintry landscape at night, leaving civilisation behind. The inert and desolate image of nature gives expression to the despair of the lost soul.

For this production of the Winterreise the great South-African artist William Kentridge created a visual journey of twenty-four videos featuring animations and collages which act as a poetic, visual counterpart to Matthias Goerne's and Markus Hinterhäuser's interpretation of Schuberts Lieder cycle. Kentridge's dynamically weightless and elegant animations and their subtle humour are only seemingly in contradiction to the melancholy of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise. The music becomes visible, the animated pictures become audible.

Wiliam Kentridge has been acquainted with Winterreise from a young age; his father used to play a recording by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore.

Kentridge first featured at the Holland Festival in 2010 with Telegrams from the Nose set to music by the French composer François Sarhan. In 2012 he returned with Refuse the hour, an opera playing with the notion of time. Kentridge is known throughout the world for his art and his work in opera – his directions have included Mozart's Die Zauberflöte and Monteverdi's Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria – but he's most famous for his drawings and animations. According to De Volkskrant: 'Whoever has seen his drawings before, will never forget them, not because of their story or their theme, but because of the style of his animations.

Kentridge's signature is defined by soft lines in charcoal, blurred at the edge, always in black with sometimes a little bit of red. In his animations he literally shows the genesis of his drawings. Instead of using keyframes and inbetween frames, which make for smooth transitions, he works within the keyframe itself with eraser and pencil, creating an effect which makes the movement seem less fluent and causes the viewer to be more aware that he's watching a series of images through time. The eraser marks reveal the past, that which has just been changed, to the viewer. In this way, he gives his animations a sense of fading memory or the passing of time; they grapple with what is not said, what remains suppressed but can easily be felt.