Winter Woes: Dancing to Schubert in Berlin

Anglophone theatre people wish each other good luck (or better, anti-bad luck) with the phrase “break a leg.” The Germans double the violence: “Hals- und Beinbruch” — break your neck and your leg, not that injuring the latter is really relevant after you’ve broken the former.

I tried not to break either body part, or any other for that matter, as I biked across frigid Berlin to a choreographed and orchestrated interpretation of Franz Schubert’s chilling and tormented cycle of two dozen songs, Winterreise, staged by the Staatsballett. The city’s unsalted sidewalks and bike paths were layered with ice, in some vast stretches mirror-smooth, in other patches sharp-edged and rutted.

As I cycled to the cycle, I thought of myself breaking a neck and a leg, and hoped the dancers were saying that to each other and therefore not doing either.

The weather conditions were right for Schubert’s wintry Art, if only one could arrive safely for the performance: through the illuminated Brandenburg Gate; alongside the adjacent French Embassy, where a dozen heads visible in a picture window were conferencing, probably about Putin or Trump or both; down the city’s grand boulevard, Unter den Linden, past the darkened Russian Embassy and the Berlin State Library and beneath the equestrian statue of Frederick the Great to the opera house (not the original building, but a post-war reconstruction, recently restored) that the musical monarch had built nearly 300 years ago.

Winterreise is a rural, not an urban journey. In Wilhelm Müller’s 1824 poetry collection of that title, from which Schubert drew the texts for his set of songs, there are no sidewalks or cycle paths, no squadrons of e-bike food deliverers, no angry cars or hulking buses. In Winterreise, deer tracks meander across white fields. The narrator vainly seeks beneath the snow a footprint left in what was once a green meadow by the beloved who has spurned him. Hot tears fall into motionless streams that, when thawed in spring, will carry away the pathetic drops. Winterreise was premiered in Vienna in freezing January of 1828. Schubert died at thirty-one as the next winter set in.

German songs—Lieder—make for a lonely genre. A solo singer stands on a stage with a lone pianist setting the scene, commenting on the imagery, emphasizing and coloring the text, at other times searching for hidden meanings and troubling unconscious thoughts. When not singing, the singer chews the scenery, searching for somewhere to look, something to do — which also and always means something not to do. There is an art to not falling through the ice of these accompanied silences.

It is a literally breathtaking artistic journey in itself to transform a duo (ten fingers and one voice) into some forty dancers and a chamber orchestra of like number, with strings, winds, brass, harp, percussion, and the occasionally ghostly utterance of a sampled Schubert piano calling up from the pit as if from the cold and out of the past.

This visionary musical reimagining, or better re-sounding, of Winterreise is a work from 1992 by opera conductor and composer Hans Zender, who died in 2019. He called it a reinterpretation, and it is much more than simply an orchestration of Schubert’s piano part, whose many textures, interior melodies, and shifting harmonies lend themselves to instrumental profiling. But Zender goes much farther and deeper, remaining true to his source also by dissecting and distorting it.

A quarter century later, Zender’s multi-dimensioned musical tableau spurred Christian Spuck to create enigmatically abstract but powerfully expressive choreography that filled the voiceless spaces, and even many of the gaps between songs, with bodies in sometimes swirling, frenetic motion and in other moments in austere, wrenching stasis.

A product of the vibrant, progressive dance culture of Stuttgart, Spuck has been intendant at the Berlin State Ballet since 2023, after a decade as artistic head in Zurich. Across several decades, he has demonstrated remarkable ability to take on canonic works of European art, from Monteverdi to Flaubert to Schubert. The present run of performances of Spuck’s Winterreise reheats (necessary in these frozen weeks) the ballet premiered in Zurich in 2018. Here in Berlin, Spuck’s Gesamtkunstwerk imprints his artistic program on this brilliant dance company, marked by technical confidence, individual dynamism and nuance, and a palpable sense of shared artistic mission.

This is Romantic music of failed romantic love and the ensuing attempt at escape and toward self-annihilation in the face of winter. And so it makes paradoxical sense that Spuck’s is often a choreography of male-female pairs, their forms revolving through each other’s arms and around each other’s legs, tessellating, resisting, conforming. Fingers splay and booted feet flex. The poise and elegance of classical arabesques and tendues are shot through with shivers and sudden contortions and anti-classical angles. Seemingly frictionless pirouettes refuse to be shackled by the past and reflexively deform. These visions seem both indifferent to, yet also in uncanny dialogue with, the present pain and anguished reveries of the poetry and music. The prevailing sense of distance and poise is brightened by flashes of mimesis, as in the twirling virtuosity of the solo male dancer in “Rückblick” (Retrospect), ecstatic in his agony: “Es brennt mir unter beiden Sohlen, / Tret’ ich auch schon auf Eis und Schnee” — It is burning hot under both my feet, / though I am walking on ice and snow.

Figures—some stooped, others resolutely erect; some masked, others carrying bundles of sticks — walk slowly along implacable gray walls that pronounce Nature and Love dead. Bodies emerge from a hidden trench in the stage, as if from a grave. Mouths gape in the imaginary wind unleashed by music and word. Black costumes predominate, though there were scant skin-colored outfits and the occasional shirtless men, classical statuary come to life in cold-free winter. Occasionally snow flurries from above or even from inside tight-fitting jackets, as in the penultimate song “Mut” (Courage).

The props are few, mostly inscrutable. An ominous stuffed crow is held by one of the dancers in the still formation that assembles on the stage at the start, as the orchestra fumbles toward inchoate utterance. The bird reappears as one of the walking humans, this time wearing long black claws for gloves and a beaked mask. No bird is seen as the crows throw snowballs at the wanderer in “Rückblick.” A solitary black bird stalks him from above in the fifteenth song, “Die Krähe” (The Crow), biding his aerial time, thinks the narrator, until he can feast as his human carrion. The stuffed crows come back in the last song for the most densely structured and peopled choreography in the cycle’s final song, “Der Leiermann” (The Hurdy-Gurdy Player), carried and placed on the boards by the near-nude ensemble that emerges from below. From amidst this display of regenerative summer flesh amongst deathly black feathers and black blindfolds, tenor Mauro Peter sang one of the most devastating, self-referential accounts of music and approaching death in all of art:

Against Zender’s addled modulations and freaky feedback loops that transform Schubert’s original monotone from self-pity into nightmare, Peter’s voice remained resolute, full of ache and beauty and strength—a voice not of redemption but of resignation. As the orchestra rode its own eery updrafts into oblivion, the dancing coalesced toward calm, even serenity.

No one on stage was clad for the poetry’s weather, nor that outside the Berlin State Opera House that bitter night. Inside and warm, necks unbowed and unbroken, last night’s audience remained enraptured for the uncanny spectacle’s 100 minutes without intermission, calling the ensemble back many times with a (mostly) standing ovation. Berlin audiences rise reluctantly, whatever the weather, but this multi-sensory Art moved them, warmed and chilled them.

(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)