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One of the greatest treasures in New York's Morgan Library collection, and indeed in any collection of music manuscripts anywhere in the world, is the handwritten working manuscripts of Franz Schubert's great and final song cycle Winterreise. Composed in 1827, the last year of his life, it describes a poet's journey through winter snows after being rejected by his lover. However the gathering darkness and the searching introspection make it a far more compelling experience for audiences, including those who heard it first, played and sung by the composer himself shortly before his death, than that simple precis suggests.
This edition of Tales from the Stave was recorded well before Covid 19 brought the closure of museums and libraries and so Clemency Burton Hill was joined at The Morgan by the tenor Rufus Muller and the pianist Inon Banatan as well as the scholar Marjorie Hirsch. What they reveal is the striving of a composer with a huge capacity for melodic brilliance matched here by a desire to make the poetry by Wilhelm Muller tell in every line. There are times when it appears to flow easily and others when there's a tortured sense of a man in a hurry. That, of course, is a reality. He had been diagnosed with syphilis and although he didn't suffer the ignominies that disease brought to many, his end coming swiftly, he was acutely aware that these songs would be amongst his last.

Producer, Tom Alban