Film Night: Schubert’s Winterreise

Many of the programs we’ve shared through the Maine Jung Center explore what we might call the Deep Descent: a chthonic journey into the depths, the underworld, the unconscious.

But do we ever truly allow ourselves to experience it?

Can we? May we?

Do we meet it as a realm, filled with presences—not just metaphors, but Things?

Franz Schubert (1797–1828) did so in one of his final works. Winterreise (Winter’s Journey) is a stark and aching song cycle of exile, rejection, and confrontation with the world’s frozen face.

The traveler has been banished from Home, from Love, and now encounters the once-familiar landmarks of his life, transformed into mocking phantoms.

Only poetry can bear this kind of soul-weight.

And only music can amplify it in a way that makes us feel what cannot be said.

Let us go together, you and I, into this 24-song journey and see where it takes us.

The evening will feature a filmed recital by distinguished tenor and scholar Ian Bostridge, with piano accompaniment, followed by brief remarks from Bostridge himself based on his research into the work’s psychological and historical layers.