A portrait in landscape

Winterreise is a portrait in landscape, writes Lindy Hume, who directs A Winter's Journey. In this version, the luminous and familiar Australian landscapes of Fred Williams offer the wanderer no more comfort than the snowy European panoramas evoked by Schubert and Müller. By surrounding this Romantic-era winter journey with Williams’ 20th-century images, we make no attempt to transplant the action from northern to southern hemisphere; rather, we aim to celebrate the timelessness and universality of Schubert’s great work. 

The description ’song cycle’ suits Schubert’s Winterreise. The wanderer’s obsessive journeying through these 24 songs leads him not to an end but rather an inescapable return to the beginning. In the final, exhausted stanza he invites the shabby organ-grinder – perhaps his alter-ego? – to wander alongside, accompanying his song. This sense of an unending journey underpins the monodrama, offering a portal to its staged performance and an insight into the wanderer’s relationship with the audience. 

The narrative of Winterreise is in the mind of the wanderer. The randomness of the song sequence makes his storytelling erratic, confessional, compulsive. He needs us to try and understand his outsider mind. He seeks our empathy for his inner struggles, yet is unapologetic about his strange choices, his pain, his outbursts, his odd behaviour, all set against an indifferent landscape. This is indeed a troubled man, burning with bitterness and shame at society’s rejection, at being pitied by his former lover’s family. As he walks, he talks to the wind, the ice, the trees, the frozen river, his tears and – constantly – to his own heart. The imagery he conjures up is disturbing: the town’s ’crows’ throwing snowballs and hailstones at him; his own disembodied heart under the river ice. He is fascinated by a ’wonderful’ crow wheeling overhead and is darkly amused at the prospect of being eaten as carrion. There is an anarchic wildness in his solitude yet, in contrast, tenderness in his song to the linden tree, and rapture in the prayer-like ’Die Nebensonnen’. 

A Winter’s Journey tours nationally in 2026, pairing Schubert’s Winterreise with the evocative landscapes of Fred Williams, in a staging by Lindy Hume with videography by David Bergman.