Great masterpiece in the history of music and landmark of German Lied, Winterreise was composed by Franz Schubert one year before he died. The composer is only thirty when he writes this score. He is experiencing a particularly prolific period, as if his inspiration was freeing itself after the death of the great Ludwig van Beethoven, who was leading the musical life in Vienna.

This condensed work is made of twenty-four melodies for voice and piano. It is based on dark and melancholic poems by Wilhelm Müller, a writer whose poems Schubert already set to music: Die schöne Müllerin (The Fair Miller-maid). The psychological range of those Lieder is complex, with a unique and strong sadness. With a deep interiority, this Winter Journey depicts in two parts the wandering of a young man, who has no luck in love, in a frozen landscape. Nature, which is represented motionless and desolate, expresses the wrench of the individual and his despair.

Schubert develops musically this lonely journey with repetitive rhythms and low colors. Then the poem acquires a metaphysical dimension: the winter journey ends with the image of an old hurdy-gurdy player, who personifies Death.

The famous South African artist William Kentridge created a visual journey with videos (animation, collage, montage) which is a poetic counterpoint to the interpretation by Matthias Goerne, the most acclaimed Lied singer today.