Nowhere Bound Poem by gershon hepner

I’m closer to Franz Schubert than
to any other man, like Sam.
Though nowhere bound, a Leiermann
who’s organ free, I am
quite unprepared for winter or
the lovely shepherdess
whom I in good times waited for,
but now care for far less
than for a place to lay my head
upon the frozen ground,
like Schubert prematurely dead,
like Beckett nowhere bound.

Inspired by Alex Ross’s review of a performance of Schubert’s “Die Winterreise, ” sung by Mark Padmore with intercalation of short plays by Samuel Beckett (“Nowhere Bound: A Night of schuber and Beckett, ” The New Yorker, January 4,2010) :
Schubert’s “Winterreise, ” twenty-four numbingly beautiful songs on texts by Wilhelm Müller, opens with the lines “I came here as a stranger / A stranger I depart.” The words seem to be a typical specimen of Romantic angst, but Schubert transforms them into a kind of philosophical motto. The first song, “Gute Nacht, ” is in walking rhythm, with accents implying a determined stride. It is in D minor, the iconic tragic key of Mozart and Beethoven, although the steady pace suggests that tragedy has been internalized, made into a way of life. And the principal melody, which moves in steeply descending phrases, is positioned with extraordinary precision between ancient balladry and the questing spirit of the art-song tradition, which Schubert more or less invented. The absence of conventional sentiment is what frees the song from its Romantic context and takes it into the eternal present. The contentment of a solitary winter stroll mixes with a deeper, more abstract dread—that of a man proceeding through life in a disaffected trance, counting off the steps toward death. The musicologist Karol Berger has claimed, boldly but plausibly, that Schubert’s cycle is “our civilization’s greatest poem of existential estrangement and isolation.”
Berger mentions Samuel Beckett in the same breath as Schubert, and he is hardly the only commentator to do so. “Winterreise, ” or “Winter Journey, ” unfolds like a Beckett play, in a landscape as vivid as it is vague. A man is walking out of a village on a snowy road, lamenting that his beloved has spurned him. He watches a weathervane spin, feels tears freezing on his face, looks for the woman’s footprints, stands by a linden tree where he once carved words of love. A river flowing beneath a crust of ice reminds him of a heart beating inside a cold body. His soles burn. A will-o’-the-wisp leads him astray. He sleeps in a charcoal burner’s cottage. He dreams of spring and wakes to cawing ravens. Events grow stranger: the blowing of a post horn makes him hope for a letter, even though he is of no address; a crow flies around his head; a fluttering leaf appears to hold his fate in the balance. He returns to the village, where dogs bark and rattle their chains. Then he returns to the road, avoiding all signposts to familiar places. He comes upon a graveyard, which he pictures as an inn of eternal rest. There is no vacancy. He walks on. A burst of courage: “Lamenting is for fools.” Mock suns in the sky. Longing for night. Finally, in “Der Leiermann, ” he meets an ancient organ-grinder, who plays a tune for no one and “lets it all go on as it will.”
Beckett himself recognized the kinship. A music lover and an amateur pianist, he felt closer to Schubert than to any other composer. Beckett’s radio play “All That Fall” begins with the strains of “Death and the Maiden.” The teleplay “Nacht und Träume” employs a fragment of the Schubert song. The writer once reported to his cousin John Beckett that he was spending his days listening alone to “Winterreise”—“shivering through the grim journey again.” His final play, “What Where, ” ends with an allusion to the cycle
It is winter.
Without journey.
Time passes.
That is all.
Make sense who may.
I switch off.
Those lines are almost a précis of the music itself. On some level, there is no journey, no movement; the cycle keeps circling back to the same textures and motifs. “Wegweiser, ” the song of the signposts, echoes the ambling tempo, the repeating chords, and the obstinate one-note patterns of “Gute Nacht.” The wanderer always finds himself on the same road out of the same village, nowhere bound.

1/8/10