Alex Ross on "Winterreise"

"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. … 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 … that he was spending his days listening alone to 'Winterreise.' … The British director Katie Mitchell, in collaboration with the tenor Mark Padmore, the actor Stephen Dillane, and the pianist Andrew West, had the excellent idea of creating a theatre piece around Beckett’s intense relationship with 'Winterreise,' weaving his poetry and prose into a live performance of the cycle. … Padmore is one of the most distinctive lyric singers on the contemporary scene—he has recorded a starkly lovely 'Winterreise,' with Paul Lewis at the piano, for the Harmonia Mundi label" ("Musical Events," New Yorker, 1/4/10).