SOURCE: "Die Winterreise: The Secret of the Cycle's Appeal," Mosaic XV, No. 1, Winter, 1982, pp. 41-52.

In the following essay, Baumann and Luetgert analyze Die Winterreise in terms of the "stages of dying" outlined in the book entitled Death and Dying by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross."

Many musicologists consider Franz Schubert's Die Winterreise, a song cycle based on the lyrics of Wilhelm Müller, to be the greatest masterpiece of its genre. The composition is so familiar that Thomas Mann incorporated a song from it ("Der Lindenbaum" also known as "Am Brunnen vor dem Tore") as a musical reference in the closing scenes of his Magic Mountain (1924). Russian Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn used the opening song ("Gute Nacht") as a kind of musical leitmotif in his 1960 drama Candle in the Wind. In each of these twentieth-century works, the protagonist dies while singing an emotional song from this nineteenth-century song...