Winterreise

Worlds and eras collide when William Kentridge adapts Franz Schubert’s cycle “Winterreise”: here the sparse images of German Romanticism, there the South African veld; here Schubert’s fictional landscape of death, there South Africa’s actual history. Initially, Kentridge was looking for music for fragments of his animation films. He decided on “Winterreise”, which he had often heard at his childhood home in Johannesburg. Together with Matthias Goerne (baritone) and Markus Hinterhäuser (piano), he developed a very special lieder recital: In addition to six of his well-known animation films, he adapted further fragments and produced six new films for the 24 lieder. We will hear and see “Winterreise” in a setting that is at once a wall in his studio and a projection surface.