Winterreise: winter journey

IN OCTOBER 1827 the 30-year-old Franz Schubert finished his cycle of twenty-four songs, Winterreise (Winter Journey), based on the poems of Wilhelm Müller. Just over a year later he was dead possibly from tertiary syphilis.1 Just over a year after that another man, who had probably never heard of Schubert or his music undertook another winter journey, this time in Ireland. Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin’s mission was to get himself a second wife and to that end he travelled on horseback from Callan to Waterford in mid-winter 1829.