Winterreise

"A stranger I arrived; a stranger I depart.”
Franz Schubert / Wilhelm Müller: Winterreise

The vastness of the American landscape, the Big Skies of the West, the empty spaces.

This is an extraordinarily beautiful vision of the American landscape in the tradition of the great American Road Trip. ‘Road Stills’ that capture the harshness and the poetry, the harmony yet also the marks of rural life etched into the landscape: dwellings, pole lines and empty, endless country roads – roads that seem to exist without any obvious destination. Throughout there is a tension and a deep sense of solitude. There are traces of man on the landscape but no human presence. The great expanse of sky is overwhelming.

Alfie Masoliver was inspired by Franz Schubert’s lieder cycle Winterreise, which was based on a collection of poems by Wilhelm Müller. The mood of the cycle perfectly exemplifies the Romantic Imaginary: The Night, Solitude, Nature, the Journey, the Road. Nature is the interlocutor of the Wanderer. And we ourselves are also the Wanderer, landscape only exists in the eyes of the traveller.

This journey without a clear destination could perhaps be understood as a beginning. Without a clear narrative. The work has this fluidity in mind. A journey that for Masoliver expresses in the most honest way his position in the face of life and perhaps in the face of death that will inexorably come to us.

Spanish born Alfie Masoliver describes himself as a Wanderer and a World Traveller. Winterreise is his first book.

‍