Kate Moore Music

Garden of Thornless Roses, a new Winterreise marking the bicentenary of Schubert’s winter journey, is a song-cycle portraying a dialogue between a wanderer and nature. Nature’s expressive language is interpreted by the wanderer through the senses, emoting with nature through the rising waters of a flood, the smouldering landscape of a fire, the gathering winds of a storm, the falling stones and rocks from a cliff face. The wanderer is not separate from nature, but dissolves into nature where there is no longer a distinction between the two. Pointing to the notion of Eutierrianism, it is a reversal of the concept of Romanticism which portrays a lonely figure, small against the overwhelming incomprehensible landscape, contemplating the fruitlessness of existence and the inevitability of death. The new winter journey is returning the figure to nature itself, where the wanderer becomes nature, where death becomes rebirth and the cycle begins again as vegetation consumes ruined buildings and the stars above are reflected by the lights of deep-sea creatures below.