The song cycle Winter Journey by Franz Schubert will be heard for the first time in Varna on January 31at 7 p.m. at the City Art Gallery as part of the “New Music Stage” project. The show will feature bass Ivaylo Djurov, who is a soloist of the State Opera in Stara Zagora, and pianist Denitsa Petrova, said the organizers from Elite Projects Management.
The songs will be presented to the Varna audience in Bulgarian, translated by the singer himself, the team told BTA. The lyrics are by the German poet Wilhelm Muller, who was a contemporary of Franz Schubert, but the two never met. Ivaylo Djurov decided to translate the poems in 2020 after he failed to find the translations made by Hristo Marinov, and others he came across did not match his attitude to the songs. He says he tried to make the verses rhyme, but naturally stuck to the German text.
Schubert received Muller’s poems from a friend in early 1827, when he was very ill and in dire financial straits, Djurov’s research found. It is Schubert’s last vocal cycle that is the saddest and shows his existence and mental anguish during the last year of his life, the singer said.
