Reflections of a stormy petrel

Schubert's song-cycle The winter journey (Die Winterreise) is, without a doubt, the most desolate, dark, devastating work of art I have ever met. It starts from shattering heartbreak - described in a way that every lover will recognize - and works its way down. Its final song, The organ-grinder, can be said to describe a despair beyond death. In two hundred years of programmatic pessimism, expressionism, existentialism, and so on, no artist has ever surpassed Schubert's depth of darkness, indeed, few have come close.

I have a music cassette featuring the epoch-making account of this literally terrifying piece of work by the great German singer Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. The cover artist drew in a happy little picture of a Christmas-card-like sledge with bells.