Alan Moss wrote:

>The "truth", as I see it, is the realisation of his utter social isolation.
>Whoever said that hell is other people had it totally wrong.  Hell is no
>other people.  Hell is isolation from God and from man.  This can drive
>men to enlightenment - or to madness.  That was of course a common theme
>in the 19th C.  Compare George Crabbe's Peter Grimes, George Eliot's Silas
>Marner; many lieder by Schubert and Schumann with words like sehnsucht and
>einsamkeit (even schone einsamkeit is still einsamkeit); and the strange
>Goethe character in Brahms' Alto Rhapsody, the man who though surrounded
>by love drank only the bitter cup of hatred, and hides himself away in the
>thicket.

I think you are absolutely right.  Just today I have had a fantastic
lesson on Erstarrung presenting my pupils first the poem, than the
Schubert version.  They very clearly found out that the wanderer is a
totally isolated person, existing only in his fixation on his beloved,
being isolated from God, from man and - worst of all- from himself, his
resources, his own potential for happiness.  BTW, I presented my pupils
the Prey/Sawallisch and the Hotter/Moore versions.  They absoluted favoured
Prey and Sawallisch since they concentrad very expressively and intensely
on the pain and despair the poor guy experiences whereas Hotter/Moore
(brilliantly I think) stress the sadness and depression of the wanderer.

Robert Peters