The protagonist of Winterreise wanders through a landscape that is both real and imagined. Banished from one home but unable to conceive another, he follows a path that circles back on itself repeatedly, leading only to exhaustion and defeat. Yet while the singer of Winterreise appears to inhabit a lonely landscape, Wilhelm Müller’s verses and their musical setting by Franz Schubert would also have evoked a concrete social world for their audiences, that of the road (Landstrasse). The road, by its very nature, was filled with people on the move, some of them (journeymen, pilgrims) heading purposefully from one place to another, but others with no particular destination, whose poverty, criminality, or “dishonorable” status banished them from their towns and villages. These last types, the “wandering people” (fahrendes Volk), had become well established as an object of public fascination and state scrutiny by the eighteenth century.