Schubert's Winter Journey

October 13, 2014
In 1828, Franz Schubert gathered his circle of friends to perform Winterreise (Winter Journey), his latest song cycle, for them; they found the music gloomy and mournful, but Schubert—who died that year at age 31—said that he liked these songs more than all the others he had composed, and that his listeners would come to like them as well. Schubert’s 24-song cycle, originally written to be recited by a male vocalist and piano for 70 minutes, without interruption, in intimate settings, is now performed in large concert halls around the world. English tenor Bostridge, who has sung these pieces frequently, offers his take on the meaning and enduring power of Winterreise. Most of the short chapters are written in elegant prose that soars off the pages, though some fall surprisingly flat. Bostridge probes the historical context of each piece and explores its connections to other arts. For example, he points out the connections between the music and lyrics of the cycle’s first song, “Good Night,” and Goethe’s two poems “Fairy King” and “Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel”: the poems animate the entire song and, musically, “subtle changes are used to shift perspective or emotional temperature.” The words of “Rest,” the 10th song in Winterreise, reflect a “rebellious ferocity and a testament to repressed energy and pain.” Bostridge’s illuminating reflections will guide readers as they listen again, or for the first time, to the nuances of Schubert’s great work.

November 15, 2014
A singer, author and professor expertly escorts us through Winterreise, Franz Schubert's 24-song cycle.The subtitle refers to an obsession, and that is no exaggeration. Reporting that he has sung the cycle about 100 times, Bostridge (Music/Oxford Univ.; A Singer's Notebook, 2011, etc.) frequently confesses his fondness for the piece, an affection that is patent throughout this illuminating and comprehensive work. Although the author pauses at times to discuss music theory, it's not often, and he keeps in mind a more general reading audience. Devoting a section to each of the 24 songs, Bostridge employs an organization that is both fixed and flexible. He begins with the lyrics (poems by Wilhelm Muller, with German and English, on facing pages) and then both focuses and digresses in ways that explain the music and illustrate the value of a liberal arts education. In his rich, highly readable text are allusions to Rousseau, Shakespeare, Dante, Napoleon, the Nazis, J.M. Coetzee, Paul Auster, Thomas Mann, Gustav Mahler, James Fenimore Cooper and countless others. He shares the remarkable story of Schubert's decline and death, a period during which he was compulsively reading Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales. However, it is the winter journey itself that most interests Bostridge, and he dives into the text, explores how the words and music relate, looks for analogues in the composer's life, and discusses his own performances and performances by others that helped shape his view of the piece. He treats readers to some things they would not expect in such a book: the history of postal delivery, the scientific explanation of the will-o'-the-wisp, the theme of loneliness in Romantic art, and the differences between crows and ravens. A graceful confirmation that reading can be an integrative education that offers a surprise with every turn of the page.

COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from November 1, 2014

World-renowned British tenor Bostridge offers here his take on Franz Schubert's famed Winterreise (Winter's Journey), a cycle of 24 songs composed near the end of the composer's tragically brief life (1797-1828)and set to poems of Wilhelm Muller. The format is a kind of "primer" that presents each song, including the original German and the English translation, on facing pages. As the Oxford-educated author explains, the songs, which tend toward the dark and brooding, roughly chronicle the wanderings and moods of an apparently rejected lover, a popular 19th-century theme, with titles like "Backwards Glance" and "Deception." Though somewhat technical musical commentary is included here and there, this enchanting book is much more than just a treatise on the songs. Bostridge ranges widely and with great ease over cultural and historical terrain to provide a context for the songs, or Lieder, teasing out the undercurrents that run through them so that "We are drawn in by an obsessively confessional soul, apparently an emotional exhibitionist, who won't give us the facts; but this allows us to supply the facts of our own lives, and make him our mirror." VERDICT Highly recommended for lovers of both fine music and European cultural history.--Edward B. Cone, New York

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 1, 2015
One of its finest interpreters, Bostridge has publicly performed Franz Schubert's great song cycle, Winterreise, more than 100 times. A setting of 24 poems by Wilhelm Mller (17841827), the piece is a defining work of Romanticism, the legend of a young man, cast away from the woman he loves, who wanders through the depths of winter, becoming ever more thoroughly outcast until . . . . The final song implies the wanderer's death or, perhaps, forecasts his faltering reentry to the world. Bostridge, PhD historian as well as musician, devotes a chapter of musical, biographical, social, and art-historical commentary to each song in the cycle, all the while maintaining his performer's perspective on Schubert's masterpiece. He explains how it might be, socially, that the wanderer has lost love and home together. He elucidates the wanderer's relationship to the literary figures of the foredoomed lover popularized by Goethe and of the outcast created by Lord Byron. He relates the cycle's setting of snow and ice to the great scientific discoveries and the great German art of Schubert's era. He shows the influence of Schubert's wanderer on subsequent literature, notably including Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain and the theater of Samuel Beckett. And he discloses Schubert advancing the art of music in the rhythms of a single bar of piano accompaniment. A book to match its subject in richness and finesse.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)