An accessible multi-disciplinary exploration of Franz Schubert's haunting late song cycle Winterreise (1827) that combines context and different analytical approaches.

"I like these songs better than all the rest, and someday you will too," Franz Schubert told the friends who were the first to hear his song cycle Winterreise. These lieder have always found admiring audiences, but the poetry he chose to set them to has been widely regarded as weak and trivial. Susan Youens looks not only at Schubert's music but at the poetry, drawn from the works of Wilhelm Müller, who once wrote in his diary, "perhaps there is a kindred spirit somewhere who will hear the tunes behind the words and give them back to me!" Youens maintains that Müller, in depicting the wanderings of the alienated lover, produced poetry that was simple but not simple-minded, poetry that embraced simplicity as part of its meaning. In her view, Müller used the ruder folk forms to give his verse greater immediacy, to convey more powerfully the wanderer's complex inner state. Youens addresses many different aspects of Winterreise: the cultural milieu to which it belonged, the genesis of both the poetry and the music, Schubert's transformation of poetic cycle into music, the philosophical dimension of the work, and its musical structure.

This Companion to Schubert examines the career, music, and reception of one of the most popular yet misunderstood and elusive composers. Sixteen chapters by leading Schubert scholars make up three parts. The first seeks to situate the social, cultural, and musical climate in which Schubert lived and worked, the second surveys the scope of his musical achievement, and the third charts the course of his reception from the perceptions of his contemporaries to the assessments of posterity. Myths and legends about Schubert the man are explored critically and the full range of his musical accomplishment is examined.

Organized in five parts, this Companion enhances understanding of Schubert's Winterreise by approaching it from multiple angles. Part I examines the political, cultural, and musical environments in which Winterreise was created. Part II focuses on the poet Wilhelm Müller, his 24-poem cycle Die Winterreise, and changes Schubert made to it in fashioning his musical setting. Part III illuminates Winterreise by exploring its relation to contemporaneous understandings of psychology and science, and early nineteenth-century social and political conditions. Part IV focuses more directly on the song cycle, exploring the listener's identification with the cycle's protagonist, text-music relations in individual songs, Schubert's compositional 'fingerprints', aspects of continuity and discontinuity among the songs, and the cycle's relation to German Romanticism. Part V concentrates on Winterreise in the nearly two centuries since its completion in 1827, including lyrical and dramatic performance traditions, the cycle's influence on later composers, and its numerous artistic reworkings.

Beginning several generations before Schubert, the Lied first appears as domestic entertainment. In the century that follows it becomes one of the primary modes of music-making. By the time German song comes to its presumed conclusion with Richard Strauss's 1948 Vier letzte Lieder, this rich repertoire has moved beyond the home and keyboard accompaniment to the symphony hall. This is a 2004 introductory chronicle of this fascinating genre. In essays by eminent scholars, this Companion places the Lied in its full context - at once musical, literary, and cultural - with chapters devoted to focal composers as well as important issues, such as the way in which the Lied influenced other musical genres, its use as a musical commodity, and issues of performance. The volume is framed by a detailed chronology of German music and poetry from the late 1730s to the present and also contains a comprehensive bibliography.

An exploration of the world’s most famous and challenging song cycle, Schubert's Winter Journey (Winterreise), by a leading interpreter of the work, who teases out the themes—literary, historical, psychological—that weave through the twenty-four songs that make up this legendary masterpiece. Completed in the last months of the young Schubert’s life, Winterreise has come to be considered the single greatest piece of music in the history of Lieder. Deceptively laconic—these twenty-four short poems set to music for voice and piano are performed uninterrupted in little more than an hour—it nonetheless has an emotional depth and power that no music of its kind has ever equaled. A young man, rejected by his beloved, leaves the house where he has been living and walks out into snow and darkness. As he wanders away from the village and into the empty countryside, he experiences a cascade of emotions—loss, grief, anger, and acute loneliness, shot through with only fleeting moments of hope—until the landscape he inhabits becomes one of alienation and despair. Originally intended to be sung to an intimate gathering, performances of Winterreise now pack the greatest concert halls around the world. Drawing equally on his vast experience performing this work (he has sung it more than one hundred times), on his musical knowledge, and on his training as a scholar, Bostridge teases out the enigmas and subtle meanings of each of the twenty-four lyrics to explore for us the world Schubert inhabited, his biography and psychological makeup, the historical and political pressures within which he became one of the world’s greatest composers, and the continuing resonances and affinities that our ears still detect today, making Schubert’s wanderer our mirror.

This book/CD package guides readers and listeners on a journey through Franz Schubert's Winterreise song cycle, in which the composer set the poetry of Wilhelm Muller to music. The complete text of the 24 poems is presented in both German and English, with 116 b&w photographs of winter scenes on the facing pages. An introductory essay by Susan Youens (musicology, U. of Notre Dame) offers a critical examination of the song cycle. The music CD features a new recording of Winterreise, performed by baritone Paul Rowe and pianist Martha Fischer. Oversize: 10.25x10.25". Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).