Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession by Ian Bostridge (review)

The Winter Journey in the title under review is, of course, the English translation of Franz Schubert’s second and last song cycle, Die Winterreise, composed in 1827, one year before his death at age thirty-one. It remains unclear whose obsession noted in the title is anatomized, but readers expecting to learn more about Schubert’s Winter Journey will soon learn that one can write a 500-page small but surprisingly heavy book about the twenty-four songs Schubert set to the poetry of Wilhelm Müller and yet rarely address the relationship of music and text. While often stylish and engaging, Winter Journey seems designed for readers who appreciate the singer–author’s distinctive personality and agile, digressive mind. Readers who wish to know more about such matters as the genesis and sources, texts, music, and musically informed discussions about Schubert’s cycle, might save themselves considerable frustration by revisiting Susan Youens’s authoritative Retracing a Winter’s Journey: Schubert’s Winterreise (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991) or the worthwhile nontechnical musical and textual discussion in Paul Robinson’s Opera & Ideas: From Mozart to Strauss (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986).

Each of Ian Bostridge’s twenty-four chapters, without a footnote or endnote in sight, corresponds to a song in Schubert’s published ordering of the cycle, a serviceable structure the author credits to his spouse. In many of these chapters Bostridge, a tenor who has sung this cycle numerous times professionally, addresses what the song means—or rather what Müller’s text means—and also occasionally offers pertinent remarks on the performance of these songs. Longer chapters provide a forum for Bostridge to launch into discussions of topics that usually go far beyond the song’s immediate context. Thus the chapter on “Die Wetterfahne” (no. 2 in the cycle) soon leads to a discussion of marriage laws in Schubert’s Vienna and an extended tangent on Schubert’s sexuality that manages to obfuscate the issues and facts and to be-little and dismiss rather than engage the work of Maynard Solomon. In “Gefrorne Tränen” (no. 3) readers learn about the disastrous winter journeys of Napoleon and Hitler, while the chapter on “Der Lindenbaum” (no. 5) offers a discourse on the Linden tree in literature and some thoughtful commentary on how Thomas Mann famously used this song in his novel The Magic Mountain.

The chapter on “Auf dem Flusse” (no. 7) informs readers about weather fluctuations in Europe between 1350 and 1850. The charcoal burner’s hut mentioned in “Rast” (no. 10) leads to a detailed discourse on energy sources in England and Wales between 1560 and 1860 and an unsubstantiated theory on how Müller’s text conceals ideas that would have merited censorship in the repressive post-Congress of Vienna Age of Metternich. In “Die Post” (no. 13) we learn about modes and speeds of nineteenth-century transportation, in “Die Krähe” (no. 15) about crows in paintings, literature, and science—although not, for my taste, nearly enough about the compelling recent research on how this intelligent bird manages to communicate information to its associates and its highly developed ability to recognize individual human faces. In “Täuschung” (no. 19), we can savor an illustration of the nine dance positions of the waltz, and in “Der Wegweiser” (no. 20), discover Schubert’s passion for the Leatherstocking tales of James Fenimore Cooper during the composer’s final illness. In “Mut” (no. 22), Schubert, God, and Nietzsche coexist, in “Die Nebensonnen” (no. 23), sun dogs and parhelia, and finally in “Der Leiermann” (no. 24), the hurdy-gurdy and its place in German culture gives way to ruminations on possible parallels between the jingle-jangle of Bob Dylan’s tambourine man and Schubert’s hurdy-gurdy man. The quantity and range of digressions is impressive, even breathtaking, and many are fascinating in their own right, even if irrelevant...