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

Several acclaimed musicians have demonstrated mastery in scholarship parallel to their better-known work. Béla Bartók was methodically rigorous enough in his field research on folk music to be esteemed and emulated by anthropologists. Olivier Messiaen’s essays accompanying his piano work Catalogue d’oiseaux are judged by experts to be first-rate ornithological treatises. English tenor Ian Bostridge follows such predecessors, though slightly farther afield, having produced a dissertation on witchcraft that is often cited in specialist works (e.g. Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, ed. Bengt Ankerloo, Athlone Press) and that has accordingly secured him a respected place as an academic historian.

Fortunately for his readers, Bostridge’s manifold gifts and experience come fully into their own in this admirably multidisciplinary study of Wilhelm Müller’s poetic cycle and its setting by Franz Schubert. It is one of two excellent books on the topic. Susan Youens’s Tracing a Winter’s Journey (Cornell UP) is likewise indispensable; its special achievement lies in its convincing analysis of the profundity beneath Müller’s deceptively folksy or naive tone.

Both books appear at a time in which the Lied in general and the songs of Schubert in particular are being assessed by listeners who were previously not very interested as a vital, significant art going far beyond specialist miniature exercises in preciosity. Samuel Beckett demonstrated indebtedness to Winterreise as a source of his own work in its themes of lonely, futile search, and Benjamin Britten assessed the cycle, along with Bach’s Mass in B minor, as one of the twin pinnacles of all Western music. Views from these rarefied heights can be supplemented by seeing the recent film Schubert und ich. This work documents the collaboration of Marino Formenti—pianist of Klangforum Wien—with amateurs in the best sense, men and women working with him to determine whether Schubert’s songs have meaning in the twenty-first century, and if so, exactly what meaning. Watching the inner journey of the singers will convince any viewer that Schubert is not merely a subject for specialists but rather that living with his songs changes lives, underlining Bostridge’s point.

Bostridge’s academic and scholarly thoroughness joins the authority and experience of his having performed Winterreise many times as one of the most prominent Lieder singers before the public. Bostridge provides rich contextualization of the poems and music, while his experience as a performer, which by nature demands painstaking attention to musical craft and vocal technique, leads him to nuanced analysis of musical effects.

On the textual side, for instance, Bostridge returns Beckett’s favor by expanding on the first word of the first song, “Gute Nacht”—fremd—to align Müller with a whole literary history of wandering and alienation. He reviews the linguistic history of the word itself, relates its theme first to Byron and Heine and then to Camus and Paul Auster, among others, then traces an unmistakable reference to Winterreise in one of Beckett’s Texts for Nothing, a kindred work in its lack of a clearly determinable setting. He relates the concept of lonely wandering to the lack of national identity in what is now Germany, linking political ideals to a sense of rootlessness. Within a more personal, psychological framework, Bostridge asks why the narrator has departed and draws on hints about thwarted love and hopes of marriage to surmise the story of a private tutor emotionally entangled with a daughter of the house, whose higher social station makes realization of such hopes impossible. After pointing out that many writers had been employed as tutors (Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Hölderlin), Bostridge traces that configuration to the bestselling novel by Rousseau, La nouvelle Héloïse (6–38). We are still with the first song, and the wealth of such information does not abate.

Touching on mythology and botany, quoting Walther von der Vogelweide and Thomas Mann, Bostridge deepens understanding of “Der Lindenbaum” (114–46...