NYT: Michael Cooper reviews Ian Bostridge: Schubert's Winter Journey

[Frank Forman]

Michael Cooper reviews Ian Bostridge: Schubert's Winter Journey
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/books/review-schuberts-winter-journey-allows-ian-bostridge-to-obsess.html

SCHUBERT'S WINTER JOURNEY
Anatomy of an Obsession
By Ian Bostridge
Illustrated. 502 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $29.

When Schubert played "Winterreise," one of the greatest cycles of
art songs, or lieder, ever written, for a gathering of his friends,
they were puzzled. As one member of his circle recalled decades
later, they were "utterly dumbfounded by the mournful, gloomy tone
of these songs."

But the ailing Schubert, who corrected the proofs of "Winterreise"
in the days before he died in 1828, at 31 (of what was probably
complications from syphilis), had faith in the work, telling
friends, "I like these songs more than all the rest, and you will
come to like them as well."

Many have come to like, and love, the songs in the years since, as
the still-expanding catalog of recordings and [208]steady stream of
recitals around the world attest. But while initiates find its 24
songs of Romantic, angst-filled wandering cathartic, "Winterreise,"
or "Winter Journey," can leave others discomfited by the intensity
of Schubert's music and the poet Wilhelm Müller's intriguing but
oblique lyrics, which tell a largely plotless tale of heartbreak,
alienation and cold, in its physical and metaphorical dimensions.

A new book promises to deepen the understanding of the legions of
"Winterreise" devotees, while offering encouragement to interested
music lovers who have had difficulty following the lieder. The tenor
Ian Bostridge, a leading interpreter of "Winterreise," has written a
cross between an idiosyncratic guide to the song cycle and a
freewheeling meditation on it, "Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy
of an Obsession," which he says at the outset aims "to explain, to
justify, to contextualize and embroider."

Mr. Bostridge is perhaps uniquely suited to the task. Not only is he
a singer who has performed the cycle more than a hundred times, made
a celebrated recording of it and grappled with its intricacies for
decades, but he is also a smooth writer who earned a doctorate from
Oxford for his study of witchcraft in English public life in the
17th and 18th centuries.

His small, heavy book--the attractively illustrated hardcover is
hardly bigger than a standard paperback, but weighs some two pounds
because of the glossy paper it is printed on--is not a musical
guide in any traditional sense, although there is a chapter
dedicated to each song. No musical notation appears until Page 152,
when it is used to illustrate a surprisingly interesting debate
about how pianists should play a section of "Wasserflut" (or
"Flood"). Rather, Mr. Bostridge, something of a polymath, draws on
his deep reading and his long experience singing the cycle to
explore Schubert's world, the roots of the songs and how they have
been received since they were written.

So, yes, there is plenty on the brooding Romantic world of Byron and
Goethe, and Mr. Bostridge gives the overview of the debate on
whether Schubert was homosexual or heterosexual. (His short answer:
We don't really know, and modern conceptions of sexuality are not a
terribly useful prism to try to view him through.) But there are
also many unexpected, often delightful asides.

An exploration of the song [212]"Gefrorne Tränen," or "Frozen
Tears," notes that "the tears shed in emotion contain 20 to 25
percent more protein than those produced when chopping onions." A
discussion of the ice crystal flowers that form on windowpanes, in
the context of the song "Frühlingstraum" ("Dream of Spring"),
includes a sampling of a few of the 5,000-odd photographs of
snowflakes taken by Wilson Bentley, an American who, Mr. Bostridge
tells us, "died in 1931 after walking six miles home in a blizzard."

The broadness of Mr. Bostridge's palate is evident in his chapter on
one of the most famous songs in the cycle, [213]"Der Lindenbaum"
("The Linden Tree"). He looks at how poets including Homer and Ovid
have written of linden trees, and about the debate over whether
Romanticism's obsession with death--which many listeners hear in
the song--paved the way for the European catastrophes of the 20th
century. And he writes of the role Schubert's song was to play later
in contexts as varied as Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" and the
German-language version of "The Simpsons," in which he notes that "a
version of the song is rapped by Bart."

At times, Mr. Bostridge risks over-egging the pudding. When the
song's narrator takes refuge in an empty charcoal burner's hut in
the song "Rast" ("Rest"), Mr. Bostridge goes into a detailed
digression about charcoal, telling us the temperatures at which wood
and charcoal burn and reproducing a chart showing the shift in power
sources used in England from 1561 to 1859.

Far more illuminating is the remainder of the chapter, which
describes the political and artistic repression in Metternich's
Austria that Schubert and his circle faced, and connects the absent
charcoal burner to the revolutionary Italian Carbonari: "literally
'charcoal burners,' the secret society whose black and red were
feared by the Hapsburg regime."

Mr. Bostridge, who writes that he started as a singer learning by
ear, takes special care in passages about music to make them
understandable to readers who do not read music or are unfamiliar
with its terminology. So he does not merely define "arpeggio," but
gives it a back story, writing that "the word arpeggio comes from
the harp, and means a chord played in sequence rather than all at
once." And some of his keenest observations are almost dashed off,
as when he notes that in much of Schubert "the major key is even
more heartbreaking than the minor."

What ultimately gives the book its authority is Mr. Bostridge's
experience singing the songs. He makes technical observations, to be
sure, but also broader ones, as when he writes that "so much of what
we have to do as 'realizers' of the score is not in the score,
either in words or in notation; that gap is what makes
'interpretation' necessary." He gives a sense of what it is like to
be onstage: Most halls, he says, are lit well enough so people can
refer to the text, and he can often recognize members of the
audience and see their reactions, favorable and unfavorable. He
wrestles, too, with what it means to sing songs that are embedded
with social protest in "the red plush halls of the classical
tradition."

If, in the end, the mysteries still remain--Mr. Bostridge
translates the cycle's enigmatic opening lines as "I came a
stranger, I depart a stranger"--readers will find that Mr.
Bostridge has proved a thoughtful, often entertaining tour guide who
has given them plenty to think about the next time they find
themselves in a concert hall facing a singer and a pianist.

References

202.
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/michael_cooper/index.html
208.
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com//2015/02/05/lincoln-center-to-open-great-performers-series-with-schubert/
209.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/books/review-schuberts-winter-journey-allows-ian-bostridge-to-obsess.html
212. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xbzcJFzLPs
213. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyxMMg6bxrg

[graham]

On 07/04/2015 6:48 PM, Frank Forman wrote:
> Michael Cooper reviews Ian Bostridge: Schubert's Winter Journey
> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/19/books/review-schuberts-winter-journey-allows-ian-bostridge-to-obsess.html
>
>
> SCHUBERT'S WINTER JOURNEY
> Anatomy of an Obsession
> By Ian Bostridge
> Illustrated. 502 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $29.
>
> When Schubert played "Winterreise," one of the greatest cycles of
> art songs, or lieder, ever written, for a gathering of his friends,
> they were puzzled. As one member of his circle recalled decades
> later, they were "utterly dumbfounded by the mournful, gloomy tone
> of these songs."
>
> But the ailing Schubert, who corrected the proofs of "Winterreise"
> in the days before he died in 1828, at 31 (of what was probably
> complications from syphilis),

Not that it matters but ISTR, from authoritative biographies, that it
was typhus.
BTW, my English teacher would have been horrified by a comma after a
bracket:-)

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Tuesday, April 7, 2015 at 9:04:11 PM UTC-4, graham wrote:
> On 07/04/2015 6:48 PM, Frank Forman wrote:

> > Michael Cooper reviews Ian Bostridge: Schubert's Winter Journey

> > But the ailing Schubert, who corrected the proofs of "Winterreise"
> > in the days before he died in 1828, at 31 (of what was probably
> > complications from syphilis),
>
> Not that it matters but ISTR, from authoritative biographies, that it
> was typhus.
> BTW, my English teacher would have been horrified by a comma after a
> bracket:-)

Then your teacher wasn't fit to teach. Or else you weren't paying attention.
Restore the rest of the sentence and you will see what the function of the
second comma is.