This Winter Journey goes far beyond expectation

You can tell a lot about a book from its bibliography. It’s the non-fiction equivalent of skipping to the final page of a novel. Turn to the end of Ian Bostridge’s Schubert’s Winter Journey — a study of the composer’s celebrated song cycle Winterreise — and you’ll find monographs on ornithology, weeping as a cultural phenomenon and wood sculpture in Renaissance Germany, essays on Samuel Beckett and the history of the mail coach, and the rather forbidding ‘Regulation of floral organ abscission in Arabidopsis thaliana’. Intrigued? Who wouldn’t be?

As academic disciplines go, musicology was a slow starter. It took until 1985 for Joseph Kerman to startle academics into looking beyond the musical score, to start systematically forging connections with art, philosophy, literary and gender theory. Things have changed a lot since then, and a book like this — written, Bostridge himself stresses, by an author never formally trained in music — shows just how much, and how much for the better.