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.
Bostridge is a performer, a classical tenor whose relationship with Winterreise extends over 30 years and more than 100 performances. He’s also an academic, a former historian whose PhD on witchcraft became his first published book. It’s a curious vantage point, one that combines ferocious curiosity and intelligence with a lived, practical experience of music. Bostridge brings the knowledge of an expert but none of their jargon to this unexpected book that treats each song in this inscrutable cycle as an object in a cabinet of curiosities — to be handled and enjoyed as well as theorised.
If Wagner’s Ring cycle, Mahler’s Third Symphony and Berlioz’s Les Troyens are the megaliths of classical music, then Schubert’s Winterreise is a miniature. Seventy minutes of music are scored for just voice and piano and divided into 24 songs, loosely connected by a narrative that follows a rejected lover’s wanderings in a wintry landscape.
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