Death in Winterreise

Death in Winterreise
Author: Lauri Suurpää
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2014-01-06
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0253011086

Lauri Suurpää brings together two rigorous methodologies, Greimassian semiotics and Schenkerian analysis, to provide a unique perspective on the expressive power of Franz Schubert's song cycle. Focusing on the final songs, Suurpää deftly combines textual and tonal analysis to reveal death as a symbolic presence if not actual character in the musical narrative. Suurpää demonstrates the incongruities between semantic content and musical representation as it surfaces throughout the final songs. This close reading of the winter songs, coupled with creative applications of theory and a thorough history of the poetic and musical genesis of this work, brings new insights to the study of text-music relationships and the song cycle.

Schubert's Winterreise

Schubert's Winterreise
Author: Franz Schubert
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2003
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780299186005

This book/CD package guides readers and listeners on a journey through Franz Schubert's Winterreise song cycle, in which the composer set the poetry of Wilhelm Muller to music. The complete text of the 24 poems is presented in both German and English, with 116 b&w photographs of winter scenes on the facing pages. An introductory essay by Susan Youens (musicology, U. of Notre Dame) offers a critical examination of the song cycle. The music CD features a new recording of Winterreise, performed by baritone Paul Rowe and pianist Martha Fischer. Oversize: 10.25x10.25". Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Schubert's Winter Journey

Schubert's Winter Journey
Author: Ian Bostridge
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2015-01-27
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307961648

An exploration of the world’s most famous and challenging song cycle, Schubert's Winter Journey (Winterreise), by a leading interpreter of the work, who teases out the themes—literary, historical, psychological—that weave through the twenty-four songs that make up this legendary masterpiece. Completed in the last months of the young Schubert’s life, Winterreise has come to be considered the single greatest piece of music in the history of Lieder. Deceptively laconic—these twenty-four short poems set to music for voice and piano are performed uninterrupted in little more than an hour—it nonetheless has an emotional depth and power that no music of its kind has ever equaled. A young man, rejected by his beloved, leaves the house where he has been living and walks out into snow and darkness. As he wanders away from the village and into the empty countryside, he experiences a cascade of emotions—loss, grief, anger, and acute loneliness, shot through with only fleeting moments of hope—until the landscape he inhabits becomes one of alienation and despair. Originally intended to be sung to an intimate gathering, performances of Winterreise now pack the greatest concert halls around the world. Drawing equally on his vast experience performing this work (he has sung it more than one hundred times), on his musical knowledge, and on his training as a scholar, Bostridge teases out the enigmas and subtle meanings of each of the twenty-four lyrics to explore for us the world Schubert inhabited, his biography and psychological makeup, the historical and political pressures within which he became one of the world’s greatest composers, and the continuing resonances and affinities that our ears still detect today, making Schubert’s wanderer our mirror.

The Cambridge Companion to Schubert's ‘Winterreise'

The Cambridge Companion to Schubert's ‘Winterreise'
Author: Marjorie W. Hirsch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2021-02-04
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1108832849

An accessible multi-disciplinary exploration of Franz Schubert's haunting late song cycle Winterreise (1827) that combines context and different analytical approaches.

Returning Cycles

Returning Cycles
Author: Charles Fisk
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2001-03-12
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0520225643

"Fisk's portrayal of Schubert is based on evidence from the composer's hand, both verbal (song texts and his written words) and musical (vocal and instrumental). Noting extraordinary aspects of tonality, structure, and gestural content, Fisk argues that through his music Schubert sought to alleviate his apparent sense of exile and his anticipation of early death. Fisk supports this view through close analysis of the cyclic connections within and between the works he explores, finding in them complex musical narratives that attempt to come to terms with mortality, alienation, hope, and desire."--BOOK JACKET.

Retracing a Winter's Journey

Retracing a Winter's Journey
Author: Susan Youens
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 1991-11-05
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780801499661

Youens addresses the different aspects of the Winterreise: its cultural milieu, the genesis of both the poetry and the music, Schubert's transformation of poetic cycle into music, the philosophical dimension of the work, and its musical structure.

The Cambridge Companion to Schubert's ‘Winterreise'

The Cambridge Companion to Schubert's ‘Winterreise'
Author: Marjorie W. Hirsch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2021-02-04
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1108967132

Organized in five parts, this Companion enhances understanding of Schubert's Winterreise by approaching it from multiple angles. Part I examines the political, cultural, and musical environments in which Winterreise was created. Part II focuses on the poet Wilhelm Müller, his 24-poem cycle Die Winterreise, and changes Schubert made to it in fashioning his musical setting. Part III illuminates Winterreise by exploring its relation to contemporaneous understandings of psychology and science, and early nineteenth-century social and political conditions. Part IV focuses more directly on the song cycle, exploring the listener's identification with the cycle's protagonist, text-music relations in individual songs, Schubert's compositional 'fingerprints', aspects of continuity and discontinuity among the songs, and the cycle's relation to German Romanticism. Part V concentrates on Winterreise in the nearly two centuries since its completion in 1827, including lyrical and dramatic performance traditions, the cycle's influence on later composers, and its numerous artistic reworkings.

The New Grove Schubert

The New Grove Schubert
Author: Maurice John Edwin Brown
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 212
Release: 1983
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780393315868

Traces the life of Franz Schubert, describes the development of his muscial career, and discusses the composition of his major works.

The Unknown Schubert

The Unknown Schubert
Author: Barbara M. Reul
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2008
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780754661924

Franz Schubert (1797-1828) is now rightly recognized as one of the greatest and most original composers of the nineteenth century. Schubert steadily graced Viennese musical life with his songs, piano music and chamber compositions. Throughout his career he experimented constantly with technique and in his final years began experiments with form. The resultant fascinating works were never performed in his lifetime, and only in recent years have the nature of his experiments found scholarly favor. In The Unknown Schubert contributors explore Schubert's radical modernity from a number of perspectives by examining both popular and neglected works. Chapters by renowned scholars describe the historical context of his work, its relation to the dominant artistic discourses of the early nineteenth century, and Schubert's role in the paradigmatic shift to a new perception of song.

Unmasking Ravel

Unmasking Ravel
Author: Peter Kaminsky
Publisher: University Rochester Press
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2011
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1580463371

Collection of critical and analytical scholarly essays on the music of Ravel by prominent scholars. Unmasking Ravel: New Perspectives on the Music fills a unique place in Ravel studies by combining critical interpretation and analytical focus. From the premiere of his works up to the present, Ravel has been associated with masks and the related notions of artifice and imposture. This has led scholars to perceive a lack of depth in his music and, consequently, to discourage investigation of his musical language. This volume balances and interweavesthese modes of inquiry. Part 1, "Orientations and Influences," illuminates the sometimes contradictory aesthetic, biographical, and literary strands comprising Ravel's artistry and our understanding of it. Part 2, "Analytical Case Studies," engages representative works from Ravel's major genres using a variety of methodologies, focusing on structural process and his complex relation to stylistic convention. Part 3, "Interdisciplinary Studies," integratesmusical analysis and art criticism, semiotics, and psychoanalysis in creating novel methodologies. Contributors include prominent scholars of Ravel's and fin-de-siècle music: Elliott Antokoletz, Gurminder Bhogal, Sigrun B. Heinzelmann, Volker Helbing, Steven Huebner, Peter Kaminsky, Barbara Kelly, David Korevaar, Daphne Leong, Michael Puri, and Lauri Suurpää. Peter Kaminsky is Professor of Music at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.