Schuberts winter journey ian bostridge biography
"Schubert's writing with a strong consciousness that he doesn't have long left."
A Winter Journey with Ian Bostridge
The English tenor and writer Ian Bostridge is happily and articulately fixed on a musical mountaintop: For 30 years he has been singing Franz Schubert’s deathbed song-cycle “Winterreise,” the “Winter Journey” of a desperate traveler toward madness and death. Think of these 24 songs as the first and all-time concept album, written in 1827 by another of those Viennese geniuses in the footprints of Mozart and Beethoven.
These are songs conceived by a 30-year old genius who knows he dying — of syphilis, it is said. Winterreise has the rattle of death in it, like Schubert’s most-played posthumous Piano Sonata in B-flat, and long soaring melodies as well. The cycle has an unearthly ring all through it, the sound of the heavens looking back on natural life. Or so it has often seemed to me. Ian Bostridge sings these Schubert songs as a path that many moderns still find themselves following — Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix, Amy Winehouse, Philip Seymour Hoffman come quickly to mind. Ian Bostridge’s omnidirectional book of reflections on the songs chase down a host of implications along the way.
The short form on Schubert (1797 – 1828): he was a demigod of musical Vienna in Beethoven time, popular and prolific. Hundreds of songs and chamber pieces, 7 finished symphonies and 1 famously unfinished one. But it’s this set of 24 songs, finished on his death bed, aged 31, that seals his genius. It makes almost any list of the faultless master creations in any category of art—up there with Don Quixote, the Taj Mahal, Moby Dick, My Fair Lady — and Ian Bostridge gets to live inside those songs on stage year after year and now inside this irresistible manual: Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession.
Winter Journey is a punctuated series of cries from the heart of a desperate traveler—sometim Franz Schubert’s Winterreise is at the same time one of the most powerful and one of the most enigmatic masterpieces in Western culture. In his new book, Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession, Ian Bostridge – one of the work’s finest interpreters – focusses on the context, resonance and personal significance of a work which is possibly the greatest landmark in the history of Lieder. Drawing equally on his vast experience of performing this work (he has performed it more than a hundred times), on his musical knowledge and on his training as a scholar, Bostridge unpicks the enigmas and subtle meaning of each of the twenty-four songs to explore for us the world Schubert inhabited, bringing the work and its world alive for connoisseurs and new listeners alike. Originally intended to be sung to an intimate gathering, performances ofWinterreise now pack the greatest concert halls around the world. Though not strictly a biography of Schubert, Schubert’s Winter Journey succeeds in offering an unparalleled insight into the mind and work of the great composer. ‘Usually great singers cannot explain what they do. Ian Bostridge can. Whether or not you know Schubert’s ‘Winter Journey’, the book is gripping because it explains, in probing, simple words, how a doomed love is transformed into art.’ Richard Sennett With a heart filled with endless love for those who scorned me, I ... wandered far away. For many and many a year I sang songs. Whenever I tried to sing of love, it turned to pain. And again, when I tried to sing of pain, it turned to love. Schubert, “My Dream”, manuscript, July 3, 1822 Winterreise – Winter Journey – a cycle of 24 songs for voice and piano based on poems by Wilhelm Müller, was composed by Franz Schubert towards the end of his short life. He died in Vienna in 1828 aged only 31. Piano-accompanied song is no longer part of everyday domestic life and has lost its one-time primacy in the concert hall. What Germans know as Lieder – is a niche product, even within the niche that is classical music; but Winter Journey is an indispensable work of art that should be as much a part of our common experience as the poetry of Shakespeare and Dante, the paintings of Van Gogh and Picasso, the novels of the Brontë sisters or Marcel Proust. The 24 songs are forerunners, in a sense, of all those songs of love and loss that have been the soundtrack of generation on generation of teenagers. But the loss of love, which is only sketched ambiguously in the first song, “Goodnight”, is just the beginning of it. Schubert’s wanderer embarks on a journey through a winter landscape that leads him to question his identity, the conditions of his existence – social, political and metaphysical – and the meaning of life. And it is all done with light and shadow, moving between sardonic humour and depressive longing. (Not surprisingly, Beckett was one of the cycle’s biggest fans.) The wanderer’s tears turn to ice; he sees flowers etched in the frost of the hut where he takes refuge; he is eyed from the sky by a carrion crow, his only faithful companion; and at the last, he sees a beggar musician playing in the street, ignored and unrewarded, the hurdy-gurdy man. Der Leiermann – The Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession
Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession
Schubert's song cycle "Winterreise" is one of the essential works of classical music and a work I have loved for many years. I respond to this cycle of lost love whenever I return to it. Written in the last year of Schubert's life, "Winterreise" is a setting for solo voice and piano of 24 poems by Wilhelm Muller. Schubert first set a group of twelve poems and, shortly thereafter returned to set the entire cycle of 24 songs. The cycle has been recorded and performed innumerable times.
The British tenor Ian Bostridge has performed "Winterreise" over 100 times in a thirty year career. He has recorded the work with pianist Leif Ove Adnes and prepared a dramatization of the cycle with pianist Julius Drake. Bostridge does not have an academic degree in music. He received a doctoral degree from Oxford in 1990 for a dissertation on witchcraft in English life from 1650 -- 1750 and taught political theory and British history at the university level before devoting himself to a career as a singer in 1996.
Bostridge's love for Schubert's "Winterreise" and his passion for music and for learning all are on full display in his book, "Schubert's Winter's Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession." The obsession in question is shared by Muller and Schubert's nameless wanderer in the cycle, by Bostridge himself, and by the reader of the book and listener to the music. In a brief introduction, Bostridge writes: 'It is surely remarkable that the piece lives and makes an impact in concert halls all over the world, in cultures remote from its origins in 1820s Vienna." He says of his goal in the book:
"I want to use each song as a platform for exploring these origins; setting the piece in its historical context, but also finding new and unexpected connections, both contemporary and long dead -- literary, visual, psychological, scientific, and political. Musical ana Ian Bostridge on singing Schubert’s Winterreise - an indispensable work of art