Schuberts winter journey ian bostridge biography
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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
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Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession
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 aro
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"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 bygd 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 fryst vatten 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 ma