It's usually a performance rather than a book that changes minds about a piece of music. But tenor Ian Bostridge's Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession (Knopf) is, as a book, a performance. Although he's sung Schubert's Winterreise , 24 songs about love gone bad, more than 100 times over 30 years, his book radically up-ends even his own earlier (and recorded) ideas about the work. A onetime scholar turned world-class performer �" his performances of Winterreise, 70 minutes of music that just wreck audiences, are big-ticket events now �" he knocks the cobwebs out of the far corners of this "classic" work and returns us to the spook house Schubert built.
The physical book is beautiful, 500 smallish pages lavishly illustrated with apposite art exquisitely reproduced and placed in the text exactly where you want it. But it would be a crime if it ended up on coffee tables rather than music stands. It's too illuminating �" and transgressive �" for that. Old assumptions die on its pages.
The Wilhelm Mueller poems that Schubert sets to music do not specify who the protagonist of this winter journey is, or for that matter whether there's a story at all. But the listeners who have not allowed Winterreise to leave the active repertoire for nearly two centuries know there's a story there, a ghost story maybe. When in the Western imagination was the tale of love gone awry, with disastrous results, not the story?
Writing about the first song, Bostridge asks, "What is our hero doing, creeping out of this house at night? Rather negligently, it wasn't something I had given much thought to before I sat down to write this book. Why should a young man, of lower economic status, be living in a house with a young woman and her family?"
Bostridge is far from dogmatic about any of his ideas about the interpretation (a word he cannily avoids) of Winterreise , but he supplies a provisional but compelling answer: the young man was a house tutor, providing in-home education to the children of the privileged. "Very often emotional complications ensued," Bostridge observes.
You could say. But here the author is flying in the face of the age-old assumption that the lad was suffering from unrequited love. If you look at it through another glass �" that the problem was precisely that his love was requited �" suddenly the whole tale snaps into focus.
One of the less than sacred cows that dies on the altar of evidence �" and this is going to cost me �" is the queer theorists' arguments that Schubert was gay. Allowing that "Schubert may have had some homosexual feelings, he may have had some homosexual experiences," Bostridge lays out �" in every sense �" the gay thesis of Maynard Solomon and others, and just lets it die for lack of intellectual oxygen. The more likely scenario �" that the composer had his heart shattered, twice, by young women at opposite ends of the social spectrum �" is not a poorer story.
There's nothing dry about the historical background Bostridge paints as the backdrop to this Biedermeier Everyboy story, and his topics include revelatory ruminations on dancing and its discontents in 1820s Vienna, and the obstacles to matrimony at the time. Schubert doesn't emerge a political firebrand, but he suddenly has a place in a political and social milieu determined by such resistance as was possible to the repressive regime of Prince Metternich.
Winterreise is a color chart of the idea of cold, and Bostridge provides information you didn't even know you wanted about snowflakes, windowpane ice-flowers, will-o'-the-wisps and parhelia, all of which makes the songs come alive. His bigger-picture observations are about historical weather patterns (surprise: Europe was even colder then) and what he calls "a winter journey to end all winter journeys, Napoleon's retreat from Moscow."
Some of the book's most game-changing ideas are about the music, and the tenor lets the chips fall where they may, including on his own old, lazy notions. If you look at the third stanza of the antepenultimate song, "Mut" ("Courage"), on the page it looks a lot like the previous two �" and in most recordings, including Bostridge's from 2004, it sounds pretty much like them.
But he now hears in that verse "the first intrusion into the cycle of notional real music, singing aloud rather than the internal, symbolic sounds that have emanated heretofore from the wanderer's mind." The wanderer, not just the onstage tenor, is singing out loud. It anticipates, breathtakingly, the appearance of the hurdy-gurdy man in the final song, when, Bostridge writes, "Now both we and the wanderer hear someone else's music floating in the frozen air."
If Winterreise is, as the author quips, "the first and greatest concept album," its hit single is its final song, "Der Leiermann" ("The Hurdy-Gurdy Man"). Bostridge's most vaulting speculation �" wildly imaginative, not conclusive �" is that in one possible reading, the hurdy-gurdy man may have been along for the whole journey, and not just at its end. The thought made my hair stand up.
With Winterreise, he writes, "We all, performers and audience, enter into an aesthetic compact according to which we challenge, for an hour or so, our basic assumptions and our way of living." Early on, writing of another Schubert song, to a poem by Goethe, Bostridge notes, "The sense of psychological depth achieved by such a rich and relentless undertaking �" Schubert never lets go of the musical or poetic logic �" is palpable, and it is difficult to go back to the poem without the music and not feel, somehow, robbed." Returning to Winterreise without this book would feel the same.