Review of Lauri Suurpää,<i>Death in</i>Winterreise:<i>Musico-Poetic Associations in Schubert’s Song Cycle</i>(Indiana University Press, 2014)

The study of songs and song cycles has generated a number of questions about interpretive practice-most notably, how to understand the relationship between text and music, and make sense of a part in relation to its whole.Lauri Suurpää's Death in Winterreise provides an important contribution to both lines of inquiry in its effort "to illuminate one narrowly defined area of the musico-poetic aspects of Winterreise, namely, how the notion of death occurs in the poems of the cycle's second part and how this theme is reflected in the music" (ix).His interdisciplinary approach to text-music analysis yields rich insights into the structural relationships between Müller's poems and Schubert's songs, leading readers to a nuanced view of the protagonist's shifting attitude towards death.[2] Death in Winterreise consists of three parts: Part I ("Background," chapters 1-4) clarifies the interpretive context and proposes a method for analysis; Part II ("Songs," chapters 5-11) presents detailed analyses of songs 14-24; Part III ("Cycle," chapters 12-14) explores cyclic coherencies among the songs discussed in Part II.Suurpää's decision to focus his study on the latter half of the song cycle as it appears in Tobias Haslinger's publication of the first edition (1828) may, at first, raise the eyebrows of discerning readers who are familiar with the compositional genesis of Müller's poems and Schubert's text settings.(1) The discrepancy between Müller's ordering of the poems in the Gedichte aus den hinter lassenen Papieren eines reisenden Waldhornisten II (1824) and Schubert's ordering in his song cycle, coupled with the differences in keys between Schubert's autograph manuscript and the first edition, introduces layers of complications to the interpretive act, particularly if the preservation of authorial intent is understood to be the only pathway towards authentic statements about cyclic coherence and musical meaning.(2) Suurpää is certainly aware of these issues ("Should Müller's final ordering of the poems [as found in Waldhornisten] be taken into consideration in the overall narrative of Winterreise?Should the songs that were transposed be analyzed in the keys found in the manuscript or in the first edition?"[5]), and his response can be read as a faithful commitment to the authorial intent of the composer: "It seems justifiable to discuss the narrative only as it appears in the song cycle" (5); "I will use the keys in the first edition, which we know Schubert accepted, or at least knew about, as he prepared his work for publication" (6).As one might expect, the kinds of textual meanings and musical relationships that pass through this sieve indeed point us towards a new reading of the songs in the second half of Schubert's song cycle.The payoff is that it invites us to hear these songs with fresh ears and deepen our sense of the cycle's possible meanings.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.