Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"Death in 'Winterreise' brings a fresh new perspective on the expressive power of Schubert's great cycle. Suurpää negotiates skillfully between larger contexts and individual details. Neither imposing nor ignoring its cyclic aspects, he allows the inexorable trajectory of the latter part of these winter songs to tell its own narrative and musical story." --Frank Samarotto, Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University Indiana University Press
Review
"[This] book will doubtless give professional analysts plenty of fodder to chew over. Those with a less analytical bent should certainly not be put off; the chapters teem with helpful summations and thorough cross-referencing. The chapters on the nature of cycles and the relationship between music and text are highly informative, and worth reading in their own right.... this book cannot but help deepen a peformer's understanding of the cycle." --Early Music Review
Review
"Death in Winterreise presents a unique and captivating study of Schubert's cycle, exposing us to new musico-poetic relationships between Müller's poems and the composer's text-settings." --Music Theory Online
Review
"Suurpää's book offers scholars, analysts, and performers a path through Winterreise and constructs a valuable theoretical system for analyzing musico-poetic relationships. Its eclectic analytical approach, paradoxically, reveals unity behind Winterreise's familiar story.... Suurpää's psychologically compelling interpretation and deep musical insights will be warmly received by anyone wishing to discover yet further meanings in Schubert's challenging cycle." --Notes Indiana University Press
Review
"Lauri Suurpää's book is a significant contribution to Schenkerian studies." --Music Theory and Analysis
Review
"Death in Winterreise is a wide-ranging study of Schubert's winter songs, one that navigates gracefully between the intricate rigors of Greimassian semiotics and Schenkerian analysis, the intersection of which offers a systematic approach to the study of text-music relationships in song. Surpaa's explanation of his methodology is remarkably clear in the early chapters and well executed in the analytical chapters. The book offers a new methodology for the study of musico-poetic associations in song.... The book will be of immediate value to those interested in the study of textmusic relationships in song, the study of Schenkerian analysis, especially close readings of individual songs, the study of Winterreise in particular, and the study of musical meaning in general." --Journal of Schenkerian Studies Indiana University Press
About the Author
Lauri Suurpää is Professor of Music Theory at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland.
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Note on the Translations of the Poems
Part I: Background
1. Genesis and Narrative of Winterreise
2. Winterreise in Context
3. Text-Music Relationships: Five Propositions
4. Musico-Poetic Associations: Principles of Analysis
Part II: Songs
5. The Emergence of Death as a Positive Option: "Der greise Kopf"
6. Death Contemplated: "Die Krähe"
7. From Hope for the Past to Hope for the Future: "Letzte Hoffnung"
8. Reflecting Lost Hope: "Im Dorfe," "Der stürmische Morgen," and "Täuschung"
9. Choosing Death: "Der Wegweiser"
10. Death Eludes the Wanderer: "Das Wirtshaus"
11. Reflecting on the Inability to Find Death: "Mut," "Die Nebensonnen," and "Der Leiermann"
Part III: Cycle
12. The Song Cycle as a Genre: Some Recent Views
13. Winterreise as a Cycle
14. Epilogue: The Meaning of Death in Winterreise
Notes
References
Index