Marjorie W. Hirsch - The Cambridge Companion to Schubert’s Winterreise

The Cambridge Companion to Schuberts Winterreise

Organized in five parts, this Companion enhances understanding of Schuberts Winterreise by approaching it from multiple angles. Part I examines the political, cultural, and musical environments in which Winterreise was created. Part II focuses on the poet Wilhelm Mller, his twenty-four-poem cycle Die Winterreise , and changes Schubert made to it in fashioning his musical setting. Part III illuminates Winterreise by exploring its relation to contemporaneous understandings of psychology and science, and early nineteenth-century social and political conditions. Part IV focuses more directly on the song cycle, exploring the listeners identification with the cycles protagonist, textmusic relations in individual songs, Schuberts compositional fingerprints, aspects of continuity and discontinuity among the songs, and the cycles relation to German Romanticism. Part V concentrates on Winterreise in the nearly two centuries since its completion in 1827, including lyrical and dramatic performance traditions, the cycles influence on later composers, and its numerous artistic reworkings.

Marjorie W. Hirsch is Professor of Music at Williams College in Massachusetts. She is the author of Schuberts Dramatic Lieder (1993) and Romantic Lieder and the Search for Lost Paradise (2007) and has more recently contributed to The Unknown Schubert (2008), Schuberts Late Music in History and Theory (2016), Drama in the Music of Franz Schubert (2019), and The Oxford Handbook of Faust in Music (2019).

Lisa Feurzeig is Professor of Music at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. She is the author of Schuberts Lieder and the Philosophy of Early German Romanticism (2014) and has contributed editions, articles, and chapters on Schubert, the Viennese Volkstheater , and Viennese operetta. In 201718 she was Fulbright-IFK Senior Fellow in Cultural Studies in Vienna. She has co-directed and performed in cabaret-style lecture-performances emphasizing music in its historical contexts.