The Cambridge Companion to Schubert’s Winterreise
Organized in five parts, this Companion enhances understanding of Schubert’s 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 Müller, 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 listener’s identification with the cycle’s protagonist, text–music relations in individual songs, Schubert’s compositional “fingerprints,” aspects of continuity and discontinuity among the songs, and the cycle’s 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 cycle’s 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 Schubert’s Dramatic Lieder (1993) and Romantic Lieder and the Search for Lost Paradise (2007) and has more recently contributed to The Unknown Schubert (2008), Schubert’s 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 Schubert’s 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 2017–18 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.
