ePub The Pied Piper by Adrian Mitchell; Robert Browning in Arts-Photography

Description

I like these songs better than all the rest; and someday you will too; Franz Schubert told the friends who were the first to hear his song cycle; Winterreise. These lieder have always found admiring audiences; but the poetry he chose to set them to has been widely regarded as weak and trivial. In Retracing a Winters Journey; Susan Youens looks not only at Schuberts music but at the poetry; drawn from the works of Wilhelm Muuml;ller; who once wrote in his diary; "perhaps there is a kindred spirit somewhere who will hear the tunes behind the words and give them back to me!"Youens maintains that Muuml;ller; in depicting the wanderings of the alienated lover; produced poetry that was simple but not simple-minded; poetry that embraced simplicity as part of its meaning. In her view; Muuml;ller used the ruder folk forms to give his verse greater immediacy; to convey more powerfully the wanderers complex inner state. Youens addresses many different aspects of Winterreise: the cultural milieu to which it belonged; the genesis of both the poetry and the music; Schuberts transformation of poetic cycle into music; the philosophical dimension of the work; and its musical structure.