Death in Winterreise: Musico-Poetic Associations in Schubert’s Song Cycle by Lauri Suurpää (review)

Abstract

Death in Winterreise: Musico-Poetic Associations in Schubert's Song Cycle. By Lauri Suurpaa. (Musical Meaning and Interpretation.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. [xi, 224 p. ISBN 9780253011008 (hardcover), $45; (e-book), $38.99.] Music examples, bibliography, index. Scholars have long sought evidence of narrative and cyclicity in Franz Schubert's Winterreise. Lauri Suurpaa's book, Death in Winterreise: Musico-Poetic Associations in Schubert's Song Cycle revisits and sheds new light on these important issues, posed earlier by Arnold Feil's monograph, Franz Schubert: Die schb'ne Mullerin, Winterreise (Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1988) and Susan Youens's Retracing Winter's Journey: Schubert's Winterreise (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991)--studies that question the coherence of Wilhelm Muller's poetic cycle and Schubert's settings. Disagreeing with such studies' assertions that Winterreise contains no explicit plot (in contrast to Die schone Mullerin), Suurpaa combines various analytical approaches based in narrative, Schenkerian, and neo-Riemannian theories that enable coherence to emerge from latent, recurring structures in the music and poetry. From this combination, he builds theoretical model that helps us to understand Schubert's cycle as expressing a kind of plot, albeit vague one (p. 7). This plot is not constructed from series of tangible events, but rather results from features in the protagonist's inner world (p. 7); namely, an opposition between reality and illusion. In Suurpaa's interpretation, Schubert's protagonist pursues two forms of illusion--symbolized by love and death--that drive him onward. Suurpaa divides the book into two parts, establishing conceptual basis in narrative theory in Part I for the music analyses in Part II. Part I begins with historical overview of the cycle's genesis and literary context (chapters 1 and 2), followed by series of propositions for musico-poetic relationships, (chapters 3 and 4). Part II contains analytical vignettes of songs grouped into chapters based on their relationship to the concept of death--the cycle's central source of narrative momentum. In chapters 3 and 4, Suurpaa lays out an integrated approach using two seemingly disparate theoretical approaches: the musical theories of Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935) and the semiotic theories of Algirdas J. Greimas (1917-1992). This hybrid approach allows him to compare meaning in structures governing the music and language, respectively. It also enables Suurpaa to compare Schubert's music and Muller's poetry directly at multiple structural levels, in three analytical stages that examine the poem and setting separately before considering their mutual influence. Greimas's semiotic theory locates the signification of meaning in poetic structure rather than semantics. Its emphasis on sign interpretation also mirrors crucial feature of the cycle: Muller's protagonist constantly reads the signs of his environment as reflections of his proximity to death. In chapter 4, Suurpaa explains that Greimassian theory describe [s] textual structure on purely functional level ... (italics mine; p. 42), by constructing binary oppositions between functional roles called actants. The actant called the (i.e., the protagonist) desires an (i.e., not-so-miserable state, or death), while senders (poetic imagery; e.g., the protagonist's white hair) and receivers (the protagonist) communicate information about the protagonist's relationship to death (e.g., the protagonist interprets his frost-covered head as white hair, signifying old age and imminent death). Each binary opposition between subject and object represents stasis (the protagonist is either conjoined or disjoined to two illusory objects, love and death), while changes between states signify narrative activity. In this way, Suurpaa's functional analysis depicts goal-directed motion toward death in poems 14-24. …