[1] The study of songs and song cycles has generated a number of questions about interpretive practice-most notably, how understand the relationship between text and music, and make sense of a part in relation its whole. Lauri Suurpaa's Death in Winterreise provides an important contribution both lines of inquiry in its effort to illuminate one narrowly defined area of the musico-poetic aspects of Winterreise, namely, how the notion of death occurs in the poems of the cycle's second part and how this theme is reflected in the (ix). His interdisciplinary approach text-music analysis yields rich insights into the structural relationships between Muller's poems and Schubert's songs, leading readers a nuanced view of the protagonist's attitude towards death.[2] Death in Winterreise consists of three parts: Part (Background, chapters 1-4) clarifies the interpretive context and proposes a method for analysis; Part II (Songs, chapters 5-11) presents detailed analyses of songs 14-24; Part III (Cycle, chapters 12-14) explores cyclic coherencies among the songs discussed in Part II. Suurpaa's decision focus his study on the latter half of the song as it appears in Tobias Haslinger's of the first edition (1828) may, at first, raise the eyebrows of discerning readers who are familiar with the compositional genesis of Muller's poems and Schubert's text settings.(1)The discrepancy between Muller's ordering of the poems in the Gedichte aus den hinter lassenen Papieren eines reisenden Waldhornisten II (1824) and Schubert's ordering in his song cycle, coupled with the differences in keys between Schubert's autograph manuscript and the first edition, introduces layers of complications the interpretive act, particularly if the preservation of authorial intent is understood be the only pathway towards authentic statements about cyclic coherence and musical meaning.(2) Suurpaa is certainly aware of these issues (Should Muller's final ordering of the poems [as found in Waldhornisten] be taken into consideration in the overall narrative of Winterreise? Should the songs that were transposed be analyzed in the keys found in the manuscript or in the first edition? [5]), and his response can be read as a faithful commitment the authorial intent of the composer: It seems justifiable discuss the narrative only as it appears in the song cycle (5); I will use the keys in the first edition, which we know Schubert accepted, or at least knew about, as he prepared his work for publication (6). As one might expect, the kinds of textual meanings and musical relationships that pass through this sieve indeed point us towards a new reading of the songs in the second half of Schubert's song cycle. The payoff is that it invites us hear these songs with fresh ears and deepen our sense of the cycle's possible meanings.[3] The approach that Suurpaa uses analyze the individual songs in Winterreise was introduced in his earlier study of Le paon and Le cygnet from Ravel's Histoires naturelles (2011). The method involves three stages of analysis: music, text, and musico-poetic aspects. In the first stage, Suurpaa analyzes the music without textual considerations, using Schenkerian analysis in tandem with Robert Hatten's (1994) expressive genres. Meaning is derived from the voice-leading structure--whose components (e.g., motives, enharmonic respellings) are woven into a musical narrative that traces cause and effect, the expressive genres that describe the music's emotional trajectory (35), and the musical texture. To account for shifting emotional intensities in a musical work's expressive genre (35), Suurpaa outlines the music's dramatic curve in terms of its global high point and local peaks, which may or may not correspond the poem's dramatic curve (36). In the second stage, Suurpaa analyzes the poem without the music, drawing from Greimas's theory of narrative grammar (1983 and 1987). …