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Books

This Winter Journey goes far beyond expectation

Ian Bostridge's guide to Schubert's Winterreise will open your eyes not only to the song cycle but to the age and place that produced it

10 January 2015

9:00 AM

10 January 2015

9:00 AM

Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession Ian Bostridge

Faber, pp.500, £20, ISBN: 9780571282807

You can tell a lot about a book from its bibliography. It’s the non-fiction equivalent of skipping to the final page of a novel. Turn to the end of Ian Bostridge’s Schubert’s Winter Journey — a study of the composer’s celebrated song cycle Winterreise — and you’ll find monographs on ornithology, weeping as a cultural phenomenon and wood sculpture in Renaissance Germany, essays on Samuel Beckett and the history of the mail coach, and the rather forbidding ‘Regulation of floral organ abscission in Arabidopsis thaliana’.

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