This is an original and important study of the significance of witchcraft in English public life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In his lively account, Bostridge explores contemporary beliefs about witchcraft and shows how it remained a serious concern across the spectrum of political opinion. He concludes that its gradual descent into polite ridicule had as much to do with political developments as with the birth of reason.

Witchcraft and Its Transformations, c. 1650 - c. 1750 (Oxford Historical Monographs)

History

Bostridge, Ian.

Europe

Clarendon Press

Award-winning singer Ian Bostridge examines iconic works of Western classical music to reflect on the relationship between performer and audience.\nLike so many performers, renowned tenor Ian Bostridge spent much of 2020 and 2021 unable to take part in live music. The enforced silence of the pandemic led him to question an identity that was previously defined by communicating directly with audiences in opera houses and concert halls. It also allowed him to delve deeper into many of the classical works he has encountered over the course of his career, such as Claudio Monteverdi’s seventeenth-century masterpiece Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda and Robert Schumann’s popular song cycle Frauenliebe und Leben. In lucid and compelling prose, Bostridge explores the ways Monteverdi, Schumann, and Britten employed and disrupted gender roles in their music; questions colonial power and hierarchy in Ravel’s Songs of Madagascar; and surveys Britten’s reckoning with death in works from the War Requiem to his final opera, Death in Venice.\nAs a performer reconciling his own identity and that of the musical text he delivers on stage, Bostridge unravels the complex history of each piece of music, showing how today’s performers can embody that complexity for their audiences. As readers become privy to Bostridge’s unique lines of inquiry, they are also primed for the searching intensity of his interpretations, in which the uncanny melding of song and self brings about moments of epiphany for both the singer and his audience.

Song and Self: A Singer's Reflections on Music and Performance (Berlin Family Lectures)

Literature & Fiction

Essays & Correspondence

University of Chicago Press

An exploration of the world’s most famous and challenging song cycle, Schubert's Winter Journey (Winterreise), by a leading interpreter of the work, who teases out the themes—literary, historical, psychological—that weave through the twenty-four songs that make up this legendary masterpiece. Completed in the last months of the young Schubert’s life, Winterreise has come to be considered the single greatest piece of music in the history of Lieder. Deceptively laconic—these twenty-four short poems set to music for voice and piano are performed uninterrupted in little more than an hour—it nonetheless has an emotional depth and power that no music of its kind has ever equaled. A young man, rejected by his beloved, leaves the house where he has been living and walks out into snow and darkness. As he wanders away from the village and into the empty countryside, he experiences a cascade of emotions—loss, grief, anger, and acute loneliness, shot through with only fleeting moments of hope—until the landscape he inhabits becomes one of alienation and despair. Originally intended to be sung to an intimate gathering, performances of Winterreise now pack the greatest concert halls around the world. Drawing equally on his vast experience performing this work (he has sung it more than one hundred times), on his musical knowledge, and on his training as a scholar, Bostridge teases out the enigmas and subtle meanings of each of the twenty-four lyrics to explore for us the world Schubert inhabited, his biography and psychological makeup, the historical and political pressures within which he became one of the world’s greatest composers, and the continuing resonances and affinities that our ears still detect today, making Schubert’s wanderer our mirror.

Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession

Humor & Entertainment

KNOPF

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Vintage

An exploration of the world’s most famous and challenging song cycle, Schubert's Winter Journey (Winterreise), by a leading interpreter of the work who teases out the themes—literary, historical, psychological—that weave through the twenty-four songs that make up this legendary masterpiece. Drawing equally on his vast experience performing this work, on his musical knowledge, and on his training as a scholar, Ian Bostridge teases out the enigmas and subtle meanings of each of the twenty-four lyrics to explore for us the world Schubert inhabited, his biography and psychological makeup, the historical and political pressures within which he became one of the world’s greatest composers, and the continuing resonances and affinities that our ears still detect today, making Schubert’s wanderer our mirror.

Ian Bostridge is one of the outstanding singers of our time. Yet his early career was that of a professional historian, and A Singer's Notebook takes a look at the multifaceted world of classical music through the eyes of someone whose career as a singer has followed a unique trajectory.

A Singer's Notebook

Faber&Faber

Ian Bostridge's acclaimed study of Schubert's Winterreise - as heard on BBC Radio 4. Franz Schubert's Winterreise is at the same time one of the most powerful and one of the most enigmatic masterpieces in Western culture. In his new book, Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession, Ian Bostridge - one of the work's finest interpreters - focuses on the context, resonance and personal significance of a work which is possibly the greatest landmark in the history of Lieder. Drawing equally on his vast experience of performing this work (he has performed it more than a hundred times), on his musical knowledge and on his training as a scholar, Bostridge unpicks the enigmas and subtle meaning of each of the twenty-four songs to explore for us the world Schubert inhabited, bringing the work and its world alive for connoisseurs and new listeners alike. Originally intended to be sung to an intimate gathering, performances of Winterreise now pack the greatest concert halls around the world. Though not strictly a biography of Schubert, Schubert's Winter Journey succeeds in offering an unparalleled insight into the mind and work of the great composer.

Schubert's winter journey: anatomy of an obsession

Arts & Photography

Music

Faber & Faber Classical Music & Dance

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Books by Bostridge, Ian.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bostridge, Ian.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Witchcraft and Its Transformations, c. 1650 - c. 1750 (Oxford Historical Monographs)

Song and Self: A Singer's Reflections on Music and Performance (Berlin Family Lectures)

Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession

Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession

Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession

A Singer's Notebook

Schubert's winter journey: anatomy of an obsession

Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession