Song and Self: A Singer's Reflections on Music and Performance

Award-winning singer Ian Bostridge examines iconic works of Western classical music to reflect on the relationship between performer and audience.

Like 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.

As 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.

Author: Ian Bostridge
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 04/05/2023
Pages: 120
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 8.10h x 5.70w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9780226809489


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 02/01/2023 pg. 76

About the Author
Ian Bostridge is an English tenor, known for his performances as an opera and lieder singer. His recordings have won multiple international record prizes and three Grammy awards, and he gives recitals regularly throughout Europe, North America, and Asia. He was awarded a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2004. His recent books include Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession and A Singer's Notebook.