Retracing a Winter's Journey: Schubert's Winterreise

"Susan Youens's Retracing a Winter's Journey is the most successful and appealing of the various recent studies of Winterreise. Youens is a true Schubertian, able to find the subtlety of the cycle and to take the reader through it in a way that broadens the understanding regardless of how familiar one may be with the work. She pays special attention to the texts, interpreting Muller's various images with a skill born of wide knowledge of the poet's other works as well as those of his contemporaries, and proceeding to an illumination of the role and importance of the texts in the musical setting.... The author's lucid and elegant writing never allows one to falter through the retracing of this fascinating journey." * Music and Letters * "This is a book of considerable importance. Given the quantity of distinguished writing about Schubert's great song-cycle it is the author's outstanding achievement to have written a study that for scope, insight, and sheer readability eclipses previous responses to the challenge.... Youens combines to a degree as rare as it is admirable the sensitivities and deep knowledge of literary historian and musicologist." * German History * "Susan Youens displays a rare ability at making penetrating comments on both poetry and music, as well as their interrelationship, and her book is full of interesting observations of details easily overlooked by those who have not studied the song cycle closely." * Times Higher Education Supplement * "This is the definitive book on the subject, by one of the world's leading lieder scholars." * Time Out New York *