Death in Winterreise, Lauri Suurpää argues, is a multivalent thing. Its literal, physical manifestation has been tempered by metaphor: for early Romantics, death ‘provides a means to experience the boundless, and the infinite’; it ‘leads to a higher form of love’, a kind of ‘pantheistic union’; it is ‘not an end point of our lives but rather a change in our continuing existence’ (pp. 27–9). When the wanderer of Wilhelm Müller’s poetic cycle yearns for death, he seeks not the end of life (if so, ‘the desolate wanderer could have died by suicide’ [p. 28]), but rather escape into dream, fantasy, illusion, memory. The former is (literally) a dead end; the latter reunites the wanderer with his beloved. This is what makes the conclusion of Winterreise so heartbreaking. As Suurpää argues, the final poems of the cycle describe the wanderer seeking death, desiring death, even choosing death (‘Der Wegweiser’), but he never locates it; there is no room in the cemetery (‘Das Wirtshaus’), no darkness at the dusk (‘Die Nebensonnen’).

Suurpää arrives at this argument by way of a comparison between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetics. In the eighteenth century, Suurpää writes, ‘language was expected to be precise. … There was a direct connection between language and reason. If reason was to be precise, then language too should be specific’ (p. 22). Contrast this approach with that of the nineteenth century: ‘Because its foundation is fundamentally elusive, Romantic poetry, as defined by [Friedrich] Schlegel, no longer retains an unequivocal, universally recognized association between language (individual words, a “signifier”) and the world (the universally acknowledged reference of the words, the “signified”)’ (p. 23). Thus, eighteenth-century death is concrete, and nineteenth-century death abstract.

This is not a novel observation, nor is it Suurpää’s main argument (on that, later), but I reintroduce it here to point out a fundamental (often fruitful, sometimes frustrating) incongruity in this book. Schubert’s Winterreise is a famously elusive work, full of ambiguous impressions and mysterious symbols. By contrast, Lauri Suurpää’s Death in ‘Winterreise’ is rigidly schematic, supported by structuralist methodologies that seek clarity, that find (to paraphrase his description of eighteenth-century aesthetics) a precise signified for each and every signifier. Here, for example, is an excerpt from his introduction to his analysis of ‘Die Krähe’ (Winterreise, no. 15):

Maybe. Maybe even probably. But then again, maybe not. Müller’s poem and Schubert’s song are potent, expressive utterances whose meanings always seem to multiply under analytical scrutiny. Yet Suurpää’s approach is often reductive – he has the habit, for example, of equating the major mode with joyfulness and the minor mode with the tragic (and the major mode tinged by ♭ as ‘joyful (mingled with tragic)’ (p. 142)). For Jonathan Guez (who reviewed the book in Music Analysis), these sorts of facile associations are ‘irksome’: the ‘modal binary is simply not adequate to the task’ – the task, that is, of grappling with Müller and Schubert’s complex expressivity.Footnote ¹ Judith Ofcarcik (in Music Theory Spectrum) offers a similar critique: Suurpää’s analyses of poetry, she argues,

But Loretta Terrigno (in Notes) has a more generous appraisal, noting that Suurpää’s binary categories often serve as placeholders for subtler designations: ‘“Tragic” and “joyful” seem like overly broad categories to describe Schubert’s complex music, yet Suurpää uses them to effective ends and provides additional nuanced interpretations of how musical expression and structure interact’.Footnote ³ Regardless, the irony here is that Suurpää carefully distinguishes between eighteenth-century objectivity and nineteenth-century subjectivity, placing Winterreise and its abstract conception of death firmly in the latter. But in seeking clear, rational solutions to Winterreise’s unanswerable questions, Suurpää’s readings can become anachronistic exercises in literal-mindedness.

The bulk of Suurpää’s book is devoted to detailed analyses of the final 11 songs of Winterreise (from ‘Der greise Kopf’ to ‘Der Leiermann’), selected because of their proximity to the topos of death. His methodology, carefully laid out in Chapter 3 (‘Text–Music Relationships: Five Propositions’) and Chapter 4 (‘Musico-Poetic Associations: Principles of Analysis’), involves segmentation, reduction and synthesis. First, segmentation: Suurpää begins an analysis of a song with the music, shorn of all text, then turns to an analysis of the poetry, shorn of all music. This strict separation is, as he says, the book’s ‘main novel feature’ (p. 50). In his review for Intégral, Kofi Agawu notes the potential consequences (positive and negative) of such an approach:

Notably, in his summary of Suurpää’s analysis of ‘Letzte Hoffnung’, Agawu begins with the poem, then proceeds to the music. Such is the usual course of action – and one that mirrors the compositional process itself (Schubert reads poem, Schubert sets poem to music). By contrast, Suurpää begins with the notes themselves – an approach that René Rusch (in Music Theory Online) finds ‘especially engaging, encouraging listeners to hear how certain musical features such as mixture, enharmonic reinterpretations, and texture convey the expression perceived in the music’.Footnote ⁵

Indeed, Suurpää’s musical analyses – based on Schenkerian reductions, augmented by motivic illuminations – are quite compelling. (For Rusch, they are ‘one of the book’s highlights’, and for Ofcarcik, they are ‘beautifully nuanced and musically sensitive, creating a vibrant picture of the musical settings’.)Footnote ⁶ Especially virtuosic is Suurpää’s reading of ‘Letzte Hoffnung’. His background graph of the song’s first half (p. 86) reveals an arpeggiation of E-flat major (local tonicizations of E♭, G, and B♭). Clear and secure, each local key area unfolds from the triad of the prevailing tonic. But a middleground graph (p. 89) exposes Schubert’s audacious harmonic plan: navigating between the latter two keys areas, Schubert moves from G major to E-flat minor to A-flat minor to B-flat major. Perhaps the chord relationships are easiest to describe in neo-Riemannian terms as local movements across the hexatonic pole (G major to E-flat minor) followed by LR (Leittonwechsel+ Relative, E-flat minor to A-flat minor), creating a long-range SLIDE (G major to A-flat major). Although Suurpää’s prose occasionally alludes to the language of transformational theory (‘the bass note G is lowered to G♭’, ‘the ♮5 is transformed into its diatonic form’ (p. 90)), he instead finds clarity in the local linear progressions, unfoldings, prolongations, and voice-exchanges that generate the musical foreground (p. 89). He shows, for example, that the relationship between G-major and E-flat-major chords is primarily contrapuntal, the latter emerging through modal mixture (♮–♭) and an inner-voice neighbour (–). That A-flat-minor chord is a minor subdominant prolonged by an enharmonic voice exchange; its flatted third both looks back (to the third of G major) and ahead (to the subsequent emergence of the minor tonic).

Whereas Suurpää’s musical analysis adopts the theories of Heinrich Schenker, his textual analysis adopts those of Algirdas Julien Greimas.Footnote ⁷ Interpreting Müller’s verses, Suurpää pays little attention to rhyme scheme, alliteration, symbolism, cultural context, etc. (for that, one should turn to the writings of Susan Youens or Ian Bostridge).Footnote ⁸ He instead focuses on narrative structure – chiefly the ways in which a subject (S) may be conjoined with (∩) or disjoined from (⋃) its object (O), the ways in which information is passed (→) from a sender (Sr) to a recipient (R), and the ways in which these statuses can change (⇒) over the course of a poem. Can you guess which poem the following diagram describes?

$$({\rm Sr}\to{\rm O}\to{\rm R})\Rightarrow({\rm S}{\cup}{\rm O})$$

Fill in ‘hurdy-gurdy man’ (Sr), ‘a state without misery’ (O) and ‘the protagonist’ (S and R): it’s ‘Der Leiermann’ (p. 153). The image of the hurdy-gurdy man offers the wanderer hope for a life without suffering; but his hope is dashed, and the poem ends with the wanderer alienated from that desirable state (death). For Suurpää, these Greimassian formulas have the advantage of exposing (or predetermining?) the very binary oppositions – life vs. death, reality vs. illusion, past vs. present – that so concern his interpretation of the cycle. But they also limit his perspective, and they hinder the sort of sensitive, nuanced readings found in his musical analyses. As Agawu notes, Suurpää’s musical analyses ‘get the lion’s share of attention, extending from no fewer than five pages to as many as eight’; textual analysis, however, ‘is dispensed with in two or at most three pages’. Rusch writes that Suurpää’s textual analyses ‘can seem unmatched, at times, by the rich observations he draws from his analyses of the voice-leading structure’.Footnote ⁹ These are symptoms of an underlying problem, perceptively diagnosed by Ofcarcik:

Suurpää’s structural analyses yield the sort of objective clarity for which he strives: there is absolutely no denying, after seeing so many poems reduced to (S⋃O), that the wanderer of Winterreise has been alienated from his desire. But the approach also erases the complex layers of meaning – irony, subtext, ambiguity – in Müller’s poetry. Once clarified, the poems have inevitably been distorted.

First, segmentation (music then text). Next, reduction (Schenkerian voice-leading graphs, Greimassian structural analyses). Finally, synthesis: Suurpää’s ‘musico-poetic’ analyses combine his two previously discrete analyses, noting points of synchrony and disjunction. For example, the separation of the wanderer from his ‘state without misery’ at the end of ‘Der Leiermann’ – (S⋃O) – corresponds with the singer’s failure to complete his Terzzug: ‘Poetically, the object is not attained, much as the music is unable to secure A as the conclusion of its third-progression’ (p. 155). But, in the postlude, the accompaniment descends –– on its own – a possible musico-poetic disjunction that yields a more multivalent analysis:

Notably, these musico-poetic analyses are executed without a precise methodology: ‘No single formula can be given for comparing musical and textual structures … . The description of structural musico-poetic relations should show sensitivity to the nature of musical and textual features in the individual songs’ (p. 52). Indeed, Suurpää is at his most sensitive here, as he teases out connections between text and music in a manner more idiosyncratic, more personal than in his Schenkerian or Greimassian analyses.

One especially lovely example concerns tension between A♭ and A♮ in ‘Der greise Kopf’. The very first measure of the song introduces a neighbour-tone figure (G–A♭–G) that affirms the tonic, C minor. But Schubert alters this figure (now G–(G♯)–A♮–G) to modulate from C minor to G major, an ‘unusual’ use of modal mixture that borrows from the major rather than the minor tonic (p. 65). A chromatic revision of the Kopfton (formerly E♭, now E♮) asserts the force of this new key area. This potent musical moment corresponds with the first of the two states – illusion vs. reality – that underpin Suurpää’s Greimassian analysis of the poem (p. 71):

$$[\left( {{\rm Sr_{1}}\to{\rm R}} \right)\to({\rm S}{\,∩\,}{\rm O})]\Rightarrow[({\rm Sr}_{{\rm 2}} \to{\rm R})\to({\rm S}{\cup}{\rm O})]$$

The protagonist’s snow-dusted gray hair (Sr₁) gives him (R and S) hope that he is near death (O); once melted (⇒), the snow reveals his true black hair (Sr₂), reminding him of his distance from his desire and the persistence of his misery. How do these two analyses fit together? In his musico-poetic analysis, Suurpää offers a compelling synthesis:

But a subsequent turn to A-flat major undoes these chromatic alterations and reveals G major to be a structurally unimportant key area – one that belongs to an elaborate composing-out of the G–A♭–G motive. ‘The [modal] mixture vanishes in the music, just as the illusion disappears in the poem … . [T]he structural stability of the G-major chord was ultimately an illusion’ (p. 72). There is a refreshingly complicated web of musical metaphors at work here – enharmonic trickery, foregrounded illusion, backgrounded truth – and their imaginative applications grant Suurpää’s analysis the kind of creative license that his structural methodologies had previously restricted. They also avoid the easy equations (major = joyful; high register = bird) that reduce, rather than magnify, a song’s potential signification.

In his final chapters, Suurpää investigates Winterreise’s coherence, limiting his focus again to the cycle’s final 12 songs. (For Ofcarcik, this section is one of the book’s ‘greatest strengths’.)Footnote ¹¹ He offers three new insights on this well-worn and hotly contested topic. First, he lists eight ‘musical cross-references’, which include stylistic devices (‘modal mixture’, ‘completion of the Urlinie in the piano part’), pitch-class motives (‘juxtaposition of E♭–D and E♭–E♮’), and topoi (‘quasi-religious chorale texture’), then demonstrates how they accompany recurring poetic ideas (e.g., ‘unison’ textures to suggest an ‘inability of the protagonist to affect his own fate’ in songs 14, 15, 16 and 18) (p. 180). Second, he invokes Roland Barthes to differentiate between ‘kernels’ and ‘satellites’ in narrative structures: ‘Kernels advance the plot … . Satellites, on the other hand, are of lesser significance for the global narrative. They are attached to individual kernels (rather than to the overall trajectory), embellishing and elaborating on them’ (p. 171). As Guez explains, ‘a benefit of this approach is that it allows Suurpää to examine the role discontinuity plays in establishing the unity of the poetic cycle. Barthes provides Suurpää with a framework for discussing exactly how the poems that do not seem to fit into the broad narrative nevertheless contribute to the work’s coherence’.Footnote ¹² This comes in handy when (third!) Suurpää adopts a neo-Riemannian approach to examine common-tone relationships between the keys of Winterreise’s final songs. He divides the second half of Winterreise into three sections: songs 13–16, a collection of ‘kernels’ with key areas sharing two or more common tones; songs 17–19, a collection of ‘satellites’, sharing common tones among themselves but not with their surroundings; and songs 20–23, a ‘kernel’ and two ‘satellites’, sharing common tones in the manuscript, but not in the transpositions that appeared in the first edition. (Song 24 (‘Der Leiermann’) notably stands apart.)

Suurpää’s project culminates here, with a strong and persuasive case for Winterreise as a ‘unified whole whose coherence grows from thematic unity among the poems, the narrative trajectory, the large-scale harmonic scheme, and musico-poetic cross-references’ (p. 190). His multivalent approach to this topic is an asset: no single plan, no single pattern unifies the songs of Winterreise. One must be willing to accept discontinuity, to indulge in methodological promiscuity, to struggle rather than to solve. Perhaps this is the best way to approach Winterreise: as Romantic – mysterious and irreducible.