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

Bostridge's new book [Song and Self] shines a light in the corner of often neglected, fragile beauty, and brings that beauty of relevance to current issues of the world we live in - gender, race, and the universality and humanity of death.

Bostridge uniquely combines the gifts of a celebrated tenor with the gifts of a professional historian. The result in these remarkable essays is an exploration of both the emergence of certain powerful musical compositions and the experience of performing them. These ‘hidden histories,’ as Bostridge calls them, at once complicate and intensify our responses to the works of art he so effectively brings to life

Throughout the slim volume, one relishes the special skill-set Bostridge brings to his task: a performer with a background in academic history. His reading is broad, his method as a writer a rewarding mixture of artistic imagination and professorial rigour; his prose is clear, unafraid to clarify and reiterate ... The preface alone, with its beautifully economical and lucid account of the key questions of what performance should be in relation to the score, makes the book worth picking up ...The themes of private and public image are central, too, to the final chapter, a richly rewarding exploration of music Britten wrote in reaction to the horrors of the Second World War...This is a fascinating little book.

[Bostridge's] ability not only to sing this vast repertoire (the book roams from Monteverdi to Benjamin Britten, by way of Schumann and Ravel) but also to stand back from it and unpick the hows and whys of performance – translating his instinctive reactions and resistances into fully fleshed-out arguments, all rooted in a gloriously broad frame of cultural reference – is singular ... There’s a bracing plunge into the conflicts of Britten’s ‘The Holy Sonnets of John Donne’ that mines ‘Thou hast made me, And shall thy worke decay?’ for fragments of concealed meaning, playing text and music off against each other thrillingly, as well as a passing glance at the postlude of Schumann’s cycle Frauenliebe und Leben that will send you straight back to listen (and think) again...Best of all is the writing on Britten – a composer whose musical language Bostridge has such an affinity for, both on and off stage.

Monteverdi through to Britten via Schumann's problematic Frauenliebe und leben, Bostridge probes works that have exercised a particular resonance on him. The final lecture examining the omnipresence of death across much of Britten's output is particularly illuminating especially in relation to John Donne: and following a lucid potted disquisition on French colonialism Ravel's Chansons madecasses divulge a fascinating backstory.