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Schubert’s song cycle Winterreise (Winter Journey) tells the story of a young man wandering through a wintery landscape in despair because his love has been unrequited. Lasting around seventy minutes it is a work of unique emotional depth and intensity. Schubert (who completed it in the last months of his life) intended it to be sung to an intimate gathering but performances of Winterriese now pack the greatest concert halls around the world. The tenor Ian Bostridge has performed the work over a hundred times and has now decided to put pen to paper to unpick the enigmas and subtle meanings of each of the twenty-four songs in the context of the world that Schubert inhabited. Tom Service met Bostridge, in the wintry surroundings of Hampstead Heath, to hear his views on this piece which remains unsurpassed in the history of song.

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In his new book After Wagner – Histories of Modernist Music Drama from Parsifal to Nono, Mark Berry traces the development of the operatic form from Wagner’s Parsifal onwards.  He looks at Schoenberg’s Moses und Aaron and Strauss’s Capriccio, moving on to operas by Dallapiccola, Nono and Hans Werner Henze. As well as looking at musical and dramatic progress he assesses the political and historical relevance of the works and trends in the world of staging operas. Tom meets Mark Berry to discuss his findings and theories.

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Today Georges Bizet is most immediately recognised as the composer of Carmen, yet it is only one chapter of Bizet’s story. In his new biography Hugh Macdonald goes beyond the composer’s most famous opera to take an in-depth look at his entire life and oeuvre. In so doing he identified a number of previously unknown pieces by Bizet, assembling the first comprehensive catalogue of Bizet’s work. He sheds light on the composer’s complex relationships with his contemporaries and traces the strange misrepresentation of Bizet’s work by French publishers and opera houses in the 1880’s, when Carmen rose to worldwide popularity ten years after the composer’s early death. Tom meets Hugh MacDonald to find out more of the unknown about Bizet.

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When an 18 year old Debussy took a job as accompanist in the studio of fading diva Madame Moreau-Sainti, he fell in love with one of her most talented pupils, the enchanting Marie-Blanche Vasnier. His green-eyed muse, 12 years his senior, mother of two, and married to a well-respected civil engineer, sang her way in to his heart, as he charmed his way into the Vasnier household.  During this period of great happiness, creativity and self-discovery, Debussy wrote nearly 40 songs, 27 of which were dedicated to Marie. Tom talks to the soprano Gillian Keith who has recorded a selection of these songs and gives the first radio play of a song called Seguidille, which until recently has lain unknown in a private collection and has just been published.

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