Song and Self

Accustomed to being centre stage, international award-winning singer Ian Bostridge, like so many performers, spent much of 2020 and 2021 unable to take part in live music. It led him to question an identity previously defined by communicating directly with audiences. This enforced silence allowed Bostridge the opportunity to explore the backstories of some of the many works that he has performed - works such as Claudio Monteverdi's seventeenth-century masterpiece Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda and Schumann's ever popular song cycle Frauenliebe und Leben. The complex world of a single song by Ravel from the Chansons madécasses has always haunted and unnerved Bostridge, while his immersion in Benjamin Britten's confrontations with death, in life and art, have given him much food for thought. Based on his Berlin Family Lectures, delivered at the University of Chicago in the Spring of 2020, Bostridge guides us on a fascinating journey beneath the surface of these iconic works. His underlying questions as a performer drive the narrative: what does it mean for audiences when a singer inhabits these roles? And what does a performer's own identity subtract from or add to the identities inherent in the works themselves?

Ian Bostridge is universally recognised as one of the greatest Lieder interpreters of today. He has made numerous award-winning recordings of opera and song, and gives recitals regularly throughout Europe, North America and the Far East to outstanding critical acclaim. On stage, he was the original Caliban in Thomas Adès's The Tempest, and he played Gustav von Aschenbach in the landmark 2007 production of Death in Venice directed by Deborah Warner. In 1999 he gave the premiere of Hans Werner Henze's song cycle, Sechs Gesänge aus dem Arabischen, which was specially written for him, and which was subsequently recorded. He read Modern History at Oxford and received a D.Phil in 1990 on the significance of witchcraft in English public life from 1650 to 1750. His books include Witchcraft and its Transformations c.1650 to c.1750 (1997), A Singer's Notebook (2011) and Schubert's Winter Journey (2015). He is Humanitas Professor of Music at Oxford, and a regular contributor to the Guardian and the TLS. He is married to the writer and critic Lucasta Miller, and they live in London with their two children., Ian Bostridge is universally recognised as one of the greatest Lieder interpreters of today. He has made numerous award-winning recordings of opera and song, and gives recitals regularly throughout Europe, North America and the Far East to outstanding critical acclaim. His books include A Singer's Notebook (Faber, 2011) and the award winning Schubert's Winter Journey (Faber, 2016). He was Humanitas Professor of Music at Oxford 2014/15 and has been a regular contributor to newspapers and journals in the UK and US including the Financial Times and the New York Review of Books.