Winterreise as a journey of a female singer – being an artist during the covid pandemic

Abstract

This article presents a singer's perspective to Franz Schubert’s Winterreise. Winterreise has drawn performers, scholars, and audiences alike for nearly two centuries and much scholarship is dedicated to it. However, in the context of German song, singer's experience as a source of meaning has mostly been overlooked in scholarship, as this research is often focused on listening and score-analysis. This article seeks to fill this gap by focusing on singer’s experience as a source of meaning-making.

I employ Karen Barad's agential realism as a theoretical framework to understand the ways Winterreise materialised and meant as a material-discursive phenomenon in performance, which took place during the Covid-19 pandemic. Agential realism shifts the focus from a fixed work, its representations and meanings to performance and its dynamic materialisations. The case study shows how the Covid-19 pandemic, I as a professional female opera singer and Winterreise intra-acted and emerged as material-discursive phenomena, giving new meaning to each.