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

Celebrated tenor Ian Bostridge explores the relationship between identity and performance in three essays based on the Berlin Family Lectures. After examining vocal pieces which blur gender boundaries – Monteverdi’s Il combattimento di Trancredi e Clorinda, Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben and Britten’s Curlew River – he focuses on the historical and political roots of Ravel’s Chansons madécasses and then reflects on death, ‘the absence in the face of which all human identity is constructed’.