At first glance, Franz Schubert’s Winterreise would hardly suggest itself for choral adaptation. The history of choral arrangements of songs from the cycle bears this out: The only song to have a major presence in choral music since the nineteenth century is “Der Lindenbaum,” which was first adapted by Friedrich Silcher in a way that emphasized its folklike, communal potential over its darker elements. Other songs of the cycle, such as “Der Leiermann,” seem to innately resist any similar treatment. This essay focuses on how the recalcitrance of “Der Leiermann” in relationship to choral arrangement colors the approaches of two recent arrangers to the song, Thomas Hanelt and Gregor Meyer; the chapter then takes into account a more improvisatory group performance of the song presented by student performers at the Universität der Künste in Berlin in December 2008. The possibility of choral or other non-solo approaches to “Der Leiermann” innately forces performers and audiences to approach the wanderer’s solitude, and the cycle’s ending, from new subjective perspectives, even as these arrangements also attractively offer nonprofessional singers a chance to grapple with Schubert’s masterwork.

Beckett’s works are built around the paradoxical notion of the still life. Suspended between motion and standstill, destruction and creation, a still life conveys the state of a being that is simultaneously lifeless and alive. Still lifes are located at the intersection of life and death, of presence and absence, of the material and the immaterial dimension of a work of art. Beckett, above all in his later prose and drama, uses the still life as a reflection on the creation of a work of art while simultaneously performing this creative process as it were in vivo. This chapter discusses the relation between visual, textual, musical and dramatic still lifes. It analyses the tableaux vivants and nature mortes in works such as A Piece of Monologue, Stirrings Still and What Where in relation to Hamlet, and investigates the notion of ghostly doppelgangers by way of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise that informed Beckett’s late plays. Journeys of dispossession and shrinking, moments frozen in time that approach the condition of a still life will be analysed in Timon of Athens, The End, King Lear, Texts for Nothing, Sonnets 55, 18 and 81, and finally in Breath.