Read on to discover all about Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin, a tragic work about an unrequited love...
The composer... the great prodigy Franz Schubert
So prodigious was Schubert’s talent that, at the time of Die schöne Müllerin, the 26 year-old’s huge number of works already included masterpieces for performers ranging from solo voices and instruments to full orchestra. These included all but one of his symphonies, including the breezy Fifth and ‘Unfinished’ Eighth, and a wealth of highly polished quartets, piano sonatas and songs – though the likes of the ‘Death and the Maiden’ Quartet and Winterreise were still to come. While major opera success would elude him, his talent for writing for the voice was amply demonstrated elsewhere…
Die schöne Müllerin... a sensitive youth's Romantic daydream
By 1815, Schubert was proving himself to be an accomplished song composer, with Gretchen am Spinnrade (1814) followed by another setting of a poem by Goethe, the dramatic ballad Erlkönig. Far from a romantic figure himself (he was very short and round), the sensitive youth was drawn to themes of the early Romantic poets: the joy and pain of young love and the interaction between the human condition and the natural world. Schubert’s two song cycles, Die schöne Müllerin (1823) and Winterreise (1827), both to texts by German poet Wilhelm Müller, have become the pinnacle of the Lieder repertoire.
The text of Die schöne Müllerin (The beautiful mill-maid) had its origin in a literary party game, or Liederspiel, that Müller attended in Berlin in 1816. Each guest created verse or music for their part in a familiar folk tale about a mill-maid and her suitors. The evening was especially charged because Müller (playing the miller lad) was in love with the 18-year-old Luise Hensel. Müller confided his passion to his diary over two years, but Luise had other suitors and didn’t respond to his advances. He went abroad to forget her. In 1818, Müller revised his contributions to the Liederspiel as a monodrama and published it in an anthology, 77 Poems from the Posthumous Papers of a Travelling Horn-Player.
The journey of naïve, unrequited love... from joy to despair
Müller’s monodrama focusses on the journey from joy to despair of a naïve young miller lad who falls hopelessly in love with a mill-maid. He convinces himself that she loves him back, but when he discovers her with a lusty huntsman, he drowns himself in the brook.
Schubert came across the cycle of poems at some point in 1823, and the theme of an erotic encounter leading to death might have seemed horribly prescient. Aged 25, he had just received a devastating diagnosis of syphilis, probably contracted from a sex worker during a night out with friends. The composer wrote to his friend Leopold Kupelwieser: ‘I feel myself to be the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world. Imagine a man whose health will never be right again, a man whose most brilliant hopes have perished, to whom love and friendship have nothing to offer but pain, whose enthusiasm for all things beautiful is gone…’
Die schöne Müllerin... when was it first performed?
Schubert took 20 of Müller’s 25 poems – omitting a Prologue, an Epilogue and three poems dotted through the cycle – for his setting, which was published as his Op. 25 by the Viennese firm Sauer & Leidesdorf in 1824. He dedicated the first edition to his friend the Baron von Schönstein, who had a lyrical high baritone voice, and who would later be credited with introducing Schubert’s music to Liszt.
The first performance of the complete cycle, however, was not until 1856 in the Musikverein, Vienna, by Julius Stockhausen. The German baritone was responsible for championing Schubert and Die schöne Müllerin, giving many performances of individual songs and complete cycles over the next decade. On 10 May 1860, he sang the complete cycle in the Musikverein, with the unset poems declaimed by the Viennese actress Julie Rettich, a friend of the Schumanns. More recently, the missing poems have also been included in recordings by singers including Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Christian Gerhaher and Ian Bostridge.
Die schöne Müllerin... style and form
Schubert creates such variety in his settings, from simple strophic songs such as the jaunty, folkloric ‘Das Wandern’ (Wandering) to through-composed mini-dramas such as ‘Am Feierabend’ (At the end of the day), in which the lad imagines labouring in the noisy, clattering mill before enjoying calm, rest and a goodnight greeting from the mill-maid. Schubert’s melodies, even when repeated, are flexible enough to allow plenty of vocal colouration – in the last stanza of ‘Tränenregen’ (Shower of tears), for instance, when his love suddenly abandons him, the key switches abruptly to the tonic minor.
Schubert uses extremes of dynamic to convey the boy’s sudden outbursts, from the phrase ‘Dein ist mein Herz’ (My heart is yours) in ‘Ungeduld’ (Impatience) to ‘Mein!’ (Mine!), a wild claim to possession of the mill-maid. Self-pity creeps in at the end of ‘Morgengruss’ (Morning greeting), and drenches ‘Die liebe Farbe’ (The favourite colour) in B minor with repeated F sharps sounding a death-toll. After a bitter reference to his rival, the hunter, in ‘Die böse Farbe’ (The loathsome colour), it’s clear in ‘Trockne Blumen’ (Withered flowers) he is resolved to take his own life.
The unfortunate young Romantic's demise...
The lad’s only confidante is the mill-stream that accompanies him on his journey, the piano supplying the water’s rolling pulse throughout the cycle. The brook first appears in the second song, ‘Wohin’ (Whither) in rippling sextuplets. There’s the mechanical churn of the mill wheel, the hunter’s horn and the tolling death bell, all conjured in the piano line.
Finally, after a last exchange with his companion, the lad’s voice goes silent and the brook, in low bass tones, seduces the lad into the water with a lullaby, ‘Des Baches Wiegenlied’ (The brook’s lullaby). Schubert’s plain setting of the last song gives singer and pianist space to paint a consolatory vision of death as eternal rest under a boundless sky.
Die schöne Müllerin... Recommended recordings
The best recording
Christian Gerhaher (baritone)
Gerold Huber(piano)
Sony Classical 88985427402
Buy Gerhaher's Die schöne Müllerin from Amazon
What makes a perfect Die schöne Müllerin? It has to be more than a beautiful voice (a matter of taste, after all) and a well-matched pianist. An exceptional performance takes us through every twist of the miller lad’s emotional journey and leaves us changed. Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber, with their restrained, intimate performance, do just that. Gerhaher has taken masterclasses with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, whose recordings of Schubert’s two song cycles remain a yardstick. Their voices are not similar but they share a scrupulous attention to the delivery of text and music – Gerhaher’s crisp rolled ‘rrr’ in ‘Morgen’ is a model of German diction. On this recording, Gerhaher inserts the missing Müller poems, his velvety, unemphatic speaking voice complementing the songs.
A mature interpretation
Gerhaher and Huber’s 2018 recording came 15 years after their first. They have honed their interpretation, adding insight and depth without losing the spontaneity. Gerhaher’s mature baritone (he was nearly 50 at the time of the recording) sounds remarkably fresh – smoother and more controlled than in the earlier version. He is a cerebral artist, considering the coloration of every note, every nuance of pace and dynamic, but the effect is never precious. He doesn’t do carefree optimism, though in ‘Neugierige’ (The curious one) he finds a tenorial simplicity and sweetness. Instead he excels in unease – you can hear the frown in his voice.
The quiet intensity of ‘Die liebe Farbe’, one of the most beautiful melodies in the cycle, is achieved with great economy, while the quiet fury of ‘Der Jäger’ (The hunter) and the menace of ‘Eifersucht und Stolz’ (Jealousy and pride) are never over-egged. Gerhaher can also reduce his light baritone to a gentle whisper, as in ‘Trockne Blumen’, with slow, affectless, detached phrases, while Huber bleaches out the piano’s tone. In ‘Halt!’ (Stop!), Huber conjures the sound of the roaring mill wheel with bass notes that surge and bubble to the surface. The integration of singer and pianist is complete – their ebb and flow perfectly in sync.
The final ‘Des Baches Wiegenlied’ is almost conversational and achingly tender. Gerhaher seduces the unhappy youth with visions of a soft pillow in a blue crystal chamber, making death seem sweet and inevitable, and Huber allows the last notes to subside gently into silence. The recording quality is admirable – it’s like having a front row seat at Wigmore Hall.
Three other great recordings
Werner Güra (tenor)
Buy Güra's Die schöne Müllerin from Amazon
Of the countless recordings by fine tenor voices, the one I could live with forever is Güra and pianist Jan Schultsz’s from 2007. Güra’s bright, youthful tenor conveys all the subtle changes of mood, from innocent joy, through plaintive self-pity to jealous fury. Schultsz’s tinny, Sunday-school piano propels the mill wheel, the splashing of the brook and the mocking horn calls. Güra offers deeper psychological insight than the fresh-voiced Fritz Wunderlich (1966) and more colours than the ardent, boyish Ian Bostridge (1995). (Harmonia Mundi HMA1951708)
Julian Prégardien (tenor)
Buy Prégardien's Die schöne Müllerin from Amazon
Alongside Kristian Bezuidenhout on a Graf-style fortepiano that is clipped and percussive – perfect for the mill-wheel, and full of resonance – Prégardien has a honeyed, flexible tenor, though purists may quibble with his lavish ornamentation. He seems to be making it up as he goes along, which can be exciting. Sometimes his urgency teeters on the hysterical, but he can hollow out his tone to chilling effect, and Bezuidenhout matches him with breathtaking pianissimos. (Harmonia Mundi HMM902739)
Matthias Goerne (baritone)
Buy Goerne's Die schöne Müllerin from Amazon
In the pantheon of baritone recordings, the legendary Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau has long been considered the benchmark. His is a beautiful voice, but it doesn’t have rough edges that snag you like Matthias Goerne’s does here. With his granite baritone, Goerne could never be mistaken for a naïve miller’s lad, but his intense portrayal of a mind unravelling is compelling. You may start by resisting the heavy tread of ‘Das Wandern’ but soon you are enfolded into his dark, velvet-edged vision, supported by pianist Christoph Eschenbach. One quibble? Goerne’s breathing is occasionally too audible in the spacy acoustic. (Harmonia Mundi HMC901995)
And one to avoid…
In 2009, the young German operatic tenor Jonas Kaufmann was becoming a worldwide sensation. And when he recorded his first Die schöne Müllerin with the experienced pianist Helmut Deutsch, it was greatly anticipated. That glorious voice as Schubert’s lovesick lad? Why not? Sadly, Kaufmann is not on top form here: his performance is, frankly, a bit dull and one-note; it is gusty and unfocussed. Deutsch does his best to support, but he can’t inject the missing energy, even in a live recording from Munich’s Max-Joseph Saal.
