Die schöne Müllerin

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Die schöne Müllerin, D. 795, is a song cycle by Franz Schubert on poems by Wilhelm Müller. It is the earliest song cycle to be widely performed. The work is considered one of Schubert's most important, and it is widely performed and recorded.

Die schöne Müllerin is performed by a pianist and a solo singer. The vocal part falls in the range of a tenor or soprano voice, but is often sung by other voices, tranposed to a lower range. Since the story of the cycle is about a young man, the work is most often sung by men. The piano part bears much of the expressive burden of the work, and is only seldom a mere "accompaniment" to the singer.

A typical performance lasts around sixty to seventy minutes.

1 Composition
2 Story
3 Song titles and keys
4 External links

[edit] Composition

Müller's poems were published in 1820, and Schubert set most of them to music between May and September of 1823, while he was also writing his opera Fierabras. He was 26 years old at the time. Schubert omitted several of the poems, such as a prologue and an epilogue delivered by the poet. The work was published in 1824 under the title Die schöne Müllerin, ein Zyklus von Liedern, gedichtet von Wilhelm Müller, which means, "The lovely maid of the mill, a song cycle to poems by Wilhelm Müller".

The cycle is occasionally referred to as the "Müllerlieder," the Müller songs, a term used by the composer once in a letter. This is not especially useful nomenclature, since Schubert's later and equally celebrated song cycle Winterreise is also to poems by Müller.

[edit] Story

There are twenty songs in the cycle, around half in simple strophic form, and they move from cheerful optimism to despair and tragedy. At the beginning of the cycle, a young man wanders happily through the countryside. He comes upon a brook, which he follows to a mill. He falls in love with a beautiful girl who works there, the "beautiful mill-girl" of the title. He tries to impress her, but her response seems tentative. The young man is soon supplanted in her affections by a hunter clad in green, the color of a ribbon he gave the girl. In his anguish he experiences an obsession with the color green, then an extravagant death fantasy in which flowers sprout from his grave to express his undying love (see Adelaide (Beethoven) for a similar fantasy). In the end, the young man despairs and drowns himself in the brook. The last number is a lullaby sung by the brook.