Die schöne Müllerin | |
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Song cycle by Franz Schubert | |
Catalogue | D. 795 |
Opus | 25 |
Text | poems by Wilhelm Müller |
Composed | 1823 |
Published | 1824 |
Movements | 20 |
Scoring |
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Die schöne Müllerin (German pronunciation: [diːˈʃøːnəˈmʏlɐʁɪn] ,"The Fair Maid of the Mill", Op. 25, D. 795), is a song cycle by Franz Schubert from 1823 based on 20 poems by Wilhelm Müller. It is the first of Schubert's two seminal cycles (preceding Winterreise ), and a pinnacle of Lied repertoire.
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, transposed to a lower range, a precedent established by Schubert himself. Since the protagonist is a young man, performances by women's voices are less common. 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.
Müller published twenty-five poems in the first fascicule (1821) of Sieben und siebzig Gedichten aus den nachgelassenen Papieren eines reisenden Waldhornisten (Seventy-seven Poems from the Posthumous Papers of an Itinerant Hornist"). [2] They arose from his unrequited passion for Luise Hensel, herself a poet as well as sister in law to Fanny Hensel and Felix Mendelssohn.
Schubert set twenty of them to music between May and September 1823, while he was also writing his opera Fierrabras . He was 26 years old at the time. Schubert omitted five of the poems, such as a prologue and an epilogue delivered by the poet. The work was published in 1824 by the firm of Sauer and Leidesdorf as Op. 25 under the title Die schöne Müllerin, ein Zyklus von Liedern, gedichtet von Wilhelm Müller (The Lovely Maid of the Mill, a song cycle to poems by Wilhelm Müller) and was dedicated to the singer Carl von Schönstein . The omitted poems were a "Prolog", "Das Mühlenleben" (following Nr. 6), "Erster Schmerz, letzter Scherz" (following Nr. 15), "Blümlein Vergißmein" (following Nr. 17) and "Epilog".
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 journeyman miller wanders happily through the countryside. He comes upon a brook, which he follows to a mill. He falls in love with the miller's beautiful daughter (the "Müllerin" of the title). She is out of his reach as he is only a journeyman. 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 Beethoven's "Adelaide" for a similar fantasy.) In the end, the young man despairs and presumably drowns himself in the brook. The last number is a lullaby sung by the brook.
The Diabelli edition of 1830 in a facsimile score, with notes by Walther Dürr, was published (1996) by Bärenreiter. The version in most common use is the Peters Edition, edited by Max Friedlaender, and in this and several other editions (e.g. Schirmer) the cycle is presented as the first 20 songs of Volume 1. There are versions in the original (high) keys, and transposed alternatives for lower voices. The Peters edition was revised by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Elmar Budde, and is available as Volume 1 of the Peters Urtext Edition, [3] available in high, medium and low key versions. The most recent scholarly edition is in the New Schubert Edition, again edited by Walther Dürr and published by Bärenreiter, [4] and contains transposed versions for lower voices.
Six of the songs were transcribed for solo piano by Franz Liszt and published as Müllerlieder. [5]
Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer of the late Classical and early Romantic eras. Despite his short life, Schubert left behind a vast oeuvre, including more than 600 secular vocal works, seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music, and a large body of piano and chamber music. His major works include the art songs Erlkönig, Gretchen am Spinnrade, Ave Maria; the Trout Quintet, the unfinished Symphony No. 8 in B minor, the "Great" Symphony No. 9 in C major, the String Quartet No. 14 "Death and the Maiden", a String Quintet, the two sets of Impromptus for solo piano, the three last piano sonatas, the Fantasia in F minor for piano four hands, the opera Fierrabras, the incidental music to the play Rosamunde, and the song cycles Die schöne Müllerin, Winterreise and Schwanengesang. Born in the Himmelpfortgrund suburb of Vienna, Schubert showed uncommon gifts for music from an early age. His father gave him his first violin lessons and his elder brother gave him piano lessons, but Schubert soon exceeded their abilities. In 1808, at the age of eleven, he became a pupil at the Stadtkonvikt school, where he became acquainted with the orchestral music of Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven. He left the Stadtkonvikt at the end of 1813 and returned home to live with his father, where he began studying to become a schoolteacher. Despite this, he continued his studies in composition with Antonio Salieri and still composed prolifically. In 1821, Schubert was admitted to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde as a performing member, which helped establish his name among the Viennese citizenry. He gave a concert of his works to critical acclaim in March 1828, the only time he did so in his career. He died eight months later at the age of 31, the cause officially attributed to typhoid fever, but believed by some historians to be syphilis.
A song cycle is a group, or cycle, of individually complete songs designed to be performed in sequence, as a unit.
Johann Ludwig Wilhelm Müller was a German lyric poet, best known as the author of Die schöne Müllerin (1823) and Winterreise (1828). These would later be the source of inspiration for two song cycles composed by Franz Schubert.
Winterreise is a song cycle for voice and piano by Franz Schubert, a setting of 24 poems by German poet Wilhelm Müller. It is the second of Schubert's two song cycles on Müller's poems, the earlier being Die schöne Müllerin.
Strophic form – also called verse-repeating form, chorus form, AAA song form, or one-part song form – is a song structure in which all verses or stanzas of the text are sung to the same music. Contrasting song forms include through-composed, with new music written for every stanza, and ternary form, with a contrasting central section.
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David Willison is an English pianist. Between 1961 and 1999 he was the regular accompanist of the baritone Benjamin Luxon in recitals and recordings.
In Western classical music tradition, Lied is a term for setting poetry to classical music to create a piece of polyphonic music. The term is used for any kind of song in contemporary German and Dutch, but among English and French speakers, lied is often used interchangeably with "art song" to encompass works that the tradition has inspired in other languages as well. The poems that have been made into lieder often center on pastoral themes or themes of romantic love.
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Franz Schubert's best known song cycles, like Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise are based on separate poems with a common theme and narrative. Other song cycles are based on consecutive excerpts of the same literary work: Schubert's "Ave Maria" is part of such a song cycle based on excerpts of the same poem, in this case by Walter Scott.
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"Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust" is the first line of a poem by Wilhelm Müller, written in 1821 with the title "Wanderschaft" as part of a collection, Die schöne Müllerin. While wandern is defined as "hiking" today, it referred to the required journeyman years of craftsmen when written, in this case of a miller.