Die schöne Müllerin (,"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.

Composition

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"). 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".

Narrative

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.

Editions

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, 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, and contains transposed versions for lower voices. Six of the songs were transcribed for solo piano by Franz Liszt and published as Müllerlieder.

Synopsis