This weekend, we go straight to the heart of the Hausmusik tradition with a Schubertiad for the 21st century. All of the music centers on the creative genius and legacy of Franz Schubert (1797-1828) – just as the original Schubertiads centered on Schubert himself as composer and performer.  In his biography of the composer, John Reed describes the context from which the term “Schubertiad” was first coined:

On 26 January 1821, Schubert gathered with fourteen members of the [Sonnleithner] circle for a musical party in Schober’s rooms.  Schubert played and sang, a lot of punch was drunk, and the festivity went on till three in the morning . . . Josef Huber wrote to tell his betrothed about it, leaving us the earliest surviving account of a “Schubertiad.”

In his musical maturity Schubert relied heavily on a small coterie of friends and admirers, both for spiritual and financial support. Sadly, as Schubert’s popularity grew during the 1820s, his health gradually declined so far that his actual appearances at these musical evenings become more and more infrequent. Personal disagreements and marital indiscretions among the regular members of the circle brought the whole situation to a crisis point during the winter of 1823-1824. Yet the “Schubertiad” concept endured even as the personnel migrated in and out, and a “big, big Schubertiad” was held on December 15, 1826 at the home of Josef von Spaun. Piano duets and over 30 songs were performed that night, followed by a feast and dancing until early morning. This was the Schubertiad’s shining moment, never to be equaled again, and the final such event before Schubert’s death two years later.

DIE SCHÖNE MÜLLERIN

Sweeping judgments are always perilous, but with Franz Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin I feel myself on solid ground: This cycle of twenty songs is an unparalleled monument to the man and the era.  Depth of expression and compositional finesse accord it the highest position in the art song repertoire.  Among German-speaking peoples, Die schöne Müllerin is as beloved and as reflective of a deep-seated cultural identity as, for instance, the National Parks are for Americans.  In these songs Schubert perfects the quicksilver changes of mood, like changes from sun to shade on a blustery spring afternoon.  It’s a fortuitous analogy, for the aesthetics of landscape painting – espoused by Constable in England, Friedrich in Germany, and the Hudson River School here in America – resonate with Schubert’s music and his choice in poetry.

1823 was a critical year for Schubert.  At age 26, his life’s journey was far nearer its end than its beginning.  He did not know this, of course, but ominous signs were starting to appear.  Prior to spending much of the year in hospital, Schubert had been devoted to achieving a durable success in opera.  It was not to be.  Fortunately, he continued to compose in other genres, producing a treasure of works for which he is fondly remembered today.  At the very end of 1823, in a burst activity that appears to have been fairly typical of his genius, Schubert completed a setting of twenty poems by Wilhelm Müller.

The genesis of Müller’s poetic cycle, given the provocative title Poems Found in the Papers Left Behind by a Journeyman Horn Player, goes back to 1816 when he introduced it as an informally staged drama at a Berlin salon.  At its heart we meet the isolated wanderer, one of the most popular symbols of the Romantic search for fulfillment and powerfully epitomized in Friedrich’s painting shown above.  Müller cast himself in that role, and life imitated art as he competed with poet Clemens Brentano for the real-life affections of his miller-maid, Luise Hensel.  Failure in love ultimately assured literary success.  Müller’s poems appeared in print in 1821 to great public acclaim. Still, he lamented his inability to set them properly to music, for which the texts seemed to call out.  Interestingly, Müller prophesied Schubert’s later contribution:

If I could produce the tunes, my poems would please better than they do now. But courage! A kindred soul may be found who will hear the tunes behind the words, and give them back to me.

Kindred souls, indeed.  Exact contemporaries; both former school teachers turned freelance artists; unlucky in love; destined for an early grave. Schubert displays an uncanny sympathy with Müller’s poetry, both in terms of content and in terms of structure and meter.  This sympathy is the greatest aesthetic achievement of Die schöne Müllerin: the expressive immediacy, the oneness of melody and words which creates an ambience of unparalleled intimacy and lyric intensity.  Schubert probes the wanderer’s mindset to extract profound insights not explicitly stated by Müller’s texts.  He so thoroughly grasps the poetry’s sentiment that he can use music – sometimes just the piano – to suggest deeper levels of meaning.

It would be difficult to attempt a summary of Die schöne Müllerin. Fortunately, we have space here to examine Schubert’s work from both broad and narrow perspectives, from highlights of individual songs to the emotional scope of the cycle as a whole.  A few general observations will help frame the discussion.  First, Schubert develops the psychology of music through his piano accompaniment, which represents an embodiment of the brook.  From companion to sounding board to vicarious love object to enveloping grave, the brook’s meandering path parallels every step of our love-besotted hero.  Schubert’s approach to accompaniment includes but goes well beyond the conventional use of a prelude and postlude to make the piano an equal partner in the conversation.  Müller’s wanderer is never really alone.

Second, because these texts trace a narrative arc, we can discuss the songs each in turn.  However, it must be conceded that the plot of Die schöne Müllerin is not where interest lies; quite the opposite, in fact.  Müller – and to an even greater extent Schubert, who eliminated five parts of the original poetic cycle – focuses on lyric meditation rather than dramatic action.  What happens matters far less than how seemingly trivial events are interpreted by the wanderer.

Finally, one of Schubert’s favored compositional devices – sudden reversals between major and minor modes – takes its place in capturing the fragile emotional state of Müller’s Wertherian hero.  It’s a technique he employs across the whole spectrum of his oeuvre to indicate a fragile peace between joy and pain, between inner and outer emotional states. In its purest guise, this slippage is not structurally motivated; the change from major to minor is purely aesthetic, a subtle modulation of color with only immediate repercussions.  (Such is the case in the opening gesture of Schubert’s C-Major String Quintet, performed tomorrow.) Furthermore, the modal inflection usually happens on either a repeated phrase of text (to indicate hidden truths where once everything seemed rosy) or is used to draw attention to a single key word.  These features recur time and again as we undertake the fateful journey from love’s promise to its agonizing demise.

THE INDIVIDUAL SONGS

The opening song, “Wandering,” sets the tone of the entire cycle in several important ways.  Its simple form and harmonic language convey a folksy earnestness and transparency.  The major mode establishes an optimistic starting point for the wanderer’s experience.  We glimpse Eden, Man in harmony with Nature.  The hero hasn’t yet met the tragic love of his life; he desires nothing more than to wander, poor but free and peaceful. Schubert sets up a suitably high plateau from which the wanderer’s mood can subsequently plummet. The mood of song 2 (“Where to?”) remains much the same.  Schubert continues the preceding piano texture – ebullient arpeggios in the right hand – to suggest rippling water, a connection crucial to the almost tangible presence of the brook in later moments.  Both songs deal with the brook’s role as teacher.  “From water we have learned” to wander, says song no. 1, and now the hero goes freely whither the water leads.  Their courses are one – symbolically at first, literally so by the end of the cycle.

In song 3 (“Stop!”) we encounter Schubert’s idiomatic rapid changes from major to minor mode.  The scene comes slowly into focus: the mill and its splashing wheel, a place for our wanderer to pause during his journey.  A tinge of minor-mode foreboding colors the final line, where the hero fatally interprets the brook’s motion as having personal connotations, leading him to the locus of much joy and pain. Songs 4 and 5 match texture to message as the story moves along.  The former maintains a sweet temper (thanksgiving) as the love-object first comes into view; the latter song takes its lead from the hero’s bravura and proceeds on bubbling sixteenth notes full of the resilience and strength that the poor wanderer can only feign.  But I anticipate . . . .

The all-important question comes in song 6 (“The Curious One”): “Does she love me?”  And despite statements to the contrary (“I would ask no flower”), our wandering fellow is, of course, very curious to know her answer. We can almost hear him pulling off petals, one by one, in the rhythmic, hesitant accompaniment of the first section.  In hindsight, this entire section sounds like mere preparation for the lyrical B section, where rippling arpeggios demonstrate Schubert’s fondness for “traveling music.” Texture supports a major structural change here, as the opening narration gives place to direct address between the youth and his faithful brook (“O Bächlein meiner Liebe…”). In Schubert’s momentary inflections toward the minor mode, we sense that the poor wanderer’s question will not receive a positive reply.

The “Impatience” described in Song 7 becomes rushing chords in the piano and athletic, skipwise emotion in the voice.  Schubert leads the voice to its highest pitches repeatedly in this extroverted piece, whose mood contrasts with the following “Morning Greeting” as night to day. Song 8 is one of Schubert’s finest.  It moves from an opening hymn texture through a moment of tonal darkening, finally arriving at triplet figuration that supports the voice’s sweet chordal third of C major.  Song 9 (“The Miller’s Flowers”) relies on its 6/8 rhythm to suggest a lullaby; the wanderer plants his seeds of love – come what may – beneath the beloved’s window, where he will sing her to sleep.

Until now, anything has been possible, all of Müller’s verbs present tense.  At Song 10 (“Rain of Tears”), the critical change to past tense – to reflections on what was and what might have been – marks the beginning of our hero’s downward spiral.  As music historian Charles Rosen puts it, “The most signal triumphs of the Romantic portrayal of memory are not those which recall past happiness, but remembrances of those moments when future happiness still seemed possible.”  At first Schubert lets nothing cloud the sunny music, though the AAAB structure opens a window to more pessimistic ideas in the final stanza, where even the heavens symbolically weep for the poor youth.  The ensuing song (“Mine!”) labors bravely to dispel unfavorable signs, all the way to its emphatic final chord.

Song 12 (“Pause”) begins a set of texts linked by the color green.  The opening theme echoes horn calls – a favorite romantic symbol connoting distance – and a sad peace infuses every bar.  Schubert’s striking harmonic changes make “Pause” a favorite subject for analysis, but the most psychologically potent detail is the well-placed fluctuation between major and minor near the end.  In song 13 the connotations of green are still positive, but by the start of song 14, in which the rival/hunter first appears, the mood has done an about-face.  The dark C minor, staccato texture, and equestrian skipping figures depict a jealous tirade.  In song 15, treating “Jealousy and Pride,” our hero asks the brook to upbraid the maiden for her fickleness.  His world has narrowed considerably from song 1; psychological strain inspires music that is driven, at times frantic.

Song 16 forms an emotional crux for Die schöne Müllerin. In addition to pleading appoggiaturas and repeated pulsing chords, “The Favorite Color” features an obsessive pedal tone (F-sharp) that appears on every sixteenth note and is sounded over 200 times!  As the pull of the grave grows stronger, the hero’s emotions become more raw.  The next song (“The Hateful Color”) includes a final show of defiance, as if life can go on without love.  But Schubert closes the case with the stark and desolate E minor opening to “Dry Flowers” (song 18).  The only time it turns brighter – to E Major, foreshadowing the key of the final song – is when the hero fantasizes how the maiden will miss him after he’s gone.  The contrast between songs 18 (E major) and 19 (G minor) seems intentionally disturbing and abrupt.  Müller’s text offers an imagined dialogue between our two main characters: wanderer and brook.  Schubert’s music for the water, as expected, is bright and fluid, whereas the youth sings a poignant dirge.

At last, in a brilliant stroke, Schubert turns to E Major for the only song in Die schöne Müllerin not sung by the wanderer, “The Brook’s Lullaby.”  As he would do in “Der Lindenbaum” from Winterreise (an 1827 song cycle also based on Müller texts), Schubert selects E Major for the sound of stillness and peace in death.  He calls upon recurrent features from earlier songs – vacillations between major and minor, horn calls, even the pedal tone – but how different the result.  We have reached the culmination of the brook’s humanization only to have it sing with the voice of an angel.  This is the journey’s end, for us and for the wanderer.  When our time comes, we can only hope death will find us so serenely accepting of our mortality.

Jason Stell, © 2025