Ex. 14-4: Der Müller und der Bach

Der Müller und der Bach (The Miller and the Brook) is the 19th of the twenty songs in Die schöne Müllerin (The Beautiful Miller's Daughter). Schubert wrote them in 1823, when he was 26. That year he was seriously ill, and in the summer he spent some weeks in hospital. In August he wrote to a friend, "I doubt whether I will ever be completely well again." The songs were printed in Vienna in 1824.

The poems are by Wilhelm Müller (1794–1827), a poet and teacher from Dessau, in central Germany. In 1815 he wrote in his diary that he could not play or sing, and he hoped that one day someone would hear the music in his words. There is no record that he ever heard Schubert's songs. He died in 1827, at 32.

In the story, a young man who works at a mill falls in love with the mill owner's daughter, but she leaves him for a hunter. In this song the young man talks with the brook. The brook tries to comfort him, but he says that it does not know what love is, and he longs to rest deep in the cool water. In the last song the brook sings him to sleep.

For many years after Schubert's death, singers sang only a few songs from the set at a time. The first concert with all twenty songs was given in Vienna in 1856, 28 years after Schubert died.

From the album Schubert: Die schöne Müllerin by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Jörg Demus (2000)
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