Ex. 14-4: Der Müller und der Bach

No. 19 from Schubert's song cycle Die schöne Müllerin (The Beautiful Miller's Daughter, D. 795), composed in 1823. The poems are by Wilhelm Müller.

The cycle tells the story of a young miller who follows a brook to a mill, falls in love with the miller's daughter, loses her to a hunter, and drowns himself in the brook. Schubert reportedly found the poems at a friend's house and composed three songs the very next day. According to a later story, the friend was the singer Benedikt Randhartinger, and Schubert took the book of poems home while Randhartinger was out of the room — but this tale is probably a legend.

He wrote the cycle in 1823, a hard year for him. He had become seriously ill with syphilis; his hair fell out, and he had to wear a wig. Some writers have suggested that Schubert, facing his own illness, felt close to this story of a young man who dies after an unhappy love.

In this song, the second to last in the cycle, the miller and the brook sing in dialogue. The miller sings in G minor; the brook answers in G major. When the miller speaks, the piano plays quiet, rocking chords; when the brook replies, it flows in gentle broken chords. The brook tries to comfort the dying man, and at the very end the music settles into the major. In the final song, the brook sings a lullaby over his body.

Franz Liszt transcribed this song for piano solo as No. 2 of his Müller-Lieder (S.565). Liszt often played his Schubert song transcriptions in his own recitals. Four years later, Schubert wrote a second song cycle on poems by the same poet, Wilhelm Müller: Winterreise (Winter Journey, 1827). It is an even darker story of lost love.

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