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Die schöne Müllerin (The Beautiful Maid of the Mill), D. 795

Twenty songs by Franz Schubert on texts by Wilhelm Müller

Between them, tenor Frank Kelley and fortepianist Kenneth Slowik have lived with Franz Schubert's great cycle of love, longing, jealousy, and death—the basic subjects of much of the German Lied repertoire—for well over half a century. Susan Youens' penetrating essay accompanying the recording of Die schöne Müllerin Slowik released (with tenor John Elwes) in 2007 elevates Schubert's settings of Wilhemn Müller's poems to mythic stature:  

     "In Franz Schubert’s first song cycle to words by the Prussian poet Wilhelm Müller, we find conjoined two powerful forces—music and myth—at maximum intensity. If the beauty of this music has long been recognized, the full extent of its mythic dimension, its confrontation with what is inexplicable in existence, has not. Because the human mind cannot plumb the mysteries of life, death, creation, Nature, the soul, evil, and desire entirely by factual-scientific means, we tell stories in which archetypal figures play archetypal roles. When we read myth, we feel a shock of recognition, impelled not by the surface trappings of the story but by its underlying psychological verity. The greatest creative geniuses routinely traffic in myth which they make modern, fashioned both to be in accord with their own time and place and to endure beyond it. Sophocles’s Oedipus, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Don Juan, Hamlet and Othello (and many other characters in Shakespeare) are just such mythical beings—and so too is Müller’s and Schubert’s miller lad."