Die schöne Müllerin Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Die schöne Müllerin is a song cycle by Franz Schubert on poems by Wilhelm Müller.Müller's poems were published in 1820, and Schubert set most of them to music in 1823. The resulting work is the earliest song cycle to be widely performed, and is one of Schubert's best-known works.
There are twenty songs in the cycle, around half in simple strophic form
The cycle tells the story of a young man wandering in the countryside. He follows a brook to a mill where he falls in love with the miller-maid. His love is not fully returned however, and he descends into despair after seeing a love rival, a hunter, at the mill. The last number is a lullaby sung by the brook in which the man has drowned himself. There is an overall movement through the cycle from cheerfulness and optimism to despair and tragedy.
A typical performance of the cycle will last around sixty to seventy minutes.
Schubert wrote one other song cycle, Die Winterreise (The Winter's Journey) (the songs collected as Schwanengesang are sometimes performed as a set, but were collected together after Schubert's death, and were not intended as a cycle by him).
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