Aksel Schiotz / Gerald Moore perform Die Schoene Muellerin
You can read the lyrics here: http://members.macconnect.com/users/j/jimbob/classical/Schubert_D795.html#texts
You may have to be between the ages of 16 and 18 to appreciate these songs properly. Back in high school they had the same place in my life as did R&B love songs in the lives of my classmates: balm for broken hearts. Nowadays most "classical" singers are too sophisticated for this music; you can hear the bow tie. Aksel Schiotz's recording from the 1930s is the only one that brings to mind the fresh, flushed cheeks and haplessness of the teenage miller.
Perhaps only rosy-faced teenage boys can move us with lines like these:
"I’d like to raise me a young starling
until he could speak the words loud and clear
until he could speak with the sound of my mouth
with the full, hot press of my heart…”
Perhaps only pimply-faced teenage boys are excused for this kind of love, love that is simply drunken absorption in the babbling brook, in the green alders, in the clattering mill-wheels around the house, the glint of sunlight from the windows, and the fountains of youth pouring from one’s body.
As for the “lovely mill-girl” of the title, she may or may as well not exist. This kind of love ends logically in suicide, in the miller boy drowning himself, merging with the landscape he loves so much. But really he is too young to believe in death, and so he only falls asleep and wakes up in November, older and more embittered, to wander the dead landscape of Schubert's other song cycle, Winterreise.
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau / Joerg Demus perform An Die Ferne Geliebte
You can Read the Lyrics here: http://www.recmusic.org/lieder/assemble_texts.html?LanguageId=7&SongCycleId=128
Perhaps only rosy-faced teenage boys can move us with lines like these:
"I’d like to raise me a young starling
until he could speak the words loud and clear
until he could speak with the sound of my mouth
with the full, hot press of my heart…”
Perhaps only pimply-faced teenage boys are excused for this kind of love, love that is simply drunken absorption in the babbling brook, in the green alders, in the clattering mill-wheels around the house, the glint of sunlight from the windows, and the fountains of youth pouring from one’s body.
As for the “lovely mill-girl” of the title, she may or may as well not exist. This kind of love ends logically in suicide, in the miller boy drowning himself, merging with the landscape he loves so much. But really he is too young to believe in death, and so he only falls asleep and wakes up in November, older and more embittered, to wander the dead landscape of Schubert's other song cycle, Winterreise.
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau / Joerg Demus perform An Die Ferne Geliebte
You can Read the Lyrics here: http://www.recmusic.org/lieder/assemble_texts.html?LanguageId=7&SongCycleId=128
Beethoven’s lover in To the Distant Beloved is homelier, square-jawed like Beethoven himself, with none of the rosy pubescent charm of the miller boy. The melodies are plainer, and in the way Beethoven has with melodies, are nuts and bolts rather than Schuber's wild bouquets. But as nuts and bolts, they constantly remind us of the impulse behind the whole, which here might be summed up in Adorno’s epigram, “He only loves, who has the strength to hold onto love.” The six songs each flow into the next without a break, woven together by the piano, which is in many ways more expressive here than the voice (Beethoven was a pianist, not a singer) and embodies this unwavering, underlying impulse. The most moving moment comes when the refrain of the first song reappears at the very end, and we see, as in many of Beethoven’s works, that it could not be otherwise, that everything we have experienced so far only leads back to the beginning, to what we always knew in a process of trial and affirmation. And so space and time is overcome, and enduring absence and uncertainty, love is transformed from the sunlight of an afternoon into the binding force of life itself. It is a more adult love than that of Die Schoene Muellerin. The experience of love is ennobling in itself, regardless of how things turned out.
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