Johannes Maria Staud

Die Schöne Müllerin - These Fevered Days

At the suggestion of the great Schubert interpreter Christoph Prégardien, I have orchestrated Schubert’s large-scale song cycle "Die Schöne Müllerin" [The Lovely Maid of the Mill] (1823) for a 19-piece ensemble and combined it with seven of my own songs set to poems by Emily Dickinson (1830–1886). The two strands are intertwined and naturally lead to a new interpretation of this timeless and enduring subject matter.

Of course, one might immediately think of Hans Zender's "compositional interpretation" of the "Winterreise" from 1993. However, as much as I admire that work, my approach is quite different.

With my instrumentation of the 20 Schubert songs in the cycle, I bring Schubert’s vibrant melodies and inventiveness into the present – very close to the original text. A misunderstood historicity would make little sense here. My own songs, obviously composed in a completely different tonal language, function as a deliberate counterpoint, as a commentary from the here and now, and as the work proceeds, they merge with Schubert's cycle on a superordinate level.

In the late work of Emily Dickinson (written, by the way, only a few decades after Wilhelm Müller’s on the other side of the Atlantic in New England), I found magnificent, laconic poems that fit wonderfully into the world of Die Schöne Müllerin. They complement it, expand it, contradict it, ironically question its romanticized image of nature – and in doing so take on a radically feminine perspective.

From the perspective of the Müllerin, who in Schubert/Müller remains merely a projection screen for male desire, I thus take a new look at the narratives of Schubert’s songs reflected by nature: wandering – strangeness – desire – unrequited love – suicide.

(Johannes Maria Staud, 2024)