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Article Excerpt
La casa del mugnaio: ascolto e interpretazione della Schone Mullerin: con l'edizione del ciclo liederistico secondo la Neue Schubert-Ausgabe. By Giuseppina La Face Bianconi. (Historiae Musicae Cultores, 102.) Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2003. [322 p. ISBN 88 222 4323 X. [euro]32.] Indexes.
In 1823, during one of the most physically and psychologically challenging moments of his life, Schubert set Wilhelm Muller's cycle of poems about the unrequited love of a mill worker for the beautiful daughter of the mill owner. Die schone Mullerin occupies an odd position in the history of art song for its deceptive simplicity, ordinary, almost archetypical plot, and predominantly simple musical forms. It remains a highly controversial and fascinating lieder cycle, because, on the one hand, it is a landmark of the golden age of the Romantic lied, and, on the other hand, it offers a representation of the miller's anguish that is more realistic than romantic, more a malady than a lyrical abstraction, presenting a stunningly modern combination of passionate involvement and controlled, almost scientific lucidity.
Notwithstanding the considerable amount of existing high-quality critical literature on Schubert's Die schone Mullerin, Giuseppina La Face Bianconi's book offers new and valuable insights on the history and meaning of this cycle by bridging traditional musicological methods of investigation based on documentary evidence and formal analysis with less traditional approaches inspired by psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and cognitive musicology. The entire second half of the volume presents appendices featuring documents in the original German with Italian translation, including Eduard Hanslick's critical essays on Die schone Mullerin; Wilhelm Muller's collection of poems Die schone Mullerin (Im Winter zu lesen), including the poems not set by Schubert; a selection of Johann Mayrhofer's poems showing intriguing thematic similarities with Muller's lyrics; and, the critical score established by the Neue Ausgabe samtlicher Werke IV/2, edited by Walther Durr (Kassel: Barenreiter, 1975).
A vexing issue related to Die schone Mullerin concerns Schubert's late stylistic and formal developments. Evolutionist and teleological interpreters had to cope with the embarrassingly regressive taste of Schubert for poetry and his rediscovery of simplicity of form: if Schubert launched his career by...
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