CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Christian Gerhaher
Gerold Huber

Weill Recital Hall
Friday, October 19th, 2007 at 7:30 PM

Christian Gerhaher, Baritone
Gerold Huber, Piano

SCHUBERT Die schöne Müllerin

Program Notes:

The Concert At a Glance

Tonight’s program consists of a single work, one of the most beautiful and important compositions in all of Western music. Franz Schubert was newly diagnosed with syphilis when he discovered a poetic cycle by a contemporary of his that tells the tale of a young lad done to death by his first erotic experience. That the composer was drawn to a story about the coupling of Eros and Death at this turning point in his own life is a coincidence to make anyone ponder the mysteries of time and fate. The characters in this narrative cycle in 20 stages go all the way back to the Middle Ages—many of you will know them in comic guise from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales—but here they are mythic archetypes for something fundamental in human existence. Few of us make the journey from cradle to grave without being clawed by love’s very sharp talons at some point, and Schubert’s cycle traverses a tragic arc from Songs of Innocence to Songs of Experience.

Notes on the Program
By Susan Youens

FRANZ SCHUBERT Die schöne Müllerin, D. 795
Born January 31, 1797, in Vienna; died November 19, 1828, in Vienna.

Composed in 1823, Die schöne Müllerin received its first complete Carnegie Hall performance in Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Recital Hall) on April 25, 1967, with Martin Sameth, baritone, and an unidentified pianist. The first Carnegie Hall performance of a song from Die schöne Müllerin took place on October 29, 1899, when Martha Wettengel sang “Trockne Blumen” with pianist A. zur Nieden in Chamber Music Hall (now Weill Recital Hall).

In the late autumn of 1816, the 23-year-old poet Wilhelm Müller took part in a weekly artistic salon at the home of the Berlin privy councilor Friedrich August von Stägemann. The other members of the group included the 22-year-old artist Wilhelm Hensel, who would later marry Fanny Mendelssohn; his 18-year-old sister, Luise Hensel; the later historian Friedrich Förster; and the 16-year-old daughter of the household, Hedwig von Stägemann. The young people
embarked on the composition of a Liederspiel (“song-play”) on the venerable theme of the miller maid (Hedwig) wooed by a variety of suitors: a gardener (Luise Hensel in a “pants role”), a hunter (Wilhelm Hensel), Müller (predestined by his name to be the miller lad), and a Junker, or country squire (Förster). The antique tale was “in the air” at the time: Giovanni Paisiello’s comic opera L’amor contrastato, o sia La bella Molinara of 1788 was popular in Germany as Die schöne Müllerin. Goethe had written four mill-ballads in different national styles, and romantic
writers followed suit.

Only fragments of the Stägemann Liederspiel are extant, but from them, we learn that it ended with the miller maid overcome by remorse and drowning herself in the same brook in which the miller lad died. The young Müller, by far the best poet in the group, was in love with Luise Hensel, but she was being strenuously courted by the older romantic poet Clemens Brentano
(she never married, however). In a traditional remedy for a broken heart, Müller left Berlin in 1817 for journeys to Austria and Italy, where he became a supporter of Greek independence from the Ottoman Empire. Returning to his native Dessau in 1818, he began revising the Liederspiel as a monodrama, a poetic cycle spoken or sung by a single character. Everyone we meet,
everything we see, everything we know comes from him, or so goes Müller’s feint.

He was proud of the finished work, as well he might be, and gave it pride of place in his first poetic anthology: 77 Poems from the Posthumous Papers of a Wandering Horn Player. The title is a mocking “send-up” of as many romantic clichés as Müller could cram into a single line (magic numbers, death, wandering, the Waldhorn or natural horn as the romantic instrument par
excellence), and it tells us that Müller was a latecomer, a postromantic writer. The parenthetical
subtitle of the poetic cycle, “To Be Read in Winter,” bespeaks someone looking back in wintry disillusionment at the springtime of romantic ideals. Literary critics used to decry Müller’s poetry as simple and naïve, but in actuality these poems overflow with literary references, their
university-educated creator trafficking in allusions to Goethe, Elizabethan poetry, medieval romance, and folk poetry. “Ungeduld” (“Impatience”), for example, is modeled on a passage
from Sir Edmund Spenser’s “Colin Clouts Come Home Again” of 1595. Müller even copies the same poetic rhythms (“Her name in every tree I will endosse, / That as the trees do grow, her name may grow …”).

In another example, the framing prologue and epilogue of Die schöne Müllerin—Schubert omitted them from his cycle—are drenched in Pirandello-esque irony. Both are in the voice of “The Poet,” a combination of carnival huckster and egotistical artist who derides his chosen subject matter as rustic but congratulates himself on his skill in making something new out of these country matters. They are not really “country matters” (except for the setting), but he did indeed make something new from them.

The three main characters in Die schöne Müllerin have a long literary ancestry beginning in the Middle Ages and extending all the way to World War I. In German folklore, hunters are fearless, independent, at home in Nature, disdainful of civilization, and possessed of irresistible sexual magnetism. They have the advantage in the ages-old chasse d’amour, or “hunt of love,” and shy,
poetically inclined miller lads cannot compete with so much masculinity mantled in so much myth. But the myths of handsome, seductive hunters also have a dark side in violence, lust, and rape. In “Der Jäger,” Müller even calls up associations with German legends of “der wilde
Mann” (“the wild man”) when his miller lad angrily cries out to a hunter who is not even there (the lad talks to himself), “And shave the bristling hair from your chin.” The stricken youth can hardly believe that the sweetheart he thinks is so saintly could reciprocate the animal desires of an uncivilized macho man when she could have a sweet and tender poet who worships her.

For those who had read the right books, however, it was easy to believe: mills were the traditional site for sex. In Roman times, the miller’s daughter was offered to the men
bringing corn or meal to grind at the mill, and Chaucer created the most famous example of sexual conniving at the medieval mill in the Reeve’s Tale from his Canterbury Tales. Some
of Germany’s oldest folk poems also tell of lusty miller maids and shy young apprentices who yearn for their favors, but Müller’s lad has read all the wrong books. He is a figure transposed
from the medieval poetry of courtly love, newly fashionable in the early 19th century, to a rustic context. The courtly lover controls lust by desiring a lady who is seen as too wonderful for the dross of sexuality; what the knight-poet does with bodily desire is to sing of it in verse stylized
to the utmost. The beloved is Muse, not lover. Following the chivalric model, the miller lad idealizes the miller maid as pure and perfect, and he sings songs to tell of her beauty
and of his love for her. But, of course, no one can actually love in this way in real life. No woman can survive this kind of exaltation, and no human being can spiritualize sexual desire
without a struggle. The result is the classic virgin-whore dichotomy in which the beloved is first worshipped as the image of perfection and then excoriated as a slut when she proves to have a carnal side.

Müller was not the first to create young men destroyed by the difference between love on the printed page and love as it really is; Goethe’s Werther was only one of many such characters Müller might have known. In fact, his miller lad suffers more than Schubert’s. The composer
omitted not only the prologue and epilogue but three poems from the body of the narrative, poems in which the miller lad 1) idealizes the maiden as a rustic saint, 2) spies on the hunter and miller maid making love, and 3) undergoes a harrowing surge of sexual revulsion that
destroys him—this is why he kills himself. By eliminating these poems, Schubert allows us to infer that the lad’s love was possibly unrequited and that some passing kindness on her part allows him in “Mein!” (“Mine!”) to fantasize that she is his before the truth of her liaison with
the hunter becomes something he cannot deny. His miller is more innocent than the poet’s.

The genesis of Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin marks the beginning of the end of Schubert’s life. He discovered that he had contracted syphilis sometime in late 1822 or early 1823, and it was in 1823 that he composed this tale of a poet-singer who dies in the aftermath of sexual experience.
“Imagine a man whose health will never be right again ... whose most brilliant hopes have perished ... whom enthusiasm for all things beautiful threatens to forsake,” Schubert wrote to a friend: this is the backdrop to Die schöne Müllerin. The initial stages of his illness were
so severe that he had to be hospitalized, possibly in the summer of 1823. The cycle was published the following year (1824) in five booklets as Op. 25 by the Viennese firm of Sauer & Leidesdorf. Schubert dedicated the first edition to his friend the Baron Carl von Schönstein, who
had, according to numerous reports, a beautifully lyrical high baritone voice; Franz Liszt was moved to tears when he heard Schönstein sing in 1838, ten years after Schubert’s death. We are told that in his later years, the aristocratic singer would receive mail addressed only to “Baron von Schönstein, Journeyman Miller”; the tale may be apocryphal, but one hopes it is true. For reasons about which we can only conjecture, Die schöne Müllerin did not immediately strike the public fancy, and there were no reviews in Schubert’s lifetime. His friend Franz Schober tried to comfort him, writing, “And your miller songs have also brought no great acclaim? These hounds have no feelings or minds of their own, and they blindly follow the noise and opinions of others.” But “the hounds” would soon atone for their initial neglect.

In this cycle, Schubert spans the gamut from the strict strophic, pseudo-folkloric sound of “Das Wandern” (“Wandering”) to the formal complexities of “Eifersucht und Stolz” (“Jealousy and Pride”) and “Die böse Farbe” (“The Evil Color”), from the diatonic strains of “Mit dem grünen Lautenbande” (“With the Lute’s Green Ribbon”) to the radical harmonic language of
“Pause,” from the hammered fury of “Der Jäger” (“The Hunter”) to the exquisite tenderness of the elegy at the end. The details of his reading of this poetry are too numerous, too extraordinary to recount them all; a few examples will have to suffice. When the lad in “Ungeduld” (“Impatience”) harps on the same tune over and over and stays in the same key, we hear his monomaniacal fervor; he cannot sit still, however, and his impatience is evident in the chromatic inflections and thrumming triplets. Youthful ardor and impatience are again evident in “Morgengruß” (“Morning Greeting”), a serenade that starts with a preliminary bit of rehearsal:
the piano begins with a two-bar phrase to which the lad will subsequently sing, “Guten Morgen,
schöne Müllerin” (“Good morning, beautiful miller maid”). He is too impatient to rehearse beyond the first phrase, however, and quickly concludes the introduction so that he can utter his thoughts aloud. In “Eifersucht und Stolz,” when the lad tells the brook to convey his reproaches to the miller maid (“Go, little brook, and tell her that”), the thought occurs to him so quickly that there is barely time for the singer to take a gasping breath before the imperative “Geh” (“Go”),
sung as an upbeat. Schubert mimics the motions of a mind in turmoil and does so within a formal structure of impeccable design. Something similar happens in “Die böse Farbe,” when the miller says that he would like “to make the green grass deathly pale with my weeping.” In Schubert’s reading, the lad realizes a split second after he sings “toten—” (“deathly”) that he is actually contemplating his own death. The shock sends him reeling and the music jolting
upward, a massive disruption of the harmonies. In a different context, “bleich” (“pale”) would not receive such emphasis, but Schubert makes us hear the moment of revelation when it happens. In “Trockne Blumen” (“Withered Flowers”), the miller tries to convince himself that
there is meaning in his death, that love will triumph in resurrection. In Müller’s poetic cycle, the delusion dies somewhere between this poem and the one that follows it, “Der Müller und der Bach” (“The Miller and the Brook”), but Schubert makes us hear false reassurance dying away
in the piano postlude to “Trockne Blumen,” the music sinking downward and all vitality draining away. In every bar of every song, there are similar marvels to be found.

At the end, neither Müller nor Schubert allows tragedy to triumph. In the last poem, the brook sings an exquisite lullaby to console the dying lad. In Vienna, it was the custom for
parish churches to ring the Zügenglöcklein, the “passing bell,” when one of their parishioners was dying so that others might pray for the person’s soul, and Schubert accordingly rings the passing bell in the outermost tones of the righthand part. A majestic spiritual vision unfolds at the close, invoked by the brook that has been the lad’s confidant all along, in whose depths he
lies dying. When it tells of the full moon rising into the heavens, dispelling the mist symbolic of all that evades our understanding in this life, it insists upon the ultimate victory of harmony and beauty in the realm of the infinite.

Copyright © 2007 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Susan Youens is author of several books on lieder, including Schubert: Die
schöne Müllerin and Schubert’s Late Lieder: Beyond the Song Cycles, both
published by Cambridge University Press.

Christian Gerhaher, Baritone
In the 2007–08 season, baritone Christian Gerhaher tours North America in recital with pianist Gerold Huber. In addition to tonight’s performance, Mr. Gerhaher and Mr. Huber appear at the Tuesday Evening Concert Series in Charlottesville, Virginia; the Vocal Arts Society in Washington, DC; Middlebury College Center for the Performing Arts in Vermont; The André Turp Musical Society in Montreal; and in recital and master classes at the Yale University School of Music.

Other 2007–08 highlights include the title role in Monterverdi’s Orfeo with the Frankfurt Opera; a tour of the Britten War Requiem with the International Bachakadamie Stuttgart and Helmuth Rilling, and with the Munich Philharmonic and James Conlon; an appearance at Wigmore Hall for William Lyne’s 75th birthday celebration, followed later in the season by a solo recital; appearances in the Far East, including Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen with Herbert Blomstedt and the NHK Symphony in Tokyo, Nagoya, and Okayama; and Schubert’s Die Schöne Mullerin, Die Wintereisse, and Schwanegesang in Tokyo and Nagoya. Mr. Gerhaher also appears with Riccardo Chailly and the Gewandhaus Orchestra for Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn in Leipzig, Florence, and Vienna.

His many recitals during the season include dates in Amsterdam, Berlin, Madrid, Essen, and Brussels.

Milestones of Mr. Gerhaher’s concert career include his collaborations with Helmuth Rilling and the Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Sir Neville Marriner, Philippe Herreweghe, Heinz Holliger, and Trevor Pinnock, and early career debuts with the Vienna and Los Angeles philharmonic orchestras. Recent highlights include the Brahms Requiem with the Chicago Symphony led by Kent Nagano for his debut and with the Munich Philharmonic and Christian Thielemann, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio with Nikolaus Harnoncourt at the Musikverein, and the Britten War Requiem with the Vienna Philharmonic. He appeared at the Bayerischer Rundfunk Orchestra in Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana under Riccardo Muti, with whom he repeated the work at the Vienna Philharmonic. He has performed and recorded Carmina Burana with Sir Simon Rattle and the Berliner Philharmoniker, released on EMI. Mr. Gerhaher has also performed the Britten War Requiem with the Berliner Philharmoniker and Donald Runnicles, both in Berlin and at the Edinburgh Festival. His Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra debut was in Dvořák’s Biblical Songs under Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

Under exclusive contract with RCA Red Seal, Christian Gerhaher’s latest disc, Abendbilder, songs of Franz Schubert with Gerold Huber, was named the best solo vocal recording of 2006 by Gramophone Magazine.

Gerold Huber, Piano
As a scholarship holder, German pianist Gerold Huber studied piano with Friedemann Berger and lied interpretation with Helmut Deutsch at the Musikhochschule in Munich, and attended Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s lied classes in Berlin. 1998 he was awarded the Prix International Pro Musicis in Paris / New York together with baritone Christian Gerhaher that was followed by concerts in Paris and Carnegie Hall in New York. He was a prizewinner of the International Johann-Sebastian-Bach-Wettbewerb Saarbrücken in 2001.

In the role of lied pianist, he has appeared at such renowned festivals as Schubertiade Schwarzenberg and Schubertiade Vilabertran (Spain), the Schwetzinger Festspiele, and the Rheingau Musik Festival. Moreover, he founded his own festival, Ernste Musik, which took place for the first time in Munich’s Nymphenburg Castle in 2006.

Mr. Huber has performed at major concert halls like Philharmonie Cologne, De Singel in Antwerp, Wigmore Hall in London, Frick Collection New York, and Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Besides his regular appearances with Christian Gerhaher, Gerold Huber also performs with Ruth Ziesak, Cornelia Kallisch, Diana Damrau, and Franz Josef Selig. He is also the pianist of the vocal ensemble Liedertafel, consisting of James Taylor, Christian Elsner, Michael Volle, and Franz-Josef Selig, and he performs with the Artemis Quartet.

His solo activities and recordings often center around the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Franz Schubert. He has performed in Munich and Regensburg, as well as at the Théâtre Municipal de Romains in France, the Festival Kultursommer Kassel, and the New Zealand Festival in Wellington.

Gerold Huber is a regular guest of broadcasting companies for live and studio recordings. For Arte Nova, Christian Gerhaher and Gerold Huber have recorded all the Schubert cycles. For the label RCA Red Seal, the duo recently released a CD of Schubert songs titled Abendbilder, which was honored with the Gramophone Award for Best Solo Vocal Recording 2006.