Wilhelm Müller, the Poet of the Schubert Song Cycles
Wilhelm Müller, the Poet of the Schubert Song Cycles

Author: Cecilia C. Baumann

Publisher: Penn State University Press

Published: 1981

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13:

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Considered a German Byron by his contemporaries, Johann Ludwig Wilhelm Müller (1794-1827) is usually remembered today as the German Romantic poet whose lyrics Franz Schubert set to music in Die schöne Müllerin and Die Winterreise. A philhellene who wrote impassioned lyrics in support of the Greeks in their struggle for independence from the Turks, Müller also collected and edited Italian and modern Greek folk songs. Goethe very likely became acquainted with Marlowe's The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus through Müller's 1818 translation of that work. Müller was an influential critic and scholar of the Romantic Era, a creative public librarian and publisher's consultant (with the prestigious firm of F. A. Brockhaus in Leipzig), a respected teacher, and a popular author of travel books--all this despite his sudden and somewhat mysterious death at 32. The son of a guild tailor in the duchy of Anhalt-Dessau and a precocious and sometimes rebellious student, he nonetheless received lifelong aid from the ducal family, including a scholarship to the new University of Berlin. Müller left the University before completing his studies and spent two years as a volunteer in the Prussian Army fighting Napoleon. During this time, he had an unhappy love affair in Brussels. At 26, Müller married into one of the leading Dessau families, and at 30 he was granted the title Hofrat. In this first comprehensive study of Müller, Dr. Baumann presents a lively and vivid profile of the poet, prose writer, translator, critic, editor, philhellene, and traveler whose life reflects the landscape of literary concern from the Romantic movement to Junges Deutschland. A complete bibliography of works by and about Müller is included. This work in the words of one reader should interest "any person with a general concern for the complex interrelationship of cultural and socio-political forces and the contact of key persons in German-speaking culture with one another during the late 18th and early 19th centuries . . . as a veritable 'window' into the period of Goethe."

Retracing a Winter's Journey
Retracing a Winter's Journey

Author: Susan Youens

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2013-01-14

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 0801468280

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I like these songs better than all the rest, and someday you will too, Franz Schubert told the friends who were the first to hear his song cycle, Winterreise. These lieder have always found admiring audiences, but the poetry he chose to set them to has been widely regarded as weak and trivial. In Retracing a Winter's Journey, Susan Youens looks not only at Schubert's music but at the poetry, drawn from the works of Wilhelm Müller, who once wrote in his diary, "perhaps there is a kindred spirit somewhere who will hear the tunes behind the words and give them back to me!" Youens maintains that Müller, in depicting the wanderings of the alienated lover, produced poetry that was simple but not simple-minded, poetry that embraced simplicity as part of its meaning. In her view, Müller used the ruder folk forms to give his verse greater immediacy, to convey more powerfully the wanderer's complex inner state. Youens addresses many different aspects of Winterreise: the cultural milieu to which it belonged, the genesis of both the poetry and the music, Schubert's transformation of poetic cycle into music, the philosophical dimension of the work, and its musical structure.

Schubert, Müller, and Die Schöne Müllerin
Schubert, Müller, and Die Schöne Müllerin

Author: Susan Youens

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1997-02-06

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780521563642

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The collaboration of Schubert and the poet Wilhelm Müller produced some of the best loved of nineteenth-century lieder - in particular the song cycle Die schöne Müllerin. Professor Youens shows us how this archetypal tale of love and rejection, which has its origins in medieval romance, Minnesong and popular German legend, is reflected in the poet's own experience, the realms of art and life intertwining. Professor Youens considers other poets' explorations of the theme of a miller maid and her suitors, and looks at other musical settings of Müller's mill poems. But above all she examines Müller's permutation of the literary legends as an exploration of erotic obsession, delusion, frenzy, disillusionment and death and the way in which Schubert crucially altered Müller's vision when the poetic cycle became a musical text.

Studies in Goethe's Lyric Cycles
Studies in Goethe's Lyric Cycles

Author: Meredith Lee

Publisher:

Published: 1978

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13:

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The book presents a series of interpretive readings of the Romische Elegien, Sonette, Chinesisch-deutsche Jarhes- und Tageszeiten, several trilogies, and the shorter cycles of 1821, taking into account the variety of literary devices Goethe employs to link poems together into a cycle. The author examines Goethe's role in the history of the lyric cycle and, in stressing structural design, urges a reevaluation of the cycle's emergence as a standard poetic device.