La casa del mugnaio: ascolto e interpretazione della Schone Mullerin: con l'edizione del ciclo liederistico secondo la Neue Schubert-Ausgabe (review)

In 1823, during one of the most physically and psychologically challenging moments of his life, Schubert set Wilhelm Müller's cycle of poems about the unrequited love of a mill worker for the beautiful daughter of the mill owner. Die schöne Müllerin 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 schöne Müllerin, 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 schöne Müllerin; Wilhelm Müller's collection of poems Die schöne Müllerin (Im Winter zu lesen), including the poems not set by Schubert; a selection of Johann Mayrhofer's poems showing intriguing thematic similarities with Müller's lyrics; and, the critical score established by the Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke IV/2, edited by Walther Dürr (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1975).

A vexing issue related to Die schöne Müllerin 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 his ground-breaking setting of Goethe's strophic ballad Erlkönig as a through-composed, highly imaginative and complex lied, he ended it by setting Müller's cheesy stanzas by reverting to a pervasive use of repetition and simple strophic setting. Although Susan Youens has repeatedly and convincingly argued that the quality of Müller's poems has been unjustly underrated (see especially Schubert's Poets and the Making of Lieder [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], and Schubert, Müller, and Die schöne Müllerin [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)], the problem of formal regression continues to puzzle commentators. As Bianconi argues, in Die schöne Müllerin, repetition does not result from a lack of creative resources (since it is used together and not in lieu of more fluid formal solutions) but, on the contrary it is itself a powerful resource. Bianconi's analytical strategy, therefore, is to emphasize rather than to hide the effect of saturation produced by redundancy of form, rhythm, and phrasing (pp. 27–36), pointing to the strong referential implications of these pervading repetitive techniques. The bulk of her study is the exploration of what (and how) repetition means in this cycle.

In the first chapter Giuseppina Bianconi offers a thorough critical review of secondary literature on the cycle, summarizing the achievements of leading Schubert scholars, such as Youens, Walther Dürr, Thrasybulos Georgiades, and Arnold Feil, and grouping interpretative approaches in large categories: those who see in the cycle a projection of the idyllic or Romantic sensibility for nature and focus on musical pictorialism (Joseph Rissé, Eberhard Waechter, Alfred Einstein, and others); those who relate the cycle to the personal existential troubles of the composer (Brigitte Massin, Craig Bell, or Eric...