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

Abstract

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. euro32.] 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 his ground-breaking setting of Goethe's strophic ballad Erlkonig as a through-composed, highly imaginative and complex lied, he ended it by setting Mullller'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 Muller's poems has been unjustly underrated (see especially Schubert's Poets and the Making of Lieder [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], and Schubert, Muller, and Die schone Mullerin [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)], the problem of formal regression continues to puzzle commentators. As Bianconi argues, in Die schone Mullerin, 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 Durr, 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 Risse, 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 Sams); those who address the apparent regression to strophic form in various and less or more apologetic ways, and in particular the formalistic analysts who try to counterbalance the loss of formal openness and fluidity by emphasizing the complexity of expression (Hans Gal and Hans Joachim Moser), or by 'discovering' large-scale tonal coherence or other unifying formal factors which in fact are not immediately clear in Schubert's score (Alfred Durr, Richard Capell, and Peter Gulke). …