Johannes Maria Staud (*1974) Die Schöne Müllerin / These Fevered Days
Instrumentation of Schubert‘s Song Cycle with 7 New Songs after Emily Dickinson [T,ens] 2024 Duration: 80' Text: Emily Dickinson and Wilhelm Müller
solo: T – 1.1.1.1 – 1.1.1.0 – 2perc – acc.pno – hp – str: 1.1.2.2.1
World premiere: Nuremberg, Tafelhalle, October 6, 2024
Commissioned by the Ensemble Kontraste, the Casa da Musica Porto for the Remix Ensemble and the Konzerthaus Wien for the Klangforum Wien
Have a look into MM 2390021.
If necessary, you can change the order quantity after having added the selected article to your shopping cart.
At the suggestion of the great Schubert interpreter Christoph Prégardien, I have orchestrated Schubert’s large-scale song cycle “Die Schöne Müllerin” [The Lovely Maid of the Mill] (1823) for a 19-piece ensemble and combined it with seven of my own songs set to poems by Emily Dickinson (1830–1886). The two strands are intertwined and naturally lead to a new interpretation of this timeless and enduring subject matter.
Of course, one might immediately think of Hans Zender's “compositional interpretation” of the “Winterreise” from 1993. However, as much as I admire that work, my approach is quite different.
With my instrumentation of the 20 Schubert songs in the cycle, I bring Schubert’s vibrant melodies and inventiveness into the present – very close to the original text. A misunderstood historicity would make little sense here. My own songs, obviously composed in a completely different tonal language, function as a deliberate counterpoint, as a commentary from the here and now, and as the work proceeds, they merge with Schubert's cycle on a superordinate level.
In the late work of Emily Dickinson (written, by the way, only a few decades after Wilhelm Müller’s on the other side of the Atlantic in New England), I found magnificent, laconic poems that fit wonderfully into the world of Die Schöne Müllerin. They complement it, expand it, contradict it, ironically question its romanticized image of nature – and in doing so take on a radically feminine perspective.
From the perspective of the Müllerin, who in Schubert/Müller remains merely a projection screen for male desire, I thus take a new look at the narratives of Schubert’s songs reflected by nature: wandering – strangeness – desire – unrequited love – suicide.
(Johannes Maria Staud, 2024)
01. | Das Wandern |
02. | Wohin? |
02a. | I. What mystery pervades a well |
03. | Halt! |
04. | Danksagung an den Bach |
05. | Am Feierabend |
05a. | II. His mind of man, a secret makes |
06. | Der Neugierige |
07. | Ungeduld |
07a. | III. Volcanoes be in Sicily |
08. | Morgengruß |
09. | Des Müllers Blumen |
10. | Tränenregen |
10a. | IV. These Fevered Days |
11. | Mein! |
12. | Pause |
12a. | V. Impossibility, like Wine |
13. | Mit dem grünen Lautenbande |
14. | Der Jäger |
15. | Eifersucht und Stolz |
16. | Die liebe Farbe |
16a. | VI. Art thou the thing I wanted? |
17. | Die böse Farbe |
18. | Trockne Blumen |
19. | Der Müller und der Bach |
19a. | VII. The waters chased him as he fled |
20. | Des Baches Wiegenlied |