Strictly speaking, Franz Schubert did not invent the song cycle as a genre: Schubert found admired models in Conradin Kreutzer, Carl Maria von Weber and, above all, Ludwig van Beethoven’s “A die ferne Geliebte”. Nevertheless, he surpassed them all with the “Schöne Müllerin” D 795 (1823) and the “Winterreise” D 911 (1828), both based on texts by Wilhelm Müller. Born in Dessau in 1794, Müller was only a good two years older than Schubert: as a volunteer, he went into battle against the Napoleonic army, became a teacher and librarian, worked as a publisher, editor and publicist – and sympathized with the Greek revolution against the Turkish occupying forces. When he died in 1827, Wilhelm Müller left five volumes of poetry, in which the influence of the Romantics Novalis, Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim can be felt. In them, the author, casually known as “Griechen-Müller”, not least prepared the ground for Heinrich Heine.
His “Schöne Müllerin” is still a kind of song narrative with a concrete, progressive plot and strong fluctuations in emotions: A wandering miller’s boy falls in love with the daughter of a wealthy miller but loses her to a hunter and goes into the water. Müller may have been coming to terms with his unhappy love for Luise Hensel, the sister-in-law of Felix Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny. Schubert’s harmonic progression leads from the initial B flat major to the deposed E major. This almost enraptured key bathes Bach’s final speech in a transcendent light: In its floods, the Müllerbursch has found suicide. The “Winterreise”, on the other hand, no longer has a logical, albeit tragic, goal – and therefore no romantic transfiguration similar to that granted to the miller’s boy: In its songs, a far more uniformly resigned essential trait is combined with the pervading motif of aimless wandering on, of transcendental homelessness. The story and, thus also, the tortured individual go around in circles in an oppressive way. Is the final lyre-man a glimmer of hope or a symbol of death?
The so-called “Schwanengesang” D 957, as the publisher Tobias Haslinger called the fourteen songs by the composer he published posthumously in print in 1829, is a different matter. It is neither an authentic complete work nor a self-contained cycle. On the contrary, the “Schwanengesang” is essentially divided into two series, each based on the works of one poet: seven settings after Ludwig Rellstab and six after Heinrich Heine. Schubert composed them in one go in August and September 1828, so they each form their context if not a directly connected cycle. While the Rellstab-Lieder appear to a certain extent as a stylistic summary of Schubert’s previous song oeuvre, the Heine-Lieder show how the 31-year-old composer once again boldly set out for entirely new shores – just a few weeks before his death.
