SCHUBERT Die schöne Müllerin D. 795
Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
Andreas Schmidt (baritone), Rudolf Jansen (pianoforte)
HÄNSSLER CD 98.373 (61’26”)
The young miller’s journey through love and loss—Schubert understood it in his bones. Andreas Schmidt and Rudolf Jansen recorded this Die schöne Müllerin in Berlin two decades ago, and it’s taken me this long to encounter it. Better late than never, perhaps.
Schmidt brings a voice of considerable warmth to these songs, though warmth alone doesn’t carry you through twenty poems. The opening “Das Wandern” has an easy, loping quality—he doesn’t overdo the cheerfulness, which is good, since too many singers turn the miller into a simpleton before he’s even glimpsed the brook. But there’s a certain… how to put this… a certain generic quality to his approach. The voice is luminous, yes. Round, well-focused in the middle register, with a baritone color that darkens appropriately as the cycle progresses.
Yet something’s missing.
Listen to “Halt!” and you hear a capable performance. Schmidt shapes the phrases with intelligence, Jansen provides alert accompaniment—the piano tone captured with admirable clarity in that Sender freies Berlin hall—but where’s the sudden intake of breath, that moment of recognition when the wanderer sees the mill? It’s smoothly done. Perhaps too smoothly. The great interpreters of this cycle (and I’m thinking here of Fischer-Dieskau in his prime, or Schreier’s penetrating 1970s release) make you feel the psychological shifts, the hairpin turns in the young man’s emotional state.
Schmidt’s “Morgengruß” sounds pleasant where it should sound tentative, hopeful but awkward. His German diction is exemplary—every consonant placed, every vowel pure—but diction without subtext becomes mere elocution. When he reaches “Der Neugierige,” that crucial song where the whole cycle pivots, he sings it beautifully. I won’t deny that. The sustained line in “O Bächlein meiner Liebe” shows real breath control. Still, I don’t quite believe his question. The desperation hasn’t seeped into the sound itself.
Jansen deserves credit for avoiding the Romantic slather that some pianists apply to these accompaniments. His touch in the brook songs—all those rippling sixteenth notes that run through the cycle like, well, like water—remains transparent, never murky. The piano itself sounds honest, not overly bright in the treble. In “Wohin?” the relentless flow of the accompaniment has genuine propulsion. He understands that Schubert’s piano parts aren’t mere support; they’re the other protagonist in this drama.
The later songs, as the miller’s world darkens, find Schmidt on more secure interpretive ground. “Die liebe Farbe” has the right obsessive quality, that haunting alternation between major and minor that Schubert uses to such devastating effect. Schmidt’s voice takes on a hollow quality here—whether by design or simply by the demands on his instrument, I can’t say, but it works. “Trockne Blumen” benefits from his refusal to wallow; he sings it straight, and the song’s own structure provides the pathos.
But then we reach “Der Müller und der Bach,” and I want more. More darkness, more resignation, more of the terrible calm that settles over someone who’s made his decision. Schmidt gives us melancholy; I need to hear something closer to the abyss. The final song, “Des Baches Wiegenlied,” should feel like a benediction and a horror simultaneously. It feels mostly like a lullaby.
This is, in the end, a well-sung, intelligently prepared Die schöne Müllerin that never quite catches fire. Schmidt has the vocal equipment and the musical intelligence, but he seems to stand at a certain distance from the cycle’s emotional core. You could program this in a recital and your audience would leave satisfied. They might not leave transformed, which is what Schubert’s greatest song cycles can do when rendition and interpretation align.
The recording quality is first-rate—natural balances, a realistic sense of space, nothing harsh or artificially spotlit. For collectors who want every serious Müllerin on disc, this deserves a place. For those seeking a desert-island version, keep looking. The journey continues.
