« ‘Die schöne Müllerin’ and its Romantic Precedents - an intertextual approach »

     Communication dispensée par Xavier HASCHER (membre du GREAM) dans le cadre du Colloque « Analytical and critical reflections on music of the long eighteenth century (1700-1828) », au Lady Margaret Hall d'Oxford (Royaume-Uni), le 2 septembre 2016.

     Somehow, works of art always rewrite and transform other works that precede them. In the case of Schubert’s and Müller’s Die schöne Müllerin, sources of inspiration extend far beyond miller-maid tales, and millers’ or hunters’ songs. The rural dress is in fact a guise under which a story previously told in a different context is retold and former topics reused. The events and the topics here are indicators of the romantic nature of the story, for which the cycle includes several details that act as giveaways. The main precedents of the music-poetic cycle are Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1796) and, even more significantly, Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1800), which was already intended as a response to the former. Yet, just as the character of the miller harks back to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, his wanders also retrace and transpose those of the knights-errant of medieval chivalric romance.

     Whereas Goethe’s novel has been described as a journey of ‘self-actualisation’, a Bildungsroman, and Novalis’s fragment extends from ‘expectation’ to ‘fulfilment’, the protagonist of Die schöne Müllerin engages in a journey of self-ruination and disappointment. Müller, whom Heine admired and regarded as a model, offers a criticism of the romantic quest, of idealism, but also of the ‘healthy German’ type embodied by the miller. This criticism should not merely be read in relation to the biographical particulars of both the cycle’s creators (in Müller’s case, his unsuccessful courtship of Luise Hensel, in Schubert’s, his realisation of having contracted syphilis), but also to their view of art, of its function, and to their conception of the world and of life.