5 - Schubert’s Treatment of Müller’s Poems: Some Issues

Summary

If one reads the poem titles of Wilhelm Müller’s earlier cycle Die schöne Müllerin from its original edition and the titles of the songs in Schubert’s published score, one quickly notes that while Schubert omitted the long Prologue and Epilogue and three other poems, he retained all the rest of the Müllerin poems and kept them in the same order as the poet’s. Schubert did a bit of judicious cutting, but left the poetic cycle largely intact.