By Parker Thomas Staff writer
The Susquehanna Department of Music premiered the ninth concert of its Schubert Song Project on Jan. 27 in Stretansky Concert Hall.
Starting in the spring semester of 2013 with its first concert, the Schubert Song Project is a continuing concert series that will eventually encompass all of Franz Schubert’s piano and vocal works, a composition of more than 600 pieces.
The project is designed to conclude in the year of 2028 to mark the 200th anniversary of Schubert’s death, which followed a short life that spanned only 31 years.
The concerts in the series are typically performed by a combination of faculty, juniors and seniors and consist of twenty songs per semester.
However, this concert differed from those in the past, consisting of one piece and only faculty performers.
The reasoning behind this decision was mostly due to the busy schedules of the professors leading the project, Naomi Niskala, associate professor of music, and David Steinau, associate professor and department chair for music, this previous semester.
Niskala was on sabbatical last semester, continuously traveling, playing and teaching elsewhere, while Steinau was a part of the search committee for the new president of the college and also in search of a new vocal instructor.
Due to these complications, the ninth concert was held off until this past Friday and was performed solely by Niskala on piano and Jeffrey Fahnestock, adjunct faculty music, who provided the vocals.
In order to provide two concerts for this semester, Schubert’s “Die Schöne Müllerin,” or “The Miller’s Beautiful Daughter,” was chosen as the sole work for the ninth concert. “Die Schöne Müllerin” is a song cycle, composed of 20 songs, and roughly elapses a period of sixty minutes.
Because of its length, the piece provides enough material for an entire concert.
Because it required one vocalist and pianist, the two professors decided to put on the piece together.
“This is normally done by one person, these 20 songs, so it was easy for Dr. Niskala and I to put it together and present it in replacement of the one that was missing last semester, since there is supposed to be one every semester,” Fahnestock said.
“Later on, there is one planned for March 29, which is when concert 10 is planned. That will involve students. That way Dr. Niskala can coach the pianists and singers,” Fahnestock continued.
The origins of the piece date back to the Romantic Era in Europe, the movement that existed during the first half of the 19th century in response to the Age of Enlightenment.
A common phenomenon amongst the artist community during this period was the development of Liederspiel, plays composed of songs.
In collaborations, poets and writers would come together and improvise poetry for such plays, each being assigned their own role within the script.
Later these groups would determine what poems were chosen for the play and then hire a composer to write music to each poem.
In the case of “Die Schöne Müllerin,” several poets, including Wilhelm Müller, came together to write a Liederspiel about the courting of a miller’s daughter by several different men aspiring to be her suiter.
Each individual poet on the project was assigned a role, including the miller’s daughter, a gardener, a hunter and the miller’s apprentice.
Because Müller’s name means miller, he was given the role of the miller’s apprentice. Impressing others with his poetry, especially when put to song, Müller tweaked the piece to be given solely by the perspective of a journeying miller, who takes up work at the mill of the miller’s daughter and falls in love.
The condensed story was composed of 23 poems, plus a prologue and epilogue, and was published in 1820.
Eventually Schubert found the published poems and wrote a composition for it between 1823 and 1824 and further condensed the story down to 20 poems, excluding the other three poems, the prologue and the epilogue.
The basic story of “Die Schöne Müllerin” encompasses the journey of a recently educated miller, who has left his master in order to find work at another mill.
During his journey, the miller encounters a brook, which he believes speaks to him and instructs him on what to do. He travels along the brook that eventually leads to a mill, where he picks up work.
The journeying miller becomes infatuated with the daughter of the mill’s owner, becoming delusional that a romance, which is not there, exists between the two of them, and that the brook led him here for that reason.
However, a hunter soon comes along and takes up the interest of the miller’s love interest.
Becoming jealous and eventually depressed, the miller drowns himself in the brook, which he believes will keep him safe from the distresses of the world.
