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In Franz Schubert’s first song cycle to words by the Prussian poet Wilhelm Müller, we find conjoined two powerful forces—music and myth—at maximum intensity. If the beauty of this music has long been recognized, the full extent of its mythic dimension, its confrontation with what is inexplicable in existence, has not. Because the human mind cannot plumb the mysteries of life, death, creation, Nature, the soul, evil, and desire entirely by factual-scientific means, we tell stories in which archetypal figures play archetypal roles. When we read myth, we feel a shock of recognition, impelled not by the surface trappings of the story but by its underlying psychological verity. The greatest creative geniuses routinely traffic in myth which they make modern, fashioned both to be in accord with their own time and place and to endure beyond it. Sophocles’s Oedipus, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Don Juan, Hamlet and Othello (and many other characters in Shakespeare) are just such mythical beings—and so too is Müller’s and Schubert’s miller lad. This story of blighted youth is especially rich: it tells what happens when idealistic, immature notions of love taken from fiction are blasted by the grittier actualities of sex, when body meets body not on the printed page but in real life. Like Don Quixote, the young protagonist of this story has read the wrong books and tried to live by them, and he too, like Cervantes’s gaunt knight, is done to death by unwelcome knowledge. And yet, the miller lad, who dies a disillusioned death by his own hand, is an unforgettable mythic embodiment of a universal experience. What adult does not remember the moment when adolescent imaginings gave way to sexual knowledge, and we too, in company with all of humanity, left the Garden of Eden?

                                                                      —from Susan Youens’ liner notes

Lyrics to “Am Feieraband”