Konrad Jarnot, baritone
Alexander Schmalcz, piano

In the prologue to his collection of poems, which was not set by Schubert, Wilhelm Müller takes an ironic attitude to the bucolic subject of his poetry. In his poem cycle, which is part of a collection with the title “77 Poems from the Posthumous Papers of a Traveling Waldhorn Player”, he avails himself of the yearnings of a middle-class citizenry caught up in the early industrial and urban age, but still longing for the “rural”, the “simple” and the “unpretentious”. The prologue begins: I invite you, lovely ladies, clever gentlemen, / And those of you who gladly hear and see something fine, / To a brand-spanking new play / In the most brand-spanking new style; / Simply shaped, naturally pruned.

But all irony is forgotten in the touching narrative of the miller‘s apprentice and his unrequited love to the young miller‘s daughter, who, is one of the icons of German romanticism in Schubert’s setting.

Konrad Jarnot has already earned great praise for his recordings of songs by Mozart, Wagner, Liszt, Mahler, Ravel, Duparc, Strauss and Hermann Zilcher. With his recording of Die Schöne Müllerin, he now begins a series of the great Schubert cycles.