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EINE SCHÖNE MÜLLERIN
Daan Janssens after Franz Schubert
2024
Eine schöne Müllerin recounts the different ways in which a very young man is awakened to passion and explores his feelings of love. It began as a cycle of lieder by Franz Schubert to a text by Wilhelm Möller, for voice and piano. This version is a free adaptation by Daan Janssens for ten musicians and voices, with additions by Fernando Pessoa.
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The video plays on these dialogues between the ancient and the contemporary, starting with a literal illustration but quickly breaking down. It combines traditional views of a river and the German countryside with the gestures of a young man discovering himself.
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In 2018, Festival 20·21 commissioned composer Daan Janssens to make a free adaptation of Schubert’s masterful song cycle Die schöne Müllerin. Janssens let the question settle for a while, and a few months later he delivered a gorgeous piece that now has been heard all over Europe and has already been recorded as well.
Knowing there was no improving upon Schubert’s melodies, Janssens left them intact, and constructed an astounding and intriguing sound world around them, with now and then a captivating interlude to texts by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Lise Bruyneel has also designed a video especially for this occasion, in which the worlds of music, image and poetry perfectly meld with each other.
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Green has always been difficult to make and even more difficult to fix chemically, whether in dyes or paints. Hence its association with all of life's unstable or ephemeral situations: fate, above all, but also adolescence, love and hope.
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These are exactly the ingredients of Daan Janssens' 'Schöne Müllerin' after Schubert: nature, youth, love, lots of hope, initiation, dreams and a dose of destiny. We don't know whether what began as a role-playing game between Müller and his friends was to be taken very seriously. In any case, the poet had a field day: I've never read so many verses about green: ‘I love green so much. Now I love green. Because our love is always green. Because hope in the distance blooms green. You love green so much. Green as the weeping willow. My darling loves green so much. Cover me with green grass. Green, let everything around be green. Tears don't make spring green.’ So I, too, took my camera into these greens: emerald, celadon, jade, mint, absinthe green, or bottle green, they follow one another, from the beginning to the end of this magnificent music.​
