NEW YORK—Star tenor Jonas Kaufmann has made few appearances in New York in recent years and recently canceled his scheduled participation in the new production of “Tosca” at The Metropolitan Opera. Thus, concertgoers were fortunate to see him perform “Die schöne Müllerin” (“The Beautiful Maid of the Mill”) at Carnegie Hall with the excellent Helmut Deutsch on piano.
Franz Schubert’s song cycle “Die schöne Müllerin” is one of the peaks of German lieder. Like his other great song cycle, “Die Winterreise” (“Winter Journey”), the poems that Schubert set to music were by Wilhelm Müller, and though the two men lived during the same period (Schubert, 1797–1828; Müller, 1794–1827), they never met.
