Hyperion Records

Understandably popular for its rare glimpse of Beethoven in a completely untroubled and relaxed frame of mind, Mailied, with its playful piano interludes between verses, sounds like a precursor to the more light-hearted moments in Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin. Goethe writes of man’s unalloyed joy at Nature, and although Beethoven’s setting could hardly be described as a profound realization, it nevertheless provides a delightful soundscape on which to base the great poet’s inspired muse.

from notes by Julian Haylock © 1999