‘Summer's a discouraging time to work,’ Ernest Hemingway told Scott Fitzgerald. ‘You don't feel death coming on the way it does in the fall, when the boys really put pen to paper.’
That was certainly the case in the autumn of 1823, when an ailing 26-yearold Franz Schubert began work on Die schöne Müllerin (‘The beautiful maid of the mill’) – the first of the great Romantic song cycles and, for us -lovers, the most enduringly wonderful of all.