Cocktail Party Fact: This might be the most psychoanalyzed composition in all of music. Just for starters, Franz Schubert composed parts of it in hospital after learning he had syphillis (whether contracted from a male or female partner no one knows). The doomed hero of the Wilhelm Muller poems is often seen as a surrogate of Schubert himself.

Commitment Factor: About 70 minutes.

Vital Statistics: Romantic Period. A song-cycle for voice and piano.

What to Listen For: The poems describe the plight of a fragile and possibly self-deluded young miller who, on the verge of claiming “the lovely miller maid” of the title for his own, discovers that she belongs to a big brute of a hunter. Unable to bear the thought of her submitting to the hunter, the miller throws himself into the millstream and drowns. An air of unreality hangs over much of the action, as if it were taking place in the miller’s imagination. Note the dramatic appearance of the hunter in song no 14, and the disturbing beauty of the young miller’s suicide song in no 19. Note also that the millstream, which had begun by beckoning the miller on at the start of the cycle, has the last word.