Two Voices, No Words

Bonus track twenty-three was a march that left its opera behind. Bonus track twenty-four is a song that leaves its words behind.

The facts. Bonus track twenty-four runs three minutes and forty-two seconds. It is No. 19 of Die schöne Müllerin, Franz Schubert’s cycle of twenty songs, D. 795: “Der Müller und der Bach”, the miller and the brook. The credit is the same as on bonus track twenty-three.

The poems are by Wilhelm Müller, published in 1821. Schubert sets them in 1823, between May and September, while he is also working on an opera. He takes twenty of the twenty-five poems and leaves out Müller’s prologue and epilogue.

A young miller falls in love with the mill owner’s daughter, and loses her.

It is a conversation.

The miller and the brook.

The miller sings first, in G minor: when a faithful heart dies of love, everything in the garden withers.

The brook answers with comfort. A new star appears in the sky, and roses bloom without thorns.

The miller isn’t convinced. The brook means well, he says, but it doesn’t know what love does. He thinks of the cool rest down below, and asks it to keep singing.

The next song is the last, and it belongs to the brook alone: its lullaby.

On Immortal there is no singer. The argument is still there, between the man and the water, but nobody says a word of it.

Track eleven gave a song without words a singer. Bonus track twenty-four takes the words away from a song.

Schubert is an old friend on Garrett’s records: the Ave Maria, the Serenade on Classic Romance, Erlkönig on Garrett vs. Paganini. “Der Müller und der Bach” has one recording against it: Immortal.

This series keeps asking what carries music past the people who made it.

Bonus track twenty-four’s answer is the tune. The words stayed behind in German. The argument didn’t.

Immortal — David Garrett for Deutsche Grammophon — from 9 October 2026: 20 tracks in the standard edition, 25 in the deluxe, on digital, CD and vinyl, on Deutsche Grammophon. One track at a time, we keep walking through it.

Sources & notes: the album credit as listed for the deluxe edition by Universal Music; the duration from Presto’s listing; the cycle and its history from the reference literature on Die schöne Müllerin; the song’s text and form from the Oxford Song database (translation by Richard Wigmore); Garrett’s recordings from david-garrett.com.