Schubert's Die Schöne Mullerin was performed in a church. The fine young tenor and his older and grizzled accompanist took their places in front of the altar in a cleared space below a large crucifixion. This, in pale yellow wood, dominated the scene. You could almost feel the still-fresh incisions made by the carver's blades. Elderly couples predominated in the audience. They seemed to approve, to socially seal, Wilhelm Müller's tale, which took on a sacrificial quality as it unfolded in the words and gestures of the singer, in the piano's ironic commentary. The journeyman miller falls in love with the miller's daughter, he dares to speak his love, she seems to accept him, but then transfers her affections to the huntsman. He descends into grief and embraces the running brook in which he drowns. It seemed to echo and oddly reverse the story of Cain and Abel (the type of Christ). Whose offering succeeds in winning favour? The hunter, man of meat and blood is again preferred to the agrarian, the man of grain and of imagination. But the latter does not rise up in jealousy and kill his brother, his rival (son semblable, son frère), but grows depressed and kills himself. And young Schubert, in the same year that he was first treated for the syphilis that would soon kill him, composes the unsurpassably beautiful songs. What is worst? The pain of being unchosen or the sacrifice in being chosen, singled out to be raised high, or the terrifying power of music to make it all seem fitting. Tea and snacks were served after the show.