Franz Schubert: Die schöne Müllerin, Konstantin Krimmel, baritone

Die schöne Müllerin is one of the most frequently performed and recorded song cycles in the entire classical repertoire, which makes it a genuinely difficult work to win a major award for, there is simply an enormous field of existing recordings, going back nearly a century, to be measured against. Konstantin Krimmel and pianist Daniel Heide’s 2023 recording for Alpha Classics managed it anyway, taking the Song Award at the 2024 Gramophone Classical Music Awards and, separately, the German Record Critics’ Prize (Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik).

Schubert composed the 20-song cycle in 1823, setting poems by Wilhelm Müller that follow a young miller as he arrives at a new mill, falls for the miller’s daughter, is gradually displaced in her affections by a rival hunter, and ultimately drowns himself in the brook that has narrated events alongside him throughout the cycle, itself almost a character in the story, addressed directly in several of the songs. It’s paired in the repertoire, and often in performers’ careers, with Schubert’s later and darker cycle Winterreise, but Die schöne Müllerin’s more overtly lyrical, folk-song-inflected writing and its clearer narrative arc have made it, if anything, the more consistently popular of the two with both performers and audiences.

The poet behind the cycle, Wilhelm Müller (1794–1827), never lived to know how central his verse would become to the classical repertoire, he died young, at 32, six years before Schubert’s own death at 31 brought a strange symmetry to the pairing. Müller’s poems for both this cycle and Winterreise were written as if performed by a fictional wandering-journeyman narrator, a device rooted in the German Romantic fascination with travel, nature and unrequited longing, and Schubert’s settings are widely credited with having done more than anything else to keep Müller’s poetry read and known at all in the two centuries since.

About the performers

Konstantin Krimmel, born in Ulm in 1993, studied at the Stuttgart Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst and has been a member of the Bavarian State Opera’s ensemble since 2021, alongside building a significant career specifically in Lieder, the German art-song tradition this cycle belongs to. He has won a run of major competitions, including the German Music Competition in 2019 and top prizes at both the International Helmut Deutsch Lied Competition and the International Singing Competition “Das Lied” in Heidelberg, credentials that sit specifically in the song repertoire rather than opera or concert work more broadly.

His pianist on this recording, Daniel Heide, is among the more sought-after vocal accompanists of his generation, and is the founder and artistic director of Der lyrische Salon, a song-recital series based at Ettersburg Castle near Weimar that has run since 2011 and is among a small number of series anywhere devoted specifically to art song. That level of specialism in the genre, on both sides of the piano lid, is a meaningful part of why this particular recording drew the attention it did, this is a duo working squarely within their core repertoire rather than a first attempt at the genre from performers better known elsewhere.

Why a baritone recording stands out

While Die schöne Müllerin has been recorded across a range of voice types, it carries a strong historical association with tenor voices, following the vocal range Schubert wrote for. A baritone account, transposed as needed, is a well-established alternative rather than a novelty, but it does mean a baritone recording has to earn its place against a particularly tenor-heavy back catalogue of classic recordings, which makes the scale of recognition this one received a genuine marker of quality rather than a “different for its own sake” curiosity.

A note on this page

This is a freshly written review of a real, recently awarded recording, not a page recovered from mmmusic’s archive of reviews from its original 1991–2018 run. We’re covering it as part of extending the same kind of grounded, fact-checked coverage to what’s genuinely being recorded and recognised today.