The many layers of 'Schöne Müllerin'

In terms of ultimate meaning, Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin might be just as elusive as any Northern Renaissance canvas. Experts can translate a white lily as Mary's purity or a rolling piano part as the brook, but those are local signposts. Consider the fact that you can make it through all 20 songs in Schubert's cycle and still not be sure who the love object is (the miller's beautiful daughter or the river?), and you have some idea of the latitude Schubert grants his listener.

In their Philadelphia Chamber Music Society performance of the piece Sunday night at the Perelman Theater, tenor Matthew Polenzani and pianist Julius Drake did tantalizingly little to impose settled answers. They formed a long dramatic arc over the songs - bright and sure at the start, then irresolute and ambiguous, and resolved but still ambiguous at the end. And they both have a firm command of tone as messenger. In "After Work," Polenzani was no less convincing in the voice of the daughter than in the miller's, and Drake was author of the unlikely idea that certain phrases can end in a musical question mark.

But there are layers to this piece, so many more layers.

Listen for the horns. Schubert took his texts from Wilhelm Müller's Seventy-Seven Poems From the Posthumous Papers of a Traveling Horn Player, and the title echoes throughout. Feel the way the millwheel goes from being a cheerful presence to a jagged, menacing one. In "Impatience," follow the piano's rhythmic pattern as it stumbles over itself in restless agitation. And we're not entirely sure how we're supposed to feel in "Rain of Tears," where major/minor ambiguity - handled beautifully by Drake - gets no help from a text in which the river and the girl converge into one image as the cycle's protagonist hears the call of death.

Polenzani's range in this one large-scale work likely exceeded the characterizations he creates on the opera stage. At the core, his is a beautiful, clear voice. But the tenor, a popular artist at the Metropolitan Opera, is a superb actor who isn't afraid to take chances with a sound that can grow edgy, magisterial, questioning, or slightly boisterous.

Beauty is not in itself a destination in the piece, although in this regard, Polenzani and Drake make their position clear. They aimed their most conciliatory and embracing sound for the last song, "The Brook's Lullaby," in which our hero is at last at home in his "blue crystalline chamber." To our 21st-century way of thinking, a watery grave might be defeat and the happy music accompanying it twisted and creepy. But to Schubert and his interpreters on this fine night, only in death could love in its purest form find full realization.

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