The Steel Miller’s Daughter: Love in a Changing Climate

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This series of musical vignettes, Stephen Kennedy Murphy's modern spin on Schubert's song-cycle The Miller's Daughter*, follows a steel millworker's pursuit of his boss' "green-movement" daughter against the backdrop of the mill towns of Pennsylvania during a winter thaw. The Steel Miller's Daughter features Schubert's classic music with Murphy's lyrics in this variation on the original story as seen through the lens of Global Warming:

On an unseasonably warm winter day while looking for a job, a recently laid-off mill worker (sung by Murphy), encounters the daughter of the owner of a neighboring mill (sung by Natalie Tyson-Multhaup), where she is working as a receptionist. When she gives him an application, he becomes enraptured with her.

Once hired, after a few initial rejections, she agrees to meet him for a lunch-hour picnic. Rain disrupts their tryst and develops into an unseasonal occurrence: a winter hurricane.

The lovesick millworker takes the storm as a sign from Nature that the girl returns his love, but she takes it as evidence of Climate Change, which he believes to be a hoax.

Nature takes its revenge in a concluding series of musical scenes during which apocalyptic weather makes him realize that the girl's love for him was completely imagined and that Climate Change is real.

*Die Shone Mullerin