During lockdown I rediscovered nature – and the colour green

By Ann Wroe

As I do the washing up, the radio is playing Schubert’s “Die Schöne Müllerin” (The Lovely Milleress). It’s a song cycle that vacillates sharply between joy and sorrow, confidence and despair. As well as a companionable little brook, it stars the colour green.

When the lover feels optimistic he sings of his love springing up like new seeds, and his fingers binding the milleress’s green lute-ribbon round her hair. But when, in her green dress, she betrays him by falling for a passing hunter, his beloved’s colour suddenly becomes hateful. The lover first summons up the saddest greens, cypress and rosemary, in which to die; then he imagines weeping over all the green in the world, the leaves and the grass, until he has bleached them white.