The sea has always been compelling, for its apparent boundlessness and sheer insusceptibility to rational measurement hold the potential for both fascination and fear. It is hardly surprising that in all areas of the arts its power as a metaphor for the unfathomable has shown itself time and again to be especially potent. Perhaps the most unfathomable concept of all is that of eternity, or timelessness, and the sea has perhaps always been suggestive of this elusive state, at no time more powerfully than in the first half of the nineteenth century. Schubert, who spent his entire life in land-locked Austria, never even set eyes on the sea, yet throughout his songwriting career he returned to this captivating subject on numerous occasions. Perhaps the most vivid example of the young composer's struggle with the sea, and eternity, can be seen in his two settings of Goethe's Meerestille (Calm sea), written within just a day of one another in the summer of Schubert's great year of song, 1815.

To be sure, a calm sea served as an especially rich metaphor for such an essentially unknowable state, lacking not only measurable dimensions but also definable movement. Herman Melville, in the 1850 novel Moby-Dick, understood this intuitively; in Chapter 93, entitled ‘The Castaway’, the boy Pip is accidentally abandoned by his shipmates in the middle of a flat sea: