The documentary lacuna regarding Schubert's self-quotations prompts consideration of a collateral matter: the ensuing time lapse in recognizing them. If no one had hitherto remarked on a relationship between any two works, why should it now be judged so? Beyond the evidence to be presented concerning “Ave Maria” and the trio, the most pertinent answer can be gleaned by briefly recounting the historical record concerning the composer's most commonly cited self-quotations. This reckoning, overlooked in the literature on Schubert's reception, begets the conclusion that listeners and performers did not require written certification in order to apprehend a self-quotation nor was there any statute of limitations for their identification.

Every pairing of musical parent and scion has a narrative launched with the first written testimony, even as indirect evidence can suggest that such a bond was likely known before it was certified in print. The resulting vacuum prompted Maurice J. E. Brown to go so far as to question a willful relationship between “Der Wanderer” and the second movement of the “Wanderer” Fantasy in C Major, D. 760, op. 15, the earliest sighting among the composer’s most frequently adduced reuses. Brown so reasoned because he did not find the fantasy bearing the nickname from the song prior to Franz Liszt’s mentioning it in 1868, apparently unaware of notices linking the two works during the previous quarter century, which were prompted by Liszt's own arrangements and performances of the fantasy. Even earlier, however, just such a label appeared in a report of a private concert at Vienna's Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde on April 27, 1834, in which the teenaged Josephine Eder (a pupil of Franz Stadler) played the fantasy. An anonymous critic (possibly Josef von Seyfried or his brother Ignaz) described the work as “ingenious, with song motives by turns developed from the ‘Wanderer’ by Schubert,” although the announcement for the concert only indicated “Phantasie fur das Pianoforte allein.” It strains credulity to hypothesize that this unnamed writer was the first individual to discern this now-familiar reappearance on the basis that no one else had yet mentioned the connection in writing.