¹ Schoenberg, Arnold, ‘Das Verhältnis zum Text’, in Der Blaue Reiter, ed. Kandinsky, Wassily and Marc, Franz (Munich: R. Piper and Co., 1912)Google Scholar; trans. Newlin, Dika as ‘The Relationship to the Text’, in Style and Idea, 1950; reprinted in Style and Idea, ed. Stein, Leonard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975): 144Google Scholar.

² Frost, Robert, Letter to John T. Bartlett, 4 July 1913, in Collected Poems, Prose and Plays, ed. Poirier, Richard (New York: Library of America, 1995): 664–9.Google Scholar Cited in Pinsky, Robert, The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998): 4, note 1Google Scholar.

³ Winn, James, Unsuspected Eloquence: A History of the Relations between Poetry and Music (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

⁴ Ibid., 250.

⁵ The complete cantata from which Winn draws is found in The Poems of Jonathan Swift, vol. 3, ed. Williams, Harold (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937; 2nd edn 1958): 956–61,Google Scholar which Winn ‘reprinted from Faulkner’s edition of 1746’ (Winn, Unsuspected Eloquence, note 59).

⁶ Winn, , Unsuspected Eloquence, 282.Google Scholar

⁷ Schoenberg, , ‘The Relationship to the Text’, 145.Google Scholar

⁸ Georgiades, Thrasybulos, ‘Lyric as Musical Structure: Schubert's Wandrers Nachtlied (“Uber allen Gipfeln,” D. 768)’, in Schubert: Musik und Lyrik (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1967): 17–31Google Scholar ; trans. Gollner, Marie Louise in Schubert: Critical and Analytical Studies, ed. Frisch, Walter (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1986): 84–103.Google ScholarCompare the analysis in Stein, Deborah and Spillman, Robert, Poetry into Song: Performance and Analysis of Lieder (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996): 45–51Google Scholar.

⁹ One of the anonymous reviewers of this article hears in the cadence an analogously ‘laconic expressiveness’ – quoting my words in describing Schubert’s closing gesture – which for this reader captures, in its simplicity, something of the brevity ‘embedded’ in the poetic structure – and even a ‘deeper echo of the image inherent in “spürest du kaum einen Hauch”’. I concur with this kind of interpretation, which goes a long way toward justifying Schubert’s personal sensitivity, despite the repetitive conventions that his inherited musical rhetoric apparently demanded. But these conventions, I would still claim, run roughshod over a delicate poetic cadence such as Goethe’s. Perhaps only a modern composer would have the stylistic means available in order to capture the kind of ending Goethe achieves, but this possibility need not undermine our admiration for Schubert’s text-setting abilities in general; rather, by my critique I am simply acknowledging what is missing.

¹⁰ Newbould, Brian, Schubert: The Music and the Man (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997): 183.Google Scholar

¹¹ Deutsch, Otto Erich, Schubert: A Documentary Biography, trans. Eric Blom (London, J.M. Dent, 1946): 270.Google Scholar Cited in Newbould, , Schubert, 183.Google Scholar

¹² Muxfeldt, Kristina, ‘Schubert's Songs: The Transformation of a Genre’, in The Cambridge Companion to Schubert, ed. Gibbs, Christopher H. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 132.Google Scholar

¹³ Ibid., 134.Google Scholar

¹⁴ For Brian Newbould, ‘the loss is symbolized by F minor, the happiness by A flat major’ (Schubert, 52). Even if one considers the opening progression to be an auxiliary one in A major, the opposition between F minor and A major will prove to be thematically and expressively significant. The term ‘arrival 6/4’, which addresses the rhetorical force of a move to a tonic-flavoured ‘cadential 6/4’ whether or not it is resolved immediately to V, is introduced in Hatten, Robert S., Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation and Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994): 15, 22Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Newbould, , Schubert, 52.Google Scholar

¹⁶ For this strategy of thematic closure in poetry, see Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, Poetic Closure: Or Why Poems End (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969)Google Scholar.

¹⁷ For ‘pavane rhythm’, see Georgiades, ‘Lyric as Musical Structure’, 89. The long– short–short motto is characteristic of some (but not all) openings of pavanes and early allemandes (see examples, respectively, in Apel, Willi, The History of Keyboard Music to 1700, trans. and rev. Hans Tischler (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972): 240Google Scholar (Fig. 235, 2) and 259 (Fig. 257). The motto rhythm on a single pitch is a formulaic opening for the chanson and its instrumental transcription or intabulation, the canzona (see Ness, Arthur J., ‘Canzona’ entry in The New Harvard Dictionary of Music, ed. Randel, Don Michael [Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1986]: 136–8).Google Scholar

¹⁸ Interestingly, Schubert’s setting of Goethe’s first ‘Wandrers Nachtlied’ (1776) was composed on the same day as his setting of ‘Erster Verlust’: 5 July 1815.

¹⁹ ‘Erster Verlust’, however, would continue to attract later composers, notably Felix Mendelssohn, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel and Hugo Wolf.