For a Viennese shopper in 1826, looking for the latest songs to add to one’s repertory, Schubert's Sieben Gesänge—advertised in the Wiener Zeitung on April 5, 24, and May 19—would have made an attractive purchase. Musicloving citizens would have been conversant with other such works by the composer. His reputation had been founded on his published Lieder, making them a familiar and admired quantity. Five months earlier, the firm of Cappi signaled this stature by offering Johann Nepomuk Passini's engraving of Wilhelm August Rieder's watercolor portrait, extolling “the composer of genius, sufficiently well-known to the musical world, who has so often enchanted his hearers with his vocal compositions in particular.” This commercial ballyhoo was founded upon Schubert's prominence as a songwriter, extending beyond the confines of his native city although by no means equally admired outside of Austria since all of his Lieder published in his lifetime had Viennese imprints. In 1826, extolling the richness and variety of contemporary songs in comparison to those of the past, Gottfried Wilhelm Fink omitted Schubert's name from an honor roll that listed Johann Abraham Peter Schulz, Johann Friedrich Reichardt (including his “Erlkonig”), Sigismund Neukomm, Conradin Kreutzer, Weber, and Louis Spohr. (Actual documented performances in Germany during the 1820s are few. Dedicated interpreters could right the balance, as was the case in France in the 1830s thanks to the singers Adolphe Nourrit and Pierre-Francois Wartel.) In another article in the same journal two months later (and one month before Mathias Artaria announced the Sieben Gesänge), a critic (possibly Fink) remarked that the composer was known in northern Germany only because of his Lieder (although Leopold von Sonnleithner recalled that he was unnoticed there until “long after his death”), whereas the previous month a Viennese correspondent for a Dresden newspaper referred to Schubert as “our beloved song composer.” These comments came in reviews of works other than songs—the newly published D. 845 Sonata and a performance of the Mass in C Major, D. 452, op. 48, at the Church of Saint Ulrich, respectively—indicating that his Lieder were the standard by which his output in other genres was measured.