Among composers who came of age in the nineteenth century, Schubert ranks as the first figure in a long line of musicians who extensively quoted their own ideas, particularly in the transfer of themes and motives from his voluminous repertory of songs to his instrumental works. He did so often enough that musicologists have taken up the matter of his reusing his earlier pieces. Although by no means the earliest writer to do so, in 1966, Maurice J. E. Brown signaled that the topic deserved a consideration of its own, which was independent of idiosyncratic similarities resulting from the composer's highly individual style:

So engaging is this subject, which Eva Badura-Skoda described as “an abiding fascination to the theme ‘Schubert quotes Schubert’” and Harry Goldschmidt deemed “the greatest and most bothersome ‘blank spot’” in research on the composer, that the scholarship on this repertory, pace Brown, has even licensed the assemblage of entire lists: Reinhard van Hoorickx enumerated thirty-three “reminiscences,” John Reed came up with forty-seven “thematic and stylistic links between the songs and the instrumental works,” and Goldschmidt considered categorizing “around 10,000 authentically documented motives and figures” from Schubert's entire vocal repertory in his instrumental output before concluding that far too many semantic ambiguities existed, making any explicit classification impossible.