ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. In exploring Schubert's fingerprints', the aim throughout has been to take his music on its own terms, outlawing the customary comparisons with Beethoven. That particular relationship seems to have been coloured by Schubert's deep love of Mozart's music and by their kinship as composers, producing an easily fruitful and apparently untroubled line of influence and connection between the two. The book presents the fundamental difference between Beethoven and Schubert lies in the fact that, above all, Schubert's most natural habitat was in the genre of Lied. Besides the virtually inevitable Beethovenian comparisons, Schubert's reputation has been haunted by the notion of his composerly character as marked above all by his supreme melodic gifts. The essence of Schubert as an instrumental composer, as he emerges at the end of the present volume, is the essence of Schubert as a composer of song.
