ABSTRACT
When the first complete edition of Franz Schubert's music was published by Breitkopf und Hartel between 1884 and 1897, the 603 songs the editor had at his disposal were arranged in chronological order. Winter makes no mention of the other song sets, but his comments on Opus 59 uncover the structural principles which govern several of Schubert's four-song sets. All four poems are based on oriental models, and three contain refrains. Schubert took advantage of this by constructing the set to produce a pattern in which the position of the refrains makes the division into two contrasting yet related pairs even clearer: refrain confined to the text, music through-composed, refrain occurs at the end of each stanza, refrain confined to the music, text through-composed, and refrain occurs at the beginning of each stanza. The history of interrelated song groupings in the early nineteenth century has only been explored.
