ABSTRACT
Matthias Claudius was probably at his best in his nature poems and in those poems which hover between a love of life and a desire to welcome 'Friend Flain', his name for death. Johann Mayrhofer, in his obituary for Franz Schubert, considered how he treated each poet differently. If the wealth of melody he invented justly astonishes, the amazement is further heightened by the clear-sightedness, the certainty and the felicity with which he penetrated into the life of the words and into the personality of each poet. Die abgeblühte Linde and Der Flug der Zeit are Schubert's only Szechenyi settings. However, in this instance, the identity may not have been originated by something in Szechenyi's literary style, it may have come from the salient features of Der Tod und das Mädchen. As Christoph Wolff says in his analysis of the song, 'the technical vocabulary of the music is taken from opera'.
