Schoenberg frequently betrayed a certain anxiety over his position within music history and especially within the Austro-Germanic canon. He acknowledged Johannes Brahms as a seminal influence on his musical style, in particular regarding phrase construction, metrical manipulations and methods of motivic development. Brahms served as a role model for the young Schoenberg and loomed large in his later teaching and theoretical investigations. Furthermore, Brahms proved fundamental to the ways Schoenberg navigated his own shifting national, musical and religious identities (especially after Schoenberg’s emigration from Nazi Germany in 1933). This chapter explores these three avenues of influence and ends by flipping the two protagonists around, interrogating Schoenberg’s role in the critical evaluation of Brahms’s music and legacy.

In the early 1820s, music critics called attention to an innovative feature of certain Schubert Lieder: musical imagery in the piano accompaniment that both unifies the song and creates dramatic immediacy. Writers hailed this aspect of ‘Erlkönig’ (Op. 1) and ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’ (Op. 2) in particular. The two songs’ main musical motifs – racing triplet rhythms evoking a galloping horse and a whirling sixteenth-note pattern evoking a spinning wheel – do more than provide unity and vivify the represented scene, however; they also powerfully contribute to the expression of changing emotions. The outer and inner worlds of the song persona(e) converge in, and are projected through, the piano accompaniment. This chapter examines the nature of musical imagery in Schubert Lieder, different ways that the musical motifs evolve, and the interpretive significance of those changes. The motif might be placed in new contexts, altered from within, fragmented, interrupted, or sounded with greater or lesser frequency, to the point of disappearing. Paradoxically, it might even evolve in meaning by resisting change. Songs analysed include ‘Erlkönig’, ‘Gretchen am Spinnrade’, ‘Meeres Stille’, ‘Auf dem Wasser zu singen’, ‘Jägers Abendlied’, ‘Halt!’, ‘Gefrorne Tränen’, ‘Letzte Hoffnung’, ‘Im Dorfe’, ‘Der Wegweiser’ and ‘Die Stadt’.