Schubert’s Ihr Bild

Since it is certainly not possible to detect a motive in these bars, it is a question of what other purpose they fulfill. Do they just simply introduce the key, or do they perhaps prefigure the initial tone of the voice part, or both? Now be that as it may, in any event one would still have to ask why the master strikes the same tone twice when it was also quite possible simply to let it remain sounding during the two bars. In fact, the answer to this second question brings us the solution of the puzzle: repeating that tone in a slow tempo, after a rest no less, amounts to staring at it, as it were, and while we do this we feel ourselves miraculously trans-ported right to the side of the unhappy lover, who stands there “in gloomy dreams” (in dunkeln Träumen), staring at the picture of his beloved: we, too, now stare at the picture with him. It is a simple artistic device, is it not, to replace a tone sustained for two bars with a repetition of that tone interrupted by a rest? and yet it must take a genius, for only a genius is given the ability to notice the difference between such possibilities, just as, generally speaking, only a genius is given the ability to supply himself instantly, in the midst of a psychological process, with the power to introduce this type of artistic device. Thus right with the first notes Schubert shows himself the true magician, who at once wraps a secret cord around an external event (staring at a picture, in this case), the soul of the unhappy lover, and us, a bond that ensures the event will have an eternal future continually full of new moments well beyond the effect of this one occurrence.