Discussions of the piano introductions in Schubert's Lieder often centre on how the music sets the mood for the subsequent text. My interest in whether or not more could be said about the introductions, in analytical terms, was aroused especially by those Schubert songs opening with a dramatic musical statement which is not mimicked by the vocal entry. 'Erlk6nig', 'Die Stadt', and 'Der Lindenbaum' are good examples. I wish to demonstrate that these seemingly separate musical ideas the distinctive piano introduction and the subsequent vocal line are in fact structurally similar, and similar on more than one level. This paper examines the introductory passages from seven Schubert songs and identifies various melodic motives in the piano introduction which take on greater significance when they recur in the subsequent music, both in the piano and the voice and at both the foreground and middleground levels. After studying several songs, I will raise the following questions: At what point is the primary note established in a Schubert song, after the voice enters, or perhaps in the piano introduction? How can the relationships between the introduction and the vocal line be graphed convincingly? In Free Composition, Figure 103, Number 4, Heinrich Schenker shows a firstorder arpeggiation and a pair of unfolding thirds in bs 7-14 of 'Die Stadt'.1 I would like to take Schenker's idea of the third as a structural interval in this song and relate it to the music which occurs before and after bs 7-14. As illustrated in Ex. 1, the piano introduction of 'Die Stadt' presents a dramatic arpeggiated diminished-seventh chord, reducible to a succession of minor thirds. What was just a whisper of thirds in the introduction, at the foreground level, expands to the middleground for the voice in bs 17-25, as shown in Ex. 2. These nine bars correspond to the introduction not only because of the diminished-seventh chord, but also because the vocal line spans an octave at the middleground, from c' to c2, echoing the octave in the left-hand part of the piano introduction, from C to c. A direct relationship can therefore be drawn between the surface of the piano introduction, the distinctive melodic figures of arpeggiated thirds and octave doublings, and the middleground of the vocal