THE ADVENT of historical consciousness and the rediscovery of musical treasures of the past brought composers in the nineteenth century face to face with a typically early-Romantic dilemma that had previously beset eighteenth-century poets, haunted by the ghosts of Milton and Shakespeare (Goethe's frank rejoicing that he was not an English writer and therefore not forced to compete with Shakespeare's achievement comes to mind). Compositions were no longer produced largely for their own milieu and age, consumed on the spot and then superseded, in the natural evolutionary order, by new works; instead, they lived on as models for subsequent generations-to be both loved and dreaded, for at the same time younger artists were enjoined to be original. The resulting, uniquely modern, conflict was one that each composer had to resolve in his own way. In Samuel Johnson's words, 'It is, indeed, always dangerous to be placed in a state of unavoidable comparison with excellence, and the danger is still greater when that excellence is consecrated by death'.' Malraux paraphrased the same observation much later with regard to creative artists in their youth: 'Every young man's heart is a graveyard in which are inscribed the names of a thousand dead artists but whose actual denizens are a few mighty, often antagonistic, ghosts'.2 Later works became, at their core, responses to earlier works in the assertion, whether conscious or unconscious, of priority: 'Where my predecessor's creation was, there let mine be'. The longing is impossible because the precursor irrevocably exists, nor would the late-comer wish him out of existence, but the desire to deny formative influences from others and to assert one's own uniqueness in an age that placed so high a premium on originality is part of the innermost fabric of music after Beethoven. The sense of creative impotence in the face of prior greatness is perhaps most marked when the dominating influence is immediate-Chausson's remark about the Wagnerian splendour that leaves behind it a darkness in which his successors grope vainly to light their own candles is an example;3 but the powers exercised by an earlier master on later artists can and do extend across several generations. For any German song composer in the later nineteenth century, particularly in Vienna, the great precursor was inevitably Schubert. The achievement was so prodigious, not only in number but in range and breadth, from the smallest-scale, finely carved miniatures that represent a ne plus ultra in intimacy to the dramatic ballad-cantatas and the splendour of the Muller cycles, that later composers might