Self-Scrutiny 1

We are in a cozy salon, which we see in soft focus, lit with warm red, full of upholstered leather furniture in the best modern taste. The soprano, sober in a fur-collared jacket, gazes at us as the pianist plays the gentle prelude. There is something odd about the windows, though. The left window shows a somewhat jittery scene, as if there were a minor earthquake that no one was noticing; the right window shows the right eye and part of the mouth of the soprano's huge face.

Self-Scrutiny 2

Heinrich Heine and Franz Schubert were born in the same year, 1797. If Heine had died when Schubert died, in 1828, it would have been an enormous loss to German letters and German music alike. For one thing, Wagner might never have written The Flying Dutchman, which he based on a brief satirical episode in one of Heine's novels. But the history of the German Lied might not have been drastically changed, because most of Heine's lyric poems—which inflamed the imaginations of countless composers, not just in Germany—had already been published, many of them in the Lyrisches Intermezzo section (first published 1823) of the Buch der Lieder (1827).

Schubert had only a little time to take note of Heine's work, but six of the fourteen songs in Schwanengesang (a song cycle compiled, not without skill, by a publisher, in collaboration with Schubert's brother, after Schubert's death) are settings of texts by Heine. One of these songs is “Der Doppelgänger”: