Schwestergruss (Sister's Greeting) (D. 762) is literally one of the most haunting and haunted songs in all of Schubert. Haunting because of the poetic ghostly apparition that flits through its text and haunted because of the musical ghost that rises from its music. The poetic ghost was the sister of writer Franz von Bruckmann, who had died the year before the song was composed and whose greeting is enshrined in its text. The musical ghost was Beethoven, two of whose best-known gestures are used as the basic material of the song. While some critics have dismissed Bruckmann's poem as vulgar morbidity, there is no denying that it drew from Schubert some of his most effectively supernatural music. Perhaps, though, it was less Bruckmann's sentimental poem than it was the vision of an afterlife that inspired Schubert. Just before he composed the song in November 1822, Schubert began to feel the first unmistakable signs of the syphilis that would kill him in less than six years. At such a dreadful time, even a free thinker like Schubert might find a belief comforting. Interestingly, the poem or perhaps the time of its setting caused Schubert to invoke the spirit of the still-living Beethoven. The song starts with the dactylic rhythm of the Allegretto of Beethoven's Symphony No. 7, here played as octave C sharps in the right hand of the piano accompaniment and the first melody to sound in the song is a minor-key version of the Prometheus theme from the finale of Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony. From these two elements, Schubert's song grows with the inevitability of mortality: each verse of the 13-verse through-composed song and each bar of its melody and accompaniment is based on these two gestures. How and why these two gestures came together in Schubert's mind to create the music for Schwestergruss can be speculated upon endlessly, but is ultimately unknown and unknowable. But it is a sign of the composer's genius that Schwestergruss is one of his best-composed and most-affecting songs.

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