One might be willing to guess that the 18-year-old Schubert had something on his mind in early April 1815. In the first few weeks of the month he wrote Das war ich (That Was I); the ardent song of a young man in love, Liebesrausch II (Love's Intoxication); a tremulously passionate love song, Sehnsucht der Liebe (Love's Yearning); a song that alternates between happiness and despair, Die erste Liebe (The First Love); a song that describes the sensation with all the fervor of youth; and Vergebliche Liebe (Futile Love) (D. 177), an archetypal song on the eternal subject of unrequited love. One need not be told that Schubert the man was in love for the first

time; the music of Schubert the composer tells the story with great eloquence.

Like his Auf einem Kirchhof of a few months earlier, Vergebliche Liebe uses a bewildering succession of compositional methods to set Joseph Bernard's three-verse poem. Starting in media risa with a recitative for the first verse, Schubert modulates through a confusing series of keys in the second verse to arrive at the frenzied and almost demented final verse, which alternates brusquely and brutally from recitative to aria before closing abruptly with a perfect cadence in C minor. For a song that lasts less than two minutes in performances, all this is nearly too much and the songs seem not so much passionate as deranged.

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