None but a lad in love could have written the blissful music for Johann Fellinger's Die erste Liebe (The First Love) (D. 182). In the spring of 1815, the 18-year-oldSchubert was that lad in love, apparently with the soprano Therese Grob, and of his 150 songs of 1815, more than half are on the subject of love. Few of those love songs are more rapturous than this setting of Die erste Liebe. A through-composed song with a painfully high vocal tessitura, Schubert's song seems to soar ever higher over throbbing chords in the piano accompaniment toward its ecstatic climatic repetitions of the final phrase: "Sie ist mein!" And even after the vocalist has expired in delight, the piano accompaniment muses blissfully on the climax straight through to its final joyous cadence.

Although older men might find the youthful romanticism of Die erste Liebe distinctly embarrassing, they are merely jealous of that which they can no longer have. And that's their loss.

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