When Schubert was composing and compiling the incidental music for Rosamunde, he recalled the melody from his song Der Leidende (The Sufferer) (D. 432a). He had reason to recall it: when he wrote the song in May 1816, he was a 19-year-old composer of genius with his whole life ahead of him; when he used the melody from Der Leidende as the melody for the "Entr'acte" for Act III of Rosamunde in 1823, he was suffering from the first stage of the disease that would kill him five years later. Certainly, a song that opens with "No longer can I bear the burden of suffering" and ends with "Open your heaven for me, kind and merciful God!" is the sort of prayer the doomed composer might have offered up for his redemption. But even aside from the autobiographical interest, Der Leidende is a wonderful song. Cast in a chromatically uneasy B minor and with a tempo justly marked Unruhig (Restless), Der Leidende has a melancholic but instantly memorable melody that sinuously slips and slides above the lightly insinuating piano accompaniment of vaguely Hungarian origins. In two brief verses to an unknown author—some speculate it was Ludwig Hölty, others imagine it might have been Schubert himself—Schubert composed a song suitable for whistling past the graveyard.

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