Each of the four verses of Gottlieb von Leon's poem "Die Liebe" (Love) opens with the question "Where does the noble spirit of love breathe?" and replies that it breathes "in flower and tree," "in the glow of evening," "in every mother's heart," "water, fire and air"—in other words, every where but in the body of man and woman. Schubert's setting of Die Liebe (D. 522) of January 1817 takes this question and its myriad answers as philosophically as possible. Starting with a short, elevated piano prelude joined by the voice in a grand flourish before its final cadence, Schubert's setting refrains from any suggestion of the sensual, much less the sexual. Indeed, his whole song is resolutely courtly, lecturing to a light melody, over something of an Alberti bass accompaniment, on the moon and the stars. Schubert's song also refrains from any suggestion of modulation and any of the other technical means of more evocative musical depiction. The result is a song whose high-mindedness belies a composer of not quite 20.

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