The only concert given in Schubert's lifetime entirely devoted to his own music was given, appropriately enough, on the first anniversary of the death of Beethoven on March 26, 1828. For the occasion, Schubert presented a cunning mixture of vocal and instrumental music, including several newly composed works. Among these were his setting of Ludwig Rellstab's "Auf dem Strom" (On the River) (D. 943), a poem originally given to Beethoven for musical setting, but which Beethoven did not live long enough to accomplish. Thus, Schubert's inclusion of the song in his concert was both an act of devotion and an act of acquisition: le roi c'est mort, vive le roi! Needless to say, those are sentiments Schubert himself would never have uttered. Although conceived as an homage to Beethoven, Schubert's Auf dem Strom is much subtler in its use of Beethovenian gestures than his Schwestergruss of 1822. Written with the high tenor Ludwig Titze and hornist Josef Lewy in mind (the pianist would of course have been the composer), Schubert created a work that takes Rellstab's poem of death and transfiguration and composes it in the memory of Beethoven. Each of Rellstab's five verses is preceded by and interspersed with horn and piano passages of noble and elegiac beauty. The verses themselves are elevated in tone and deeply moving in their dignified reticence. A through-composed song, each of the verses is built on different melodies but each has something exalted about it. That "something exalted" is revealed at the start of the second verse when the tenor sings the words "And so the waves bear me away" to the theme from the "Marcia funebre" of Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony. And yet, though that theme is the secret basis for the melodies of Auf dem Strom, it never draws attention to itself as the Beethoven quotations from Schwestergruss had done. Rather, Schubert was able to subsume the music of Beethoven into his own music, receiving, as it were, the spirit of Beethoven from the hands of his own music.

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