As everyone with even a passing familiarity with Schubert knows, his father, in addition to being petite bourgeois, was a petty tyrant who tried to squelch his son's genius for music by chaining him to a teacher's desk. Fortunately for posterity, Schubert left home and to pursue his muse. Fortunately for psychotherapists, Schubert left behind a sufficiently rich legacy of self-revealing documents so that he can be endlessly analyzed. Fortunately for everyone, most of those documents took the form of songs.

In his setting of Karl von Leitner's Drang in die Ferne (Drawn to the Distance, also known as Longing to Escape) (D. 770) from early 1823, Schubert left both a wonderful psychological document and a wonderful piece of music. With wild outbursts like "Let me go!" and "Father and mother, you must not be angry!" Schubert had clearly found a poem with very personal resonance. At the same time, however, Schubert's song is not merely a psychological document: by his setting the ten-verse poem to a lilting tune in waltz time to a modified strophic form, Schubert generalized the poem's emotional content. And by making the song's harmonic structure an expansion of his favorite ambivalent key relationship of A minor and A major, a key relationship which finds joy in sorrow and sorrow in joy, Schubert has universalized the song's emotional and musical content.

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