One criticizes a Schubert Lied with understandable hesitancy. Not only did he write the greatest songs in the German language (paceSchumann, Brahms, and Wolf), but he also wrote more songs and more great songs than nearly any other composer. Still, if there is an utterly disappointing work among Schubert's songs, it is his setting of his friend Johann Mayrhofer's Abendlied der Fürstin (The Princess' Evening Song) (D. 495). Although it starts and ends as a pleasant little pastoral lullaby in the key of F major and the time signature of 6/8, something seems to go wrong in the third of the song's four verses. At the line "But then suddenly he is awoken by thunder," Schubert's gentle lullaby literally turns into a Beethovenian storm, as the music all but quotes the last movement of Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata. This rather obvious musical scene painting is not only melodramatic in the worst sense of the word but it destroys the unity of the song. The return of the lullaby in the fourth verses seems incongruous and utterly beside the point.

As close to writing an outright bad song as Schubert ever got.

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