Was the German Lied, as so often has been claimed, born on 19 October 1814 with the composition of Gretchen am Spinnrade? Did Schubert (1797–1828) – known not so much for composing as he was for a kind of channeling while in “a state of clairvoyance or somnambulism, without any conscious action,” as his close friend the singer Johann Michael Vogl once observed – achieve on that day a “breakthrough in the principle of the Romantic art song”? Did he create the Lied, the most important new musical genre of his century, out of a vacuum, without models and other inspirational sources save that of Goethe's “musical poet's genius”? Is it true, as George Grove insisted as long ago as 1883, that Schubert had only to “read the poem, and the appropriate tune, married to immortal verse (a marriage, in his case, truly made in heaven), rushed into his mind, and to the end of his pen”? Or is there nothing new under the sun: are there models and historical antecedents even for Schubert's songs?

In setting Goethe's famous poem “Gretchen am Spinnrade,” the new, according to many critics, is the celebrated accompaniment that imitates the whirling motion of the spinning wheel and the foot treadle of the spinner, all of which succeeds in placing the listener in the middle of a highly realistic albeit imagined scene. But of course, the accomplishment is not as innovative as many have insisted. The Spinnerliedchen from the winter episode of Haydn’s oratorio The Seasons (1801) exploits the very same means. Like Haydn, Schubert was guided by an established topos, or “topic” – one of numerous characteristic musical figures associated with various moods, scenes, and situations long familiar to Western Europe.