In their respective responses to Goethe's two-stanza poem, Schubert's two settings of Am Flusse clearly differ from one another in their formal approach. The first interprets the content of the poem as a three-part structure, while the second takes the binary form of the poem very much at face value, responding to it with a sort of large-scale antecedent-and-consequent structure. In part because of the sheer brevity of the poem, however, neither song really addresses (or is indeed required to address) what is often the central formal issue for music responses to poetry, not just Schubert's; should a song reflect the stanzaic structure of the poem concerned by setting each poetic stanza (or even pair of stanzas) with a single, repeating musical strophe (in what has come to be known as a ‘strophic’ setting), or should it sacrifice this formal unity in the service of a more detailed response to the content of the poem as it progresses (in what is generally understood as a ‘through-composed’ setting)? Alternatively, should the musical response steer a middle course between these two extremes and have an essentially strophic structure that reflects the stanzaic form of the poem but which is nevertheless temporarily changed or even abandoned in order to accommodate developments within its content (usually described with the catch-all term ‘modified strophic’)?

The two Goethe poems under consideration in the present chapter, An den Mond (To the moon) and Jägers Abendlied (Hunter's evening song) both address the moon as a celestial image of love, be it the poet's own heart (in the first instance) or his distant beloved (in the second). The ambiguities and subtleties that arise from such a comparison have a direct impact upon Schubert’s decision to reshape his initial musical response to each of these poems when crafting his second.