Franz Schubert in the context of "Symphony No. 8 (Schubert)"

Strophic form – also called verse-repeating form, chorus form, AAA song form, or one-part song form – is a song structure in which all verses or stanzas of the text are sung to the same music. Contrasting song forms include through-composed, with new music written for every stanza, and ternary form, with a contrasting central section.

Christian Johann Heinrich Heine (born Harry Heine; 13 December 1797 – 17 February 1856) was a German poet, writer and literary critic. He is best known outside Germany for his early lyric poetry, which was set to music in the form of Lieder (art songs) by composers such as Robert Schumann and Franz Schubert. Today, Heine is perhaps best remembered for coining the phrase “Where books burn, so do people.”

Heine's later verse and prose are distinguished by their satirical wit and irony. He is considered a member of the Young Germany movement. His radical political views led to many of his works being banned by German authorities—which, however, only added to his fame. He spent the last 25 years of his life as an expatriate in Paris.

The term string quartet is a type of musical composition or a group of four people who play them. Many composers from the mid-18th century onwards wrote string quartets. The associated musical ensemble consists of two violinists, a violist, and a cellist.

The string quartet was developed into its present form by the Austrian composer Joseph Haydn, whose works in the 1750s established the ensemble as a group of four more-or-less equal partners. Since that time, the string quartet has been considered a prestigious form; writing for four instruments with broadly similar characteristics both constrains and tests a composer. String quartet composition flourished in the Classical era, and Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert each wrote a number of them. Many Romantic and early-twentieth-century composers composed string quartets, including Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Dvořák, Janáček, and Debussy. There was a slight lull in string quartet composition later in the 19th century, but it received a resurgence in the 20th century, with the Second Viennese School, Bartók, Shostakovich, Babbitt, and Carter producing highly regarded examples of the genre, and it remains an important and refined musical form.

A march is a musical composition with a strong regular rhythm which in origin was expressly written for lockstep marching of soldiers. As a musical genre, it is a type of martial music, most frequently performed by a military band during parades.

March music pieces vary widely in mood, ranging from the emotional funeral march in Wagner's Götterdämmerung to the brisk Romantic marches of John Philip Sousa and the militaristic hymns of the late 19th century. Examples of the varied use of the march can be found in Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, in the Marches Militaires of Franz Schubert, in the Marche funèbre in Chopin's Sonata in B flat minor, the "Jäger March" in the Op. 91a by Jean Sibelius, and in the Dead March in Handel's Saul.

A musical figure or figuration is the shortest idea in music; a short succession of notes, often recurring. It may have melodic pitch, harmonic progression, and rhythmic meter. The 1964 Grove's Dictionary defines the figure as "the exact counterpart of the German 'motiv' and the French 'motif'": it produces a "single complete and distinct impression". To the self-taught Roger Scruton, however, a figure is distinguished from a motif in that a figure is background while a motif is foreground:

Allen Forte describes the term figuration as being applied to two distinct things:

Nacht und Träume (Night and Dreams) is a lied for voice and piano by Franz Schubert, from a text by Matthäus von Collin, and published in 1825. In Otto Erich Deutsch's catalogue of Schubert's works, it is D. 827.

The song, a meditation on night and dreams, is marked "Sehr langsam" (very slowly) and is in the key of B major (with a modulation to the flattened submediant, G major, in the middle). There is a single dynamic indication, "pianissimo" (very quietly), which does not change throughout the song. The piano plays broken chords in semiquavers for the song's duration in a manner similar to bar five (the bar in which the voice enters), for example:

In the Western classical music tradition, Lied (/liːd, liːt/ LEED, LEET, German: [liːt] ; pl. Lieder /ˈliːdər/ LEE-dər, German: [ˈliːdɐ] ; lit. 'song') is a term for setting poetry to music. The term is used for any kind of song in German, but among English speakers, lied is often used interchangeably with "art song" to encompass works that the tradition has inspired in other languages as well. The poems that have been made into lieder often center on pastoral themes or themes of romantic love.

The earliest Lieder date from the late fourteenth or early fifteenth centuries, and can even refer to Minnesang from as early as the 12th and 13th centuries. It later came especially to refer to settings of Romantic poetry during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and into the early twentieth century. Examples include settings by Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Hugo Wolf, Gustav Mahler or Richard Strauss.

"Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust" ("To wander is the miller's delight") is the first line of a poem by Wilhelm Müller, written in 1821 with the title "Wanderschaft" ("Errancy") as part of a collection, Die schöne Müllerin. While wandern often means "hiking" today, in this song it refers to a wandering journeyman miller.

The poem was set to music often, notably by Franz Schubert in 1823 titled "Das Wandern", as part of his song cycle Die schöne Müllerin, and by Carl Friedrich Zöllner, who wrote a four-part setting in 1844. With his melody, the poem became a popular German Wanderlied and Volkslied.

Die schöne Müllerin (German pronunciation: [diː ˈʃøːnə ˈmʏlɐʁɪn],"The Fair Maid of the Mill", Op. 25, D. 795), is a song cycle by Franz Schubert from 1823 based on 20 poems by Wilhelm Müller. It is the first of Schubert's two seminal cycles (preceding Winterreise), and a pinnacle of Lied repertoire.

Die schöne Müllerin is performed by a pianist and a solo singer. The vocal part falls in the range of a tenor or soprano voice, but is often sung by other voices, transposed to a lower range, a precedent established by Schubert himself. Since the protagonist is a young man, performances by women's voices are less common. The piano part bears much of the expressive burden of the work, and is only seldom a mere 'accompaniment' to the singer. A typical performance lasts around sixty to seventy minutes.