Schubert’s song is remarkable for the extent to which it points to the future, not only in the music but also in the subject matter of the text by Heinrich Heine.

The doppelganger idea (“evil twin”, “double” or alter-ego) was a favourite element in Romantic literature. Think of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, for example.

• Subjectivity
• Emphasis on expression of personal feelings and emotions
• Interest in the natural and supernatural world
• Interest in expressing the human spirit.

All creatures drink of joy
At Nature’s breast.
Just and unjust
Alike taste of her gift;
She gave us kisses and the fruit of the vine,
A tried friend to the end.
(Schiller`s “Ode to Joy”)

This text, used by Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony, is a world away from the despair of the Heine poem. Together they represent the extremes of romanticism; the triumph and the desolation of the human spirit. Romantic art expressed both revolutionary zeal and personal disillusionment.

In Heine`s poem the doppelganger reflects the inner anguish of the man, as though in a mirror. It is not about the woman he lost, but about his own tormented soul.

This is a scene from The Student of Prague, a silent German film made in 1913. The unhappy student regards his reflection in the mirror as an adversary.

Later in the film, after making a foolish bargain with an evil magician, the student is forced to play cards with his doppelganger for the right to exist.

Having lost at cards, the student desperately flees from the doppelganger, but to no avail. The film ends with him finding peace only in death, with his doppelganger sitting at the graveside.

Interestingly enough, this early Expressionist film dates from about the same time as Schoenberg`s Pierrot Lunaire.

• Emphasis on man trapped in a brutal world as though in a nightmare.
• Fascination with the relationship between the conscious mind and the subconscious.
• Expression of a man’s inner fears by grossly distorting the external world around him (nature, buildings, other people, etc).
• Feelings of alienation and loss of identity.