A song cycle is a group of songs associated by a common poetic theme or an actual story. For the words of the songs, composers either found whole coherent groups of poems to set, or else made their own selections from a larger collection of a poet’s work. Schubert, who wrote two great song cycles relatively late in his career, was able to use ready-made groups of poems published by a minor Romantic poet named Wilhelm Müller: Die schöne Müllerin (The Fair Maid of the Mill) and Winterreise (Winter Journey).

The advantage of the song cycle was that it extended the rather fragile expression of the lied into a larger, more comprehensive, and hence more impressive unit. It was, in a sense, an effort to get beyond “miniaturism,” even while composing miniatures. The unity of such larger units, however, is always loose. The individual songs can often be sung separately, as well as in sequence with the rest of the cycle.