When Franz Schubert died on November 19, 1828, he left a legacy that included about one hundred published works circulating principally in Austria and Germany, a respectable collection of panegyrics by Viennese obituarists, and an uncertain number of admirers that nonetheless included one zealous teenager studying law in Leipzig who had written (but not sent) a letter to the older composer earlier that summer and who had recorded in his diary the single word “dismay” upon learning of Schubert's passing. One year later, that youthful enthusiast, Robert Schumann, wrote to his piano teacher Friedrich Wieck asking him to send to Schumann all of the composer's music that had appeared since his death. These works were the first signs of what would prove to be a large number of posthumous publications during the ensuing decade. By the end of that period, Schubert's music was inciting responses that ranged from a near cultish vogue among members of the Paris cultural elite to rearguard carping by London's principal music critic. It was Schumann, however, now an established composer, who had become Schubert's leading literary propagandist through articles that appeared in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (hereafter NZfM), the music journal established in 1834 through his leadership.

Still in its nascent stage, Schubert's reception was canalized in 1838 by a passage in one such essay in which Schumann reviewed some of the composer's newly issued works for piano, the Grand Duo (D. 812, op. posth. 140) and three sonatas (D. 958–60), which the publisher Diabelli had dedicated, respectively, to Clara Wieck, the daughter of Schumann's teacher and the composer's future wife, and Schumann himself.