A study of the music of Schubert's operas, which number sixteen if the fragmentary ones are included, reveals that he found in the melodrama special challenges and opportunities which prompted him to extend his style in new and to some degree unique directions. The melodrama, a genre in which text is spoken over the accompanying music or in short silences during its course, is nowhere more extensively used by Schubert than in Die Zauberharfe, a "Zauberspiel mit Musik" (magic play with music) in three acts to a libretto by Georg von Hofmann. Die Zauberharfe, not performed in anything like its original form since Schubert's day, has gained something in accessibility in recent years through the appearance of relevant printed materials. It was the first of Schubert's stage works to be published in the New Schubert Edition in 1975.1 A study of Schubert's melodramas by Peter Branscombe appeared in 1982 and gave due prominence to Die Zauberharfe.2 Most recent of all, Elizabeth Norman McKay's book on the composer's stage works (1991) includes a chapter on it.3 What appears to have gone unnoticed, however, is the fact that this score of 1820 contains a palindrome, the only example in Schubert and possibly the sole instance in the whole of nineteenth-century music. "Palindrome" here means a musical statement followed by its retrograde. It denotes more than the retrograde of a single line, for