In this post I’m looking at a single song by Spohr, “Das heimliche Lied” (the secret song). It’s part of a set of “Six German Songs,” Opus 103, where the singer is accompanied by a piano and a clarinet. The combination is unusual, but the clarinet is one of my favorite instruments, and he uses it effectively. The Spohr Society has a discussion of the Six German Songs, with information on the people who wrote the texts. Ernst Koch, the author of “Das heimliche Lied” and a contemporary of Spohr, is obscure today but not forgotten.

Right at the start, there’s a question about the song’s title. Most of the sources I’ve found give “Das heimliche Lied,” but the Spohr Society article gives it as “Das heimliche Leid” (the secret suffering). The latter is a more literal description of the poem’s contents, but “secret song” has a poetic feeling that fits. Neither word occurs in the text. It turns out that Koch’s title for the poem was actually “Relique eines Verschollenen” (relic of a missing person), but nobody uses that title for Spohr’s setting. The poem is about emotions that aren’t expressed or perceived, so we don’t know what they are, making the text broadly applicable. We all have feelings we hide from others.
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