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.

The clarinet part makes good use of the low register, as well as having a lot of arpeggios that punctuate the song. An ascending arpeggio of two octaves or more on a clarinet carries the instrument through strongly changing tone colors from dark to bright, creating a sense of strong feelings.

The song is in two verses with the same music. The first half of each verse is in G minor, then it goes into G major, corresponding to lines with a more hopeful feeling. The piercing arpeggios are in the minor section, with one exception that goes with the word “jubelnd” in the major-key part.

Here’s a link to the Six German Songs with printed music on YouTube, set to start with “Das heimliche Lied.” The clarinet part, which I think was written for B-flat clarinet, is shown in concert pitch, making it appear that some notes are below the instrument’s range.

This article is available under a Creative Commons BY-NC license. That says you can use it however you want — for instance, in program notes — provided you give me credit by name and aren’t making money off it. (If you are making money, that’s fine, but I expect a cut. Talk to me.)