Beethoven’s “Das Geheimnis” (The Secret, WoO 145) is his only song to a text by Ignaz Heinrich Carl von Wessenberg, an Enlightenment figure and a liberal advocate within the Roman Catholic Church. He was also the author of poems, plays, hymns, history, and theology.
Beethoven’s setting of “Das Geheimnis” first appeared with Wessenberg’s poem in a music supplement of a Vienna periodical targeted towards women that covered (as Paul Reid writes) “the latest fashions in art, literature, music and the theater.” (“Song Companion,” p. 88)
“Das Geheimnis” is a dialog: The two stanzas have the same vocal melody but different accompaniment. In the first stanza, the poet pleads with his muse “to make flower and star known to me.” The muse's response in the second stanza directs the poet to search his “innermost self.”
#Beethoven250 Day 286
“Das Geheimnis” (WoO 145), 1815
This studio recording by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau is accompanied by an animated score.