This is a consummate revision of a setting Beethoven had already made in 1798/9 (WoO127). It is the only one of the Op 75 set of songs to be through-composed, and is by some distance the subtlest setting of its kind that Beethoven had written up to this time. Indeed, its seemingly spontaneous exuberance and fluent ease of expression (hardly typical Beethoven traits) and effortless interplay between voice and piano mark it out as perhaps the finest song in the collection. The ending appears to have given Beethoven endless problems – his sketch books contain no fewer than seven different versions of this one passage alone – which may explain the strangely curtailed feel of even the printed version.
from notes by Julian Haylock © 1999
