Along with the Six Songs, Op. 14, the Five Canons, Op. 16, and a handful of other vocal works in the mid-1920s, the Five Sacred Songs, Op. 15, are situated with Anton Webern's oeuvre at a crucial juncture. After this cluster of text settings, Webern's emphasis on instrumental music would underscore his adoption of the 12-tone method of composition only recently presented to the world by his mentor Arnold Schoenberg. And while scholars observe an extreme angularity in Webern's vocal writing that resists any inclination toward lyricism in the traditional sense, his text settings have an acute and often poignant expressivity all their own.

The fifth song in the set, "Fahr hin, o Seel" (Pass on, My Soul), was actually the first to be composed, in 1917. Its lucid canonic structure, its relatively restrained melodic contours, its longer length, and its use of the full instrumental ensemble (voice, clarinet/bass clarinet, trumpet, harp, and violin/viola) lend it a sense of repose and arrival that befit the quasi-narrative constituted by the five texts as a whole: a journey from mortality through death toward redemption and heavenly rest. The angularity of the first movement, then, points up the transcendent distance to be traversed over the cycle as a whole. Comprising a description of Jesus' arrival at the cross and his words of comfort to his mother, it follows a melodic thread built of wide, motivically interrelated leaps, tenuously set against a viscous, rhythmically fluid chordal background. Still, even in this opening song a foreshadow of redemption is offered: in a moment of pictorialism that starkly contrasts Webern's reputation as the most austere of composers, the soprano leaps to a breathtakingly high and crystalline C sharp on the word "heaven." The second and fourth movements, both written during a summer vacation in 1922, shimmer with an anxiousness appropriate to the devout, forward-looking optimism of their texts: the former projects a "morning"-themed text from Das Knaben Wunderhorn as the dawn of immortality, with exaggeratedly wide melodic arcs; the latter, which was composed last of all five songs, uses more reduced instrumentation and more selective melodic leaps (such as the heavenward ascent on "God's peace") to depict the expectation of immortality. The third and central movement is a spiritual call to arms, one that also ties specific elements of Webern's spare linear forms to images in the text: each of the "three little angels" mentioned in the text gets its own motive.

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