Together with the five songs of Op. 3 and four unpublished items, all of them settings of poems by Stefan George, Webern renounced his allegiance to late Romanticism's dalliance with chromaticism and definitively followed Schoenberg into full atonality. Compared to the Op. 3 songs, those of Op. 4 are longer and feature more chordal (and therefore, more dissonant-sounding) accompaniment. Even so, the music retains some vestige of a tonal system, the songs anchored by recurring chords or chord patterns. As in the companion set, these songs inhabit, so to speak, a very low, mysterious dynamic level. The texts allude in many ways to death (and perhaps resurrection) and Webern's music is appropriately mournful and haunted. "Eingang" (Entrance) bids goodbye to the world of humans and finds the singer entering the "shivering coolness" and "expectant silence" of the forest. In "Noch zwingt mich treue," the singer is compelled by faithfulness to watch over a lover and share "the beauty of your suffering"; this is a particularly anguished setting, with the piano and soprano actually producing a few, fleeting forte notes. "Ja Heil und Dank" (Yes, Hail and Thanks) expresses appreciation for a beloved who "calmed the constant, loud heartbeat with that anticipation of you...during these radiance-filled weeks of dying." In "So ich traurig bin," the singer declares that when she is sad, she need only imagine herself with her beloved. "Ihr tratet zu dem Herde" finds the person addressed by the poem stepping toward a cold hearth, dipping his fingers into the ashes ("searching, touching, grasping"), thereby bringing the hearth aglow again.

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