The Three Songs from "Viae inviae," Op. 23 (1933 - 34) was Anton Webern's first published set of lieder in twenty-five years. The differences between the atonal songs of 1909 and these, which make use of the twelve-tone technique, are as numerous as their similarities. In spite of the passage of moire than two decades and a clear syntactic evolution, a common intimacy prevails among all of these songs. The composer always found various ways to enrich his approach to music—most often, directly involving the views and/or music his former teacher, Arnold Schoenberg—but his outlook never really changed. Listeners familiar with Webern's music can detect a common goal throughout his output: the praise of God through art that celebrates His creations.

The Op. 23 songs—"Das dunkle Herz," "Es stürzt aus Höhen Frische," and "Herr Jesus mein"—include the final element that would assist the composer in delivering the musical utterance that most accurately represented his personal vision. That was the poetry of Hildegard Jone, the writer whom Webern considered closest to himself in artistic outlook. The texts Webern used through the years involved specific shifts in his interests. As a younger man, he preferred to set the great poets of his day, including George, Rilke, and Trakl. Between the two world wars, his preferences gradually shifted toward more anonymous, directly Catholic faith-related texts.

In 1938, a museum in Vienna commissioned local sculptor Josef Humplik, Jone's husband, to make a bust of the composer. The Weberns and Humplik and Jone got along famously. Jone's spirituality, like Webern's, was grounded in the earth and all living things, and saw love for one's significant other and children, nature, and God as all being related to God's love. Opus 23 seems to be composed with total faith in Webern and Jone's artistic coupling. The composer's earlier songs are largely chracterized by their transparent structures; his settings of Jone, however, have an almost sprawling, instinctual quality, requiring an even more acute ear to detect variation and reprise in their construction. Jone's poems are longer than the texts Webern normally used, and the songs are likewise of a larger —though by conventional standards, still quite modest—scope. At nearly three minutes in length, the first song of Op. 23 is the longest in Webern's catalogue.

These songs mark a desire to proclaim an aesthetic consummation so urgent that their shape is almost lost. With the encroachment of Fascist hysteria threatening to consume Austria, Webern was perhaps attempting to stave off the absurdly nationalistic, political cluelessness that had consumed him in World War I. The discovery of Jone's poetry was not only an excuse to be too preoccupied to deal with Europe's problems, but her poetry made that preoccupation a cause to celebrate. For these reasons, the measure of Webern's artistic success with Op. 23 may be a matter of dispute. However, this collaboration would yield some of the most valuable sacred music of the twentieth century.

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