This is one of several settings of poems by the poet Heinrich Heine, set for voice and piano. Heine's admiration for Meyerbeer's music was unbounded. He placed the composer in the forefront of the nineteenth century and thought that Meyerbeer's music was of the finest composed ever. Meyerbeer had difficulty setting his poems. He said that they had so much music in them to begin with, that he was afraid of destroying them instead of adding to their greatness. This short poem is a love poem, and speaks of the loss of the beloved, and the despair of the one left behind to grieve. The music to it is tender, yearning, and even wistful. The piano accompaniment figures remind one of Schubert. They are pianistic and contain figurations which augment the movement of the melody: they both propel it along and provide it ease. Nowhere in these little pieces does Meyerbeer become florid in the vocal line, as he does in his operatic writing. The music sets the sense of the words, the sounds of the words, and most of all, the textual meaning. And the emotional drama of the poems are left in relief.

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