Erinnerung (Totenopfer) (Remembrance [Sacrifice for the Dead], D. 101) is very youthful Schubert: he had written only 14 songs before he set this poem by Friedrich von Matthisson in April 1814 at the age of 17. Erinnerung is nevertheless an astonishingly mature and even masterful song, a song that illuminates and transfigures the sentimental images of Matthisson's three-verse poem in a through-composed setting. Like the best of Schubert's through-composed songs, Erinnerung embodies the idea of becoming and of transformation: the song starts with a bare chordal piano accompaniment that blooms and blossoms from line to line until it reaches its fullest flowering in the song's final lines. The vocal line is a Schubertian miracle: a long-breathed melody which seems always to have existed and yet is fresh at each hearing. Even harmonically, the song grows from the naked and disconsolate E minor of the opening to the warm and embracing E major of the close.

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