Schubert loved his friends and his friends loved him. Part of this shared love must have been elicited by Schubert's unassuming personality, part of it must have been in recognition of his genius for composition, and part of it must have come from the feeling of brotherly camaraderie that Schubert and his friends felt for each other. Each member was in his way special—a poet, a composer, a nobleman, a dramatist—and none knew which of the group would find the immortality they all sought.

One of Schubert's closest friends was Johann Mayrhofer. Older by Schubert than ten years, well educated, a poet, and, by some cruel irony of fate, one of the censors working for Metternich's police state, Mayrhofer was Schubert's friend, guide, and, for a time, his roommate. In return for his friendship, Schubert set several dozen of Mayrhofer's poems to music which enabled the poet to achieve the immortality for which he yearned.

One of the Mayrhofer poems Schubert set was this Geheimnis (An Franz Schubert) (Secret [To Franz Schubert], D. 491) from October 1816. For Mayrhofer's affectionate if somewhat obscure poem (who is "The old man, crowned with reeds, emptying his urn"? and why does Schubert wonder "at God's silent creation?"), Schubert wrote an affectionate through-composed song. Each line of the two-line poem is set to different music that seems to grow effortlessly and naturally from that which has gone before. The musical allusions to Mozart's last piano concerto and Haydn's Die Schöpfung (The Creation) that Schubert wove into the score seem to place him in the line of succession of the great Austrian composers.

While Geheimnis may not be one of the greatest of Schubert's Mayrhofer settings, it is surely one of the most loving.

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