Sehnsucht (longing) is arguably the German Romantic emotion par excellence. From Schubert through Wagner, an ineffable and insatiable yearning is virtually the defining quality of some of their best music. Schubert's songs are themselves suffused with longing: longing for love, for friendship, for peace, for death, for heaven and, in his strophic setting of Theodor Hell's Das Heimweh (Longing for Home) (D. 456), for home.

Schubert's song starts with a piano introduction which itself is full of yearning; the intense chromaticism of these four bars are lost and alone in the tonal world and searching for a way home. The gracefully drooping vocal melody is the embodiment of a tired and weary traveler. Although most of Schubert's strophic settings tax the listener's patience by virtue of repeating the same music over and over again, so heartbreakingly beautiful is his Das Heimweh that six verses hardly seem enough.

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