Brahms wrote little music for chorus until he took up his first official position at Detmold, where part of his duties included conducting the choral society. Once he began composing choral music he never stopped. Although not published until 1864, Brahms' Geistliches Lied (Sacred Song), Op. 30, was written in the spring of 1856, the year before the composer began directing in Detmold.

The Geistiches Lied is a setting of a text by Paul Flemming for four-voice choir with organ or piano accompaniment. Although Brahms' choral compositions betray his familiarity with folk song as much as his solo songs, there are works in which he aimed to reproduce the style of earlier works in the sacred idiom. In the case of the Geistiches Lied, Brahms must have felt this style appropriate for Paul Flemming's text, which is a call to trust in the will of the Christian God.

In the Geistiches Lied, Op. 30, Brahms' choral writing is clearly derived from his study of early-Baroque contrapuntal technique, undertaken initially at the library in his native city of Hamburg and intensified after meeting the Schumanns at Düsseldorf. Thus, many of Brahms' choral works, especially his a cappella pieces, are more akin to examples from the late seventeenth century than those of the nineteenth. For instance, in the Geistliches Lied we find a double canon, the tenor following the soprano and the bass the alto, each at a major ninth below. Brahms even gives a nod to the seventeenth century in the title, "Geistliches Lied," drawn from the term, "Geistliches Konzert," which was used in the seventeenth century to indicate a work for voice with instrumental accompaniment setting a sacred text.

Set in E flat major, Geistiches Lied begins with an imitative keyboard passage that, although not as contrapuntally strict as the ensuing choral parts, is suggestive of the technique of the entire work. The same keyboard passage introduces each of the three verses, all of which are double canons at the ninth with the same pairing of voice parts. The pattern changes at the closing "Amen," where the basses enter first with a descending line that is imitated two measures later by the altos, again a major ninth above, while the soprano and tenor entrances are reminiscent of their opening canon. An E flat pedal undergirds the entire "Amen," which closes with a plagal cadence, typical of Protestant hymns.

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