1821 was a happy year for Franz Schubert: it would be a year still before he contracted the illness that would seriously limit his activity and eventually end his life, and while he produced less new music during this his 24th year on earth than during any other year of his adult or late childhood life—a dozen-or-so Lieder would normally be the product of few weeks' work, not an entire year's, and outside the realm of German song only an unfinished symphony (D. 729 in E), a few minor piano and choral pieces, and the first pages of the opera Alfonso und Estrella were written during the year—this shortage was more than made up for in Schubert's mind by the appearance during the year of his first-ever volumes of printed music, given the headings Opus 1 through Opus 9, all save the last of which are made up entirely of German songs. The first of these printed Lieder appeared in March and April 1821, and it can hardly be coincidence that it was during these same months that Schubert composed most of the year's Lieder. Seeing his own music in print, and hearing it sung around Vienna moved Schubert in ways he'd not yet ever experienced, and, as a result, the handful of Goethe-Lieder composed during the spring of 1821 are almost all masterpieces of one kind or another. Geheimes, D. 719 is in the front rank of these songs.

Geheimes (Secret) takes its text from the poem Glückliches Geheimes written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1814 and published in the West-Östlichen Divan. The poem is laid out in three four-line stanzas, and Schubert responds by crafting three sections of music, the first and third of which are the same music, the second (and considerably shorter) taking off on a slightly different melodic notion and straying just a little bit from the A flat major of the rest of the song. "Etwas geschwind, zart" ("Somewhat fast, delicate") is Schubert's marking, and it is a wholly appropriate one for a poem that tells of a surreptitious complicity between two lovers, a fleeting glance here, a promise of secret happiness there.

The accompaniment rhythm—quarter/eighth/rest, quarter/eighth/rest—falters just once or twice throughout the entire Lied, but out of this regularity Schubert carves a series of phrases that vary in length between five, seven, eight, and ten bars; the five-bar phrase (a normal four-bar gesture to which the piano adds a measure of its own before the voice starts up again) is of special importance throughout the song. The piano's introduction, a wonderfully flexible six-bar notion that gushes forward to a cadence only to suddenly pause on a hushed A flat major chord, pops up twice more as the song unfolds. The first reappearance ushers in the second stanza of the poem; the second one wraps up the entire song as if with a gasp of anticipation that can only be resolved when the two lovers meet to fulfill their shared promise—something that happens somewhere outside the boundaries of this little song.

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