“Sei du mein Trost, verschwiegne Traurigkeit” (K. 391)
di Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Mozart’s German Lied “Sei du mein Trost, verschwiegne Traurigkeit” (K. 391; formerly KV6 340b) was composed between August 1781 and May 1782 in Vienna, when he was 25–26 years old. A setting of Johann Timotheus Hermes, it shows Mozart testing a more inward, text-led lyricism than listeners may expect from the composer of dazzling public concert pieces.
Background and Context
“Sei du mein Trost, verschwiegne Traurigkeit” belongs to a small but telling group of German songs Mozart wrote soon after settling in Vienna. The Neue Mozart-Ausgabe places it, together with the companion Hermes settings K. 390 (KV6 340c) and K. 392 (KV6 340a), between August 1781 and May 1782 in Vienna—a period when Mozart was newly independent, shaping a freelance career, and moving between salon-scale genres and the larger theatrical world [1].
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In Köchel numbering the song carries the stable identifier K. 391, while older catalog traditions often cite it as KV6 340b [2]. The scoring is the classic late-18th-century domestic pairing—voice and keyboard—which places particular expressive weight on declamation, harmonic shading, and the accompaniment’s ability to “speak” alongside the singer.
Text and Composition
Hermes’s poem is commonly given the title “An die Einsamkeit” (“To Solitude”), and its opening line—“Sei du mein Trost, verschwiegne Traurigkeit!”—immediately frames solitude not as simple calm, but as a chosen refuge for grief that prefers concealment to display [3]. Mozart responds in a manner that feels almost anti-operatic: rather than projecting a character outward, the song cultivates privacy, with the keyboard part acting as atmosphere and confidant.
Modern discographies and commentaries continue to group the piece with Mozart’s other German songs, often under the poem-title “An die Einsamkeit,” and preserve its older Köchel cross-reference (K. 340b) alongside K. 391 [4]. That dual naming is more than a catalog curiosity: it reflects how these Lieder have circulated—less as “famous single hits” and more as part of an intimate repertory known through anthologies and recordings.
Musical Character
Although the song is sometimes discussed under varying catalog descriptions in secondary lists, it is fundamentally a strophic-like, text-responsive Lied in which vocal line and accompaniment collaborate to sustain a single affect—consolation tinged with restraint. The keyboard writing is not mere chordal support; it shapes pacing and color, allowing harmonic turns to suggest what the poem does not say aloud.
What makes K. 391 distinctive within Mozart’s output is precisely this scale: it shows how, in the early Vienna years, he could compress psychological nuance into a few minutes, without relying on operatic scena structure or virtuoso display. Heard next to the two other Hermes songs (K. 390 and K. 392), it also offers a miniature study in how Mozart adjusts musical rhetoric to closely related texts—an early sign of the careful word-setting that would soon flower in his mature operas and concert arias [1].
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[1] Neue Mozart-Ausgabe (NMA), Serie III/8 “Lieder” (ed. Ernst August Ballin, 1963), critical foreword (English PDF): dating and contextual notes for the Hermes Lieder (K. 390–392).
[2] Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum, Köchel-Verzeichnis entry for K. 391: work title, genre/scoring (“voice and clavier”), and catalog cross-references.
[3] LiederNet Archive: Johann Timotheus Hermes, poem text “An die Einsamkeit” (first line “Sei du mein Trost, verschwiegene Traurigkeit!”).
[4] Hyperion Records work page for “An die Einsamkeit, K391”: title/first line, Hermes attribution, and catalog note “K340b in sixth edition.”