Like the previous song:"Schilderung eines Mädchens" this work, which translates to "To an Infant" was published as a one-off in Boßler's weekly musical magazine Blumenlese für Klavierliebhaber. Its quirky poetry relates the notion that soon each infant will realize that the woman nursing him or her is its mother; similarly, we, too, will realize the same about God. In SAT speak: infant:mother::we:God. To this odd sentiment, Beethoven writes an awkward Mozartean pastoral with a weak middle modulation in a volkstumliche - folksy - style, signalled by ubiquitous parallel thirds. The folksy style must be a conscious choice to make the music match the countryside ethos of the text: the only women nursing their own children at the time were the poor and the peasantry, certainly not the market of Boßler's magazine, intended as it was for the burgeoning middle class. That being said, I think Beethoven was too young to be making any point beyond that.
Somehow this work is not included in the Brilliant Classics edition.
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