Hess 137 – “Schwinge dich in meinem Dom”.
See the following catalogue number.

[Hess made an error in reporting the title of the piece. The phrase he gives has no coherent meaning, whereas the correct title should be “Ich wiege dich in meinen Arm”. The author of the text remains unknown. Cooper dates the composition to 1795, though on a “purely conjectural” basis. The autograph has been lost. Judging from the correct title, the piece was probably a lullaby. This otherwise unknown song came to light through a reference made to it in a price list compiled by Beethoven in 1822 for potential publication.

The source of Hess’s error in the title appears to be Thayer. On this point, Alan Tyson writes: “In the appendix to the third volume of his Beethoven biography, Thayer cites a price list that Beethoven compiled for a number of his unpublished works (and, in a few cases, not yet composed ones). Thayer seems to have learned of it from a transcription by Otto Jahn, and his published text contains several mistakes. Fortunately, these can be corrected, since the list is today held at the SBB, catalogued as ‘Mus. Ms. Autogr. Beethoven 35, 80’. As one might expect, the list carries no date, as the document was probably intended for Beethoven’s own use only. Thayer published the list together with Beethoven’s correspondence with Steiner and Haslinger from the years 1815–1817, adding an enigmatic footnote remarking that, according to clues in the Steiner–Streicher correspondence, the document should be dated to the end of 1816. (See Thayer III, pp. 487–88; reprinted unaltered in Thayer–Deiters–Riemann III, pp. 619–20. The footnote was omitted in Thayer/Krehbiel and in Thayer/Forbes). Thayer’s dating was not questioned by Nottebohm. It is now clear, however, that the list must be placed more than five years later. The clearest evidence for a later date appears in a letter Beethoven wrote to the Leipzig publisher C. F. Peters on 5 June 1822.”

This letter is catalogued as Anderson 1079 / Brandenburg 1468. It contains a list of works offered to Peters for publication, including the piece corresponding to the present catalogue number and, among others, those related to Nos. 138.

This is only one of the many pieces that Hess decided to include in his catalogue without knowing for certain whether they had ever actually been written. No sketches, fragments, or autographs survive.

See Alan Tyson, A Beethoven Price List of 1822, in Beethoven Essays: Studies in Honor of Elliot Forbes, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1984. See also C/C, p. 264.1.

The International Beethoven Project presented the world première of the Beethoven Lied Liebe, also known as Ich wiege dich in meinen Arm (Hess 137), at the Chicago Beethoven Festival on Saturday, 8 September 2013, Central Daylight Time.

Lost since as early as 1822 and known only from a scribbled note of its opening words in a price list sent by Beethoven that year to the publisher C. F. Peters, the poetic text was rediscovered by Mark S. Zimmer, Director of the Beethoven research centre Unheardbeethoven. The musical sketches by Beethoven were traced by the Centre’s Music Director, Albert Willem Holsbergen, who prepared a performing version from these materials.

Originally written by Beethoven around 1797, this work eluded scholarly attention for nearly two centuries until its rediscovery in the summer of 2013.
The première on 8 September was given by tenor Dominic Armstrong and pianist George Lepauw. And here, at last, is the recording of this unique performance!