That is the advantage you have as a native German speaker ... you can know that everything truly does come out from the music. Specifically, however, because I am not a native speaker, what you also sense is the work I have to do toward understanding. My favorite musician, Kurt Möll, tended to "lean" just a little on something that is especially important in any lyric, and when a voice that huge and expressive does that, it gets past the language barrier for an active mind. In that sense, the great professor really is my teacher, because off I have gone on improving my German again and reading in German history over centuries, and finding translations of whole librettos in as many as four languages to grasp something in a character that most other singers could not express in a single song or aria -- and finding general and even eternal wisdom put down in this music even as it is expressed in my own beloved Negro Spiritual -- and reconsidering all the music I know in light of this.
So, there is an external walking around after an internal walking around ... and as Herr Möll himself said, much of the work of the artist is to make the internal, external ... so I discover the music, and manifest the internal walking around of my thoughts about it in this way.