MARBECKS COLLECTABLE: Brahms: Lieder

For Johannes Brahms, composing lieder was anything but a sideline. He published more than 200 solo songs with piano accompaniment, not to mention numerous vocal duets, quartets and folksong arrangements; and a variety of further such pieces appeared posthumously. It is astonishing how evenly the production of these works was spread over the period 1851-88, complemented in 1896 by that weighty postscript, the Four Serious Songs.

Brahms experienced none of the "song years" enjoyed by Schumann and Wolf; his lieder act as a constant counterweight to his instrumental music and serve as a model for the songlike character of many of his slow movements. Occasionally there are even flashes of direct thematic allusion (as in the echoes of Regenlied op. 59 no. 3 or the two songs Wie Melodien zieht es op. 105 no. 1 and Komm bald op. 97 no. 5 in the First and Second Violin Sonatas, respectively).

The present selection concentrates on "women's songs", which curiously enough - considering the many outstanding female singers who played an important role in his life - are in a minority among Brahms's lieder. For example, most of the songs of his opp. 14 and 19 date from 1858-59, during the height of his attraction to Agathe von Siebold; his op. 105, published in 1888, may have been a token of love from the mature composer to the contralto Hermine Spies.

In selecting his texts Brahms was interested largely in the general content and mood of a poem, less in its formal distinction. He found most of Goethe's poems too perfect for the addition of music. A song should have something to say that cannot be expressed in words alone. Brahms preferred poems that were rich in allusions and open to interpretation with music. His favourite subject was unquestionably love, in all its forms and guises, which takes in other, more general themes such as longing and loss, resignation and retrospection. He frequently turned to contemporary poets like Karl Candidus, Georg Friedrich Daumer, Hans Schmidt, Robert Reinick, Hermann von Lingg and Klaus Groth, whose names would probably be forgotten today were it not for these settings; yet their texts were an ideal foundation for Brahms's lied composing.

Completely in the spirit of the times, Brahms was also served by folksong as an important source of inspiration: "The lied so often sails off course, that one cannot rely too heavily on an ideal - for me that is the folksong." Following the publication of collections of popular lyrics such as Herder's Stimmen der Völker [Voices of the Peoples] and Arnim and Brentano's Des Knaben Wunderhorn [The Youth's Magic Horn], there appeared between 1838 and 1840 in Berlin two volumes of Deutsche Volkslieder mit ihren Original-Weisen [German Folksongs with their Original Melodies], which for the first time also included musical examples. Notwithstanding the scholarly objections to this "romanticized" collection expressed by later folksong researchers, texts such as Vergebliches Ständchen op. 84 no. 4 were an important stimulus to Brahms.

Along with German folksongs Brahms regularly set German versions of poetry in other languages, as published by such figures as Daumer, Heyse and Geibel. Unlike his folksong arrangements, Brahms's solo lieder only seldom make use of original folk melodies; instead he created songs "in folk style" utilizing the material and techniques of art music, yet without eschewing allusions to regional musical elements. Thus for example the Zigeunerlieder op. 103 are marked by that characteristic "Magyar" inflection which belonged to every 19th-century composer's musical vocabulary and which we also encounter in Brahms's Hungarian Dances. A rare example of Brahms quoting a melody literally can be found in the Geistliches Wiegenlied op. 91 no. 2; but even there the German Christmas carol Joseph, lieber Joseph mein serves only as a subsidiary voice, presumably intended as a musical tribute to his friend Joseph Joachim, for whose wedding in 1863 Brahms is said to have composed this song.

His "ideal of the folksong" is also manifested in Brahms's preference in his lieder for strophic form. At least half of them are simple or varied strophic songs, and his (sole) student Gustav Jenner had the impression that he "regarded strophic song as the highest of the song forms". In that respect Brahms approaches the conservative lied aesthetic of Goethe, who required that "the various meanings of individual strophes should be emphasized through a single melody".

Referring to the through-composed settings by Spohr and Beethoven of his character Mignon's Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, Goethe once complained that the strictly analogous features of the individual strophes clearly indicated that he expected the composer to produce "just a song" with this poem out of his novel Wilhelm Meister. Brahms, too, normally distinguished on the title-pages of his collections between strophic songs (Lieder) and songs having some other type of formal articulation or through-composed (Gesänge).

Brahms's strophic songs are, of course, worlds removed from the compositions of Zelter and the so-called Berlin Lieder School, which Goethe had in mind. Instead of making a clear separation between melody and supporting accompaniment, Brahms strove for a thematic-motivic interpenetration of every musical layer. Even his very first published song, Liebestreu op. 3 no. 1, evolves from a single three-note motif that permeates both bass and melody and is subjected to canonic interplay. The modifications from one strophe to the next derive from the principle of "developing variation", which Brahms borrowed from the realm of his instrumental music. On the purely musical level, every one of his songs represents a wholly self-contained, consistent and meaningful structure. Robert Schumann seems already to have recognized this in 1853 when he wrote in his celebrated article Neue Bahnen [New Paths] that Brahms composed "lieder whose poetry can be understood without knowing the words".
Eva Reisinger
(Translation: Richard Evidon)