Composed probably in Pörtschach during the summers of 1877–79, published in July 1882. The song’s autograph is in Newberry Library, Chicago.
A major (original key), 3/4 Lebhaft und gut gelaunt

This is one of the most famous and oft-performed of all lieder, and it was the first-ever Brahms song I was asked to accompany. Even the difficult-to-please composer once told his friend Kalbeck that he would trade all his other songs for it. It has the advantage of being either a duet (as it is performed on this album, and as Brahms perhaps intended with his markings of ‘Er’ and ‘Sie’), or a solo song where singers are challenged to play the role of the opposite sex with changes of vocal colour and characterization. This is a village love scene from the Lower Rhine where the men are straightforward in expressing their needs and desires, and the women are able to look after themselves and tell a few home truths. Brahms with his working-class background was in his element.

The melody is instantly memorable—this is hearty, open music, simple enough for the voice to be doubled in pianistic octaves between the hands in both clefs. But simplicity is not always innocent, and there is no doubt of the suitor’s lascivious intent: he wants to be let in, in every way possible. The girl replies with different words set to exactly the same music, but having been warned by her mother (an exchange of intra-generational views on the distaff side of the family is the theme of quite a few Brahms songs), the young lady flatly refuses him entry. His reply, the next verse sung as a manipulatively minor variant of the main melody, puts us in mind of the Lemcke setting, Willst du, dass ich geh?—except that song’s protagonist is a seasoned seducer of women, and this young man’s attempts at emotional blackmail are inept. He warns her that his love is in danger of being extinguished by the cold weather unless she relents, but she is having none of it. In the final verse, a return to the major key and taken at a faster tempo, she calls his bluff. ‘If your love goes out, then let it go out!’, she says. If the plumbing had been up to it in the golden age of folk song, she might have said: ‘Take a cold shower before going to bed.’ She slams the door (or window) shut, but not before inflecting her final goodnights with enough coquetry to encourage him to try again. The ‘gut gelaunt’ marking is sometimes forgotten by performers who misguidedly play angry, but it is clear from the harmony, and the pacing of the penultimate ‘goodnights’, that she likes him a lot, and that her rebuttal is good-humoured. The young man has tried before and he will try again; she will almost certainly lead him to the altar in the not-too-distant future.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2020

Brahms found the poem Vergebliches Ständchen in the Deutsche Volkslieder collection, edited by Kretschmer and Zuccalmaglio, and it is one of his finest and wittiest songs which he professed, in a letter to Hanslick, to prize above all others. Singer and accompanist are instructed to perform ‘lebhaft und gut gelaunt’ (with animation and good humour), and Gerald Moore in Singer and accompanist (Methuen, 1953) is surely right to interpret the sforzando, three bars from the end, as the sound of the window being slammed by the young girl in her lover’s face.

from notes by Richard Stokes © 2016

Composed probably in Pörtschach during the summers of 1877–79, published in July 1882. The song’s autograph is in the Library of Congress, Washington.
A minor (original key), 3/8 Bewegt und heimlich

As in the preceding song on this recording (also the preceding song in Brahms’s Op 84), Spannung can be sung as either a duet or a solo song. As if in two minds on this, Brahms provides a final page of music with an optional obbligato line for the male voice to come together with the female if there are to be two singers. There is a great deal of moody and unsettled music in this relatively long song, but the major-key ending implies the disagreement has been a blip, simply one of the ups and downs of an essentially loving and loyal relationship, a passing misunderstanding. Bearing in mind this is also a folk song from the Lower Rhine, we might imagine that, in the composer’s mind, these are the same two people who were at the initial stages of their courtship in Vergebliches Ständchen, now further down the road in terms of their commitment to each other. In that case the tonal scenario of the two songs taken together would be A major–A minor–and finally back to A major.

There has clearly been gossip afoot in the village community that the young man has been seeing other women. The ‘mein Engel’ that ends each verse is meant tersely, even sarcastically, except of course in the reconciliation at the end of the song. In the first two verses the A minor tonality and the loping right-hand quavers in thirds and sixths, supported by brusque and peremptory pairs of left-hand quavers an octave apart, provide brooding and unsettled music for a spiky exchange. In the third verse he denies the accusations of those he terms ‘godless folk’, and the flow of semiquavers suggests an attempt at smooth-talking denial. The piano-writing of her reply retains the same figurations, typical of the economy Brahms employs in his folk-song arrangements; she suggests that he should confront his accusers and establish his innocence.

This might indeed have been a good idea, but at this point, very suspiciously in my view, he goes for a diversionary tactic: in the most elaborately accompanied and heated verse of the song he says that he is leaving her—out of the blue she is accused of loving someone else. This sudden ultimatum puts her on the back foot: she protests her innocence and reaffirms her love, all in the major key—a marvellously tender way of finishing, especially as the two voices sing together. But will this be a lasting reconciliation? There is no smoke without fire and this could very well be only a temporary truce. This composer, like Hardy, is inclined to see the most pessimistic side of any human relationship—men are basically cheats, especially those who are adept at spinning a line, with or without music.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2020