Composed probably in Pressbaum bei Wien in the autumn of 1881, published in July 1882. The song’s autograph is in the Library of Congress, Washington.
E minor (original key D minor), 2/4 Andante con moto

The little-known poet Hans Schmidt—a Latvian who moved to Vienna to study music—became something of a friend and protégé of Brahms in the 1870s. He was a composer and a pianist, perhaps one of the very first to have made his living as an accompanist, and the regular performance partner of the contralto Amalie Joachim and the famous lieder-singing tenor Raimund von zur-Mühlen. When Schmidt sent a copy of his crudely printed Gedichte und Übersetzungen to Brahms in 1881, the response was immediate and enthusiastic, despite the fact that Schmidt was an amateur poet with no established reputation. This seems not to have mattered to Brahms who immediately fell for three poems sung by mothers and daughters, set to music as part of his Op 84. Was it a coincidence that the composer had alighted on poems on one of his favourite themes? It appears more than likely that Schmidt was already aware of this aspect of his composer’s enthusiasm and intentionally provided these dialogues as a hook to land a Brahmsian catch. After all it was an honour for anyone to be set to music by this master, and the immortality of Schmidt has indeed been assured by the fact that he provided the text of the famous Sapphische Ode, Op 94 No 4.

The scenario of Sommerabend is a slightly lighter-hearted and far more charming version of Liebestreu (track 1). The mother has no specific warnings regarding the dangers of love, but she is negative, world-weary and minor-keyed. She hears the warning hoot of the owl, and all her daughter seems to care about is the song of the nightingale. Alarmed at the liveliness of her unbiddable offspring, she begs her daughter to go to sleep. The accompaniment here might betoken the rocking of a cradle: chords tied across the bar lines move back and forth pendulously on the stave, gently alternating between the hands. The trouble with this theory is that the daughter’s answers in the major key and a faster tempo, she with a spring in her step, are far too sophisticated for anyone still in need of a cradle. Her piano-writing is also more adventurous than her mother’s, as demonstrated by the roving hands of the accompanist; we can confidently predict for her a lively future. The fact that the song seems related to the style of the Zigeunerlieder can probably be ascribed to Brahms’s awareness of Hans Schmidt’s Baltic background, hardly Hungarian, but nevertheless folk-like and exotic, just as the composer liked a great deal of his poetry to be.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2020

Composed probably in Pressbaum bei Wien in the autumn of 1881, published in July 1882. The song’s autograph is in the Library of Congress, Washington.
E minor (original key G minor), 6/8 Allegro grazioso

As simple as it might look on paper, this is one of the trickiest of the Brahms songs to play—devilishly difficult in fact, as well as devilishly clever. The idea of entanglement—a wreath caught in a girl’s hair—is connected to the idea of weaving, and that in turn suggests counterpoint, one layer of notes woven into another. The accompaniment is thus a two-part invention for agile, intertwined digits, as ingenious as Bach under the fingers, and with something of the sinister atmosphere of Mahler’s mother-and-child song, Das irdische Leben. Brahms’s work is another of Schmidt’s mother-daughter dialogues, this time beginning with the daughter complaining in the minor key about her wreath of roses, thorns and all, specially woven for her by a young man who has been wooing her. The mother has the central panel of the song. Her vocal tessitura is lower in order to distinguish her words from those of the younger woman; beautifully crafted pianistic figurations with a hint of the major key underpin her rather brusque maternal reassurance. ‘Unfasten the wreath from your tresses, and forget the boy’, the older woman says confidently, but that may be easier said than done. The girl’s music returns in the minor and bristles once again with uncomfortable quasi-contrapuntal complexity. She tells her mother that it is impossible to remove the wreath on account of the thorns. And then the music is suddenly marked ‘animato’, and the key signature changes from minor to major. The text is enigmatic: the girl speaks of ‘words’ spoken to her by the boy, as if they have entered her bloodstream and become part of her. She seems to be mesmerized by something he has said, like that magical stream of Faust’s words (‘seiner Rede Zauberfluss’) that bewitch and seduce poor Gretchen. But Schmidt’s words also could have been something far cruder, like ‘I’m going to do something to you that will make you mine for ever’, weaving and splicing here bearing similar results. It is not clear from the music whether she is enthralled or horrified—probably rather more of the former. In any event, and whether she is pregnant or not, the girl has become awakened: she is no longer a maiden, and that in itself is a kind of triumph, or so the postlude implies. The ongoing enmeshment of left hand with right occasions a race up the stave to a forte conclusion, defiant bravado perhaps.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2020

Composed probably in Pressbaum bei Wien in the autumn of 1881, published in July 1882. The song’s autograph is in the Library of Congress, Washington.
B flat major (original key E flat major), 2/4 Sehr lebhaft

Elisabeth von Herzogenberg was much taken with these three Schmidt settings of Op 84, referring to them as ‘jolly little rascals’ and rejoicing in their economy of expression: ‘The marvellous beauties of the quickest movements, as in the flight of a lovely deer, pass almost unnoticed while the unathletic person, trying to keep pace, wheezes and pants behind.’ This song is undoubtedly one of the sauciest of the Brahms lieder, a feast of punning and innuendo. The mortal enemies of those who grow berries for a living are the sparrows who peck the fruit to pieces; this pecking accounts for the staccato chords in the piece. But the girl who is charged with singing in order to frighten the birds away has a lover whom she entertains in the berry fields without the mother’s knowledge; her subterfuge is written into the writhing quavers of the sub rosa (or rather sub-berry) accompaniment, left and right hand—like boy and girl—on top of each other and slyly doubling each other’s activities in the lower regions of the stave. Of course the lover (‘Schatz’) kisses or pecks quite differently from the sparrow (‘Spatz’—the poet intends for the words to sound very similar). When the girl is busy canoodling in the bushes with her secret visitor, she is clearly too busy kissing to discharge her vocal duties (but the irony is that in telling the story, she is singing all the while). Disturbed by her daughter’s silence, the mother commands her to resume her role as a bel canto scarecrow; the girl makes the excuse that she had better not do so, as this might encourage her boyfriend to pay a visit. ‘I’m coming right down to help’, the mother then replies; ‘no, you don’t need to do that’, says the girl who, as if caught in the act, comes clean regarding her priority (kissing, of course), although it is not clear whether her closing phrases, triumphant and unashamed, are addressed to a proprietary parent or to the audience—almost certainly the latter. The merriness of the music and the jovial accompaniment, chords prancing between the hands, suggest that the consequences may not be all that dire. The mother’s music in this performance is in B flat major, the pivotal B flat tonic turning into A sharp, which is the leading note of the girl’s retaliatory music in B major. Herzogenberg tells Brahms that this sudden enharmonic change is ‘horrible for the reader’, while understanding the point of it—a wonderful way of musically demonstrating the different priorities (and pecking orders) of the two women: the mother doing anything to protect her property, the girl willing to sacrifice all her berries for love. ‘Oh, the freedom and the mastery!’, Herzogenberg writes admiringly to Brahms almost despite herself, and we have to agree.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2020

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