Composed in Hamburg in January 1853, published in December 1853. The song’s autograph is in the Bibliothèque Inguimbertine, Carpentras, France.
B minor (original key E flat minor), 4/4 Sehr langsam

This is Brahms’s debut as a composer of lieder, and what an extraordinary beginning it is! This song astounded Joachim and Schumann, and a fine performance astonishes us even today. Putting all his cards on the table, the young composer, already lionized, indicates that he has begun as he intends to continue. A great deal that is familiar about Brahms is already present: an introspective mood in a dark, minor-key tonality; a scenario that encompasses depths of the ocean; triplets clashing with duplets. It is impossible to imagine this work as having been composed by anyone else: the song owes nothing to Mendelssohn, Schumann or Franz, and little to Loewe apart from its exploration of a lower tessitura in both voice and piano. Even in a short work like this, we can hear the rhetoric and drama of Brahms’s barnstorming early piano sonatas, when the imposing first piano concerto was already in the bud.

First we hear the push and pull between the piano’s left-hand quavers, supporting those of the anxious mother, then the dreamy (‘träumerisch’ is the marking) replies of the daughter, higher in tessitura, and with a smooth and untrammelled accompaniment. Fragments of a canon between voice and piano—indications of the young composer’s strict schooling—immediately set up the idea of a finger-wagging lecture. The younger woman is a faithful paragon, her idealism a foil for parental negativity. The song begins very slowly, but as the two characters gradually get into their respective strides—the daughter radiant and then exultant, the mother increasingly infuriated at being contradicted and consumed by bitterness—there is a wind-up of tension via faster tempi. This is more in the style of a Russian romance than a lied, and a Russian translation of the song would sound very convincing; it is little wonder that Brahms would later feel so at home with a great deal of Slavic poetry (see also the next song on this recording). Robert Reinick’s lyrics are more often sunny and somewhat banal, but the mood of Liebestreu is as far as can be imagined from most settings of this poet (Schumann’s genial Op 36 set, for example, extolling Rhineland virtues, is the poet’s best claim to musical durability). Long after Brahms had left Reinick behind him, the musical mood of Liebestreu became typical of the enigmatic commentaries on failed love (often encompassing conversations between mothers and daughters) to which the composer would return for the rest of his life. An assertive depth of feeling and an unashamed fondness for the epic and larger-than-life are already evident in this very first song. In short, here are quite a number of the things that have long made listeners either love Brahms, or hate him.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2020

The composer’s sheer accomplishment and individuality in this first set of songs, published well before his twenty-first birthday, is astonishing. The six songs of Op 3 (not to mention the piano sonatas in C major and F sharp minor, Opp 1 and 2) announced the arrival on the scene of the young Johannes Brahms in no uncertain terms, a star in the firmament, and clearly the ‘next big thing’ in German music. Although Robert Schumann was already ill and disturbed when the much younger composer first visited him (and Clara of course) in Düsseldorf in September 1853, his generous article following this meeting hailed Brahms, someone twenty-three years his junior, as a composer of genius.

Liebe und Frühling is a suite of seven poems written by Hoffmann von Fallersleben in 1833, and included in the poet’s Gedichte of 1834, an edition owned by Schumann and used for four of his song settings. It seems likely that Brahms found the poem in a later edition of the Gedichte from 1853—his literary tastes coinciding with Schumann’s before he had even met the older composer; his Liebe and Frühling I and II are the fifth and seventh of the poet’s group.

Right from the beginning it is clear that Brahms at twenty is already pretty much the master we know, supremely confident in his right to do things differently from most of, if not all, his forebears. The opening bars of the song, where the piano exactly doubles the voice, establishes the idea of one thing, or thought, cleaving to another, music to depict emotional complicity and at-oneness. The whole idea of the poem is thus translated into a simple and arresting musical gesture. These unisons between voice and piano also occur in the opening bars of Ihr Bild, a ground-breaking song from Schubert’s Schwanengesang (D957, 1828). It is not impossible that Brahms’ beloved Schubert was an inspiration here, especially considering that the last and crucial word in this Liebe und Frühling poem is ‘Bild’, and that the deep contemplation of a dear and lovely picture is also what triggers the music that begins the Schubert setting of Heine. This is not a question, however, of imitating Schubert, rather an assimilation of his thought-processes when it comes to word-setting.

In the fifth bar of this song there is a canon between the left-hand piano part and (two beats later) the right hand doubling the vocal line. It is the kind of somewhat self-conscious display of contrapuntal prowess that was later to enrage Brahms’ enemies, like Hugo Wolf, but it is also a technical twist that is undeniably appropriate for a text that describes two-part entwinement, tendrils of bindweed and rosebush growing together, combined and yet separate, as they traverse the trellis-like stave.

Elsewhere, the lie of the piano writing is already typically Brahmsian, for example the strong bass line and the thick spacing of the left-hand chords under ‘Meine Tag- und Nachtgedanken’. When these words are repeated (poco più lento) the accompaniment takes the form of a melodic obbligato to a vocal line buried in the middle of the texture where the note values are minims instead of crotchets. There are perhaps also signs of Brahms the emerging cryptologist: Eric Sams points out that the Clara theme (D sharp–C sharp–B–A sharp–B in the song’s original key, the translation of the letters of her name into notes) makes an appearance here in bars 13-14, under the words ‘und ranken’. How could this happen if the song were composed before Brahms had met the Schumanns? Sams proposes a scenario that is only just possible: his theory is that Brahms added the motif in a revised copy of the song he made in October 1853. If this is indeed so, Clara’s appearance in the young composer’s life (at that first meeting in 1853) was a coup de foudre that led to the revision, and mystification, of an existing composition a few months before its publication.

Max Kalbeck mentions another hidden musical quotation: apparently, Brahms told Kalbeck he had once been in love with a soprano who had sung the role of Zerlina in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Accordingly the theme of the aria ‘Batti, batti, o bel Masetto’ is heard in bars 16-17 when we first hear the words ‘Meine Tag- und Nachtgedanken’. The story of an unidentified Zerlina may have been true, but it was probably sheer obfuscation—the composer was after all a master of teasing biographers and putting them off the trail. Sams is unconvinced by the story of an anonymous soprano (she is still unidentified), and argues that both quotations are significant—that the conflation of the Clara theme and the Zerlina aria was the result of Clara’s maternal kindness to the young composer. Motherliness seems to have been a powerful inducement to devotion as far as Brahms was concerned. It seems possible that his adoration for an unreachable paragon (and how many young men of twenty have been devastated by the beauty and emotional authority of a woman in her middle-thirties!) is here combined with his own feelings of unworthiness.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2018

If the spirit of Schubert hovers over the first of these Liebe und Frühling songs, the second has the bracing energy and elan of the composer who was counted by almost everyone at the time as the greatest master of lieder of the age, Felix Mendelssohn. (The middle nineteenth century found many of the lieder of Schumann—whose work now stands on a far higher pedestal of recognition—often unapproachably avant-garde.) Schumann was a great admirer of Mendelssohn of course, and also of this very song by young Brahms. From the asylum in Endenich he wrote to the younger composer, singling out this third song of Op 3 for special praise. His way of describing its mood was that it was something ‘for loving girls to yearn at’, and he also praises the marvellous climax, no doubt the ecstatic passage of elongated cadence, plus melisma, on the word ‘lichten’, at the song’s close.

The song is more remarkable for its exuberance and harmonic ingenuity than for the fidelity of its word-setting. Perhaps one is asking too much of a composer who is working with a poem that is a useful, rather than a great, lyric. In this three-part structure the opening and closing sections are stirring and exciting, the pianist required to cross hands to echo the singer’s impatience. For the final page Brahms ups the ante by replacing the semiquavers of the opening with tremolos for the whoosh of the peroration.

It is in the middle section (beginning ‘Ich will die Rosen nicht mehr sehn’) that there are two changes of key signature and further restless shifts of key. The music progresses through the tonic minor (in this transposition, G minor) into the distant key of F sharp minor. At the end of this page there is an extraordinary melismatic cadence, extended over three bars, on the word ‘lauschen’ (‘listen’). The singer has made it clear that he is no longer interested in looking at birds and listening to them. And yet the elongation of the word ‘lauschen’ and the way it hangs in the air, eventually resolving on a dominant seventh chord that will take us back to the tonic key, is a perfect musical metaphor for straining to listen, an ingenious illustration of what the singer tells us he does not want to do. Hats off to Brahms for an illuminating, if inappropriate, setting of ‘lauschen’, but this kind of own goal born of excessive enthusiasm is something that is not to be found in the later lieder.

The composer would perfect this kind of moto perpetuo in another song of impassioned flight, Von waldbekränzter Höhe, Op 57 No 1, in 1871, where the repeated words ‘zu dir’ once more appear. In the end, the exalted aspiration of Liebe und Frühling II dies down into a pianissimo, a failure to storm the citadel. This kind of musical surrender where defeat is snatched from the jaws of victory is typical of the closing bars of many of the later songs.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2018

Composed in Göttingen in July 1853, published in December 1853. The song’s autograph is in private hands.
C minor (original key E flat minor), 4/4 Mit feurigem Schwung

In this seldom-performed song, praised for its originality by Robert Schumann from the asylum in Endenich, we have a Loewe-like ballad with a Russian twist (mention of the Volga) together with hints of sexual obsession and revenge. It is interesting to return to the Gedichte of Bodenstedt, once a famous poet and now almost completely forgotten, to fathom the full plot of the story. Brahms sets two sections from a long narrative poem: Ivan, Son of the Starost—poetic colour sketches from Russia. It is a Marriage of Figaro triangle with a cast shorn of courtly charm: a peasant couple, Ivan and Masha, are in love, but Count Büstrow has a gimlet eye for Masha’s beauty. Unlike Susanna in Mozart’s opera, Masha finds the Count irresistible, and Ivan vows a terrible revenge. The Count thinks he has tricked Ivan into going away so he can have his way with the girl, but the younger man lies in wait and kills them both with an axe; their bodies are found floating in the river. (There is another Brahms song, composed over thirty years later, with a similar background of jealousy and murder: Verrat, Op 105 No 5.) The first twelve lines of the poem are the thoughts of the vengeful Ivan who thinks of his Masha as a vulnerable dove or a little fish, and damns the Count as a lustful vulture and a gull hunting for prey in the river. What is not obvious is that the final six lines of the song are the thoughts of the guilt-ridden Masha as she lies dead in the river. The text telescoped by the composer’s editing is thus a mishmash, but it need not cause unnecessary confusion as long as the listener grasps the broad-brush scenario of sex, betrayal, guilt and death, all taking place somewhere in the barren expanses of the Russian steppes.

The music is strong on gesture and excitement, weaker on melodic inspiration, but that is regularly the way with such narratives and, as is often the case with German ballads, the vocal line is largely shadowed and doubled by the piano. The main image is that of the chase, a bird of prey (the Count) swooping with ascending arpeggios on the vulnerable Masha, and the revengeful Ivan swooping in turn on the guilty couple, with all that doubling and shadowing of voice and piano a metaphor for the hunt as he keeps them fixed in his sight. The sheer physical energy of the young Brahms is on display here, and the result is excitement for performer and listener alike. The desperately sad final two bars—Masha’s last gasp as it were—are not at all the way we might have expected such a song of vengeance to end. Such a dying fall in defiance of the listeners’ more blood-curdling expectations is already a Brahmsian signature.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2020

Composed in Hamburg in November 1852, published in December 1853. The song’s autograph is in the Library of Congress, Washington.
F sharp minor (original key), 4/4 Poco agitato

This is another homage to Schumann, this time not hesitating to adopt the same tonality as the setting of In der Fremde that opens Liederkreis, Op 39. That the text comes directly from that song, rather than from the Gedichte, is shown by Brahms’s re-adoption of Schumann’s insertion of an ‘ach’ after ‘Wie bald’, and his change of ‘Rauschet’ to ‘Rauscht’. In the Schumann song’s final line there is also a re-ordering of Eichendorff’s words, as well as an excision of ‘auch’—alterations that survive uncorrected in the Brahms.

This is not to say that there is nothing original about this song, and indeed this starts with the tempo marking of ‘Poco agitato’. Schumann’s setting, notoriously opaque in its challenges to its performers, is marked ‘Nicht schnell’; its rolling and utterly unshowy arpeggios that propel the words forward can sound placid, inoffensive, even somnolent, with the accents in the accompaniment (surely denoting the flashes of red lightning) usually ignored. It is Brahms who better conveys a sense that the poet-orphan is more than simply dejected and deracinated; he is desperate, even frightened. The composer makes this anguish clear at the end of both strophes when the marking is forte, and the words ‘Es kennt mich dort keiner mehr’, and their second-strophe variant, are placed high in the stave with the added emphasis of a sudden change into D major. This is a theatrical contrast to the almost phlegmatic cadences of the more famous Schumann setting. Arguably Brahms’s more verismo approach lacks the mystery of Schumann’s introspection, and there is no doubt that the older composer gave the world a greater song, closer to Eichendorff’s almost gnomic concision and understatement.

In other ways the Brahms song is old-fashioned enough to suggest a folk song strummed to guitar accompaniment: the vocal line is almost entirely shadowed by the right-hand thirds of the accompaniment rising and falling in step with the vocal melody. There are two normally unimportant words that are most interestingly set: in bar 9 the elongation of ‘Aber’ (‘but’) over an entire bar denotes a diffidence regarding the sharing of private grief; in bar 20 the five beats allocated to the first syllable of the word ‘über’ (‘over’) are marvellously indicative of a canopy of tall trees, a visualization and illustration of the size of the forest that is entirely lacking in the Schumann. The piano-writing has accents in bars 8-9 and 13-14, and at the end of the song as it softens ruefully into the tonic major. Perhaps these were meant to indicate the intermittent flashes of lightning mentioned in the poem’s opening, or perhaps they denote the tolling of a death knell. These are hints of sad secrets and tragic losses, intimations of emotions obscure to the listener. And these may refer to the composer’s story as much as to the poet’s. In this way at least this song is already quintessential Brahms.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2020

Composed in Hamburg in December 1852, published in December 1853. The song’s autograph is in the Library of Congress, Washington.
A major (original key), 9/8 Poco allegretto

This is titled Erinnerung in the Gedichte (1843) and has three rather than four verses, ruling out that volume of poems as Brahms’s source. It seems very likely that in setting In der Fremde Brahms became curious as to where this text had originally come from—Eichendorff’s novella Viel Lärm um nichts (‘Much ado about nothing’). There ‘Lindes Rauschen’ is sung from the mountain crags by Florentin who is Prince Romano’s young hunting assistant. Two verses of this heartfelt paean wafting over the treetops with pervasive semiquaver accompaniment yield to a third verse—ten calmer bars ending in horn-call hunting motifs in thirds and sixths (‘Alles ist mir wie ein Traum!’) in deference to the boy’s occupation (proof that Brahms had read the book). In Viel Lärm um nichts these three verses are followed by a page and a half of prose before Florentin resumes his song from afar while waving his hat. Brahms’s setting dutifully reflects this literary hiatus with a double bar line before the song’s ‘Poco animato’ conclusion.

This may seem at first glance to be one of Brahms’s rare salutes to Mendelssohn and his famous moto perpetuo accompaniments, including some of that composer’s Eichendorff settings (like his ecstatic hymn to spring: Wanderlied, Op 57 No 6, from 1841). Nevertheless, the cautionary marking of ‘Poco allegretto’ (rather than ‘Schnell’) and several ritenuto markings show the differences between the two composers. Brahms prefers a musical discourse that waxes and wanes, rather than one where tension is ruthlessly maintained by unwavering tempo; unlike Mendelssohn, his accompaniments reflect the minutiae of the text. The semiquavers are here not only to provide quasi-instrumental excitement and momentum, but to depict gentler ideas in the poem: rustling leaves, the chirping of birds, the bubbling of mountain streams.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2020