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