This is the last of Brahms’ great songs in ballad style. It was composed at the same time as he was working on his folksong settings (also late fruit from the Brahmsian tree). The listener is referred to track 26 (
Es reit ein Herr und auch sein Knecht) later on this disc: it was probably after working on this thematically related setting that the composer inserted into the Lemcke text the rhetorical ‘Ja’, characteristic of the German folksong style, that facilitates the meaning-loaded repetitions of words at the end of phrases.
It is no coincidence that the original key (as sung here) is the same as that for the famous Von ewiger Liebe—here is that idealistic song’s cynical counterfoil, and Sams points out that even in the opening bars the bass lines of the two songs are intimately related. Von ewiger Liebe is no mere piece of atmosphere, it tells a dramatic story, even if it is nowhere near as bloodthirsty as Verrat where the plot unfolds with admirable concision—it is a maxim of great balladry that there should be few wasted words.
The jealous lover stands watching, concealed in the shade of a linden tree—the tiny piano interlude after the word ‘Linde’ is surely indicative of his louring suspicions. The accompaniment, right-hand quavers alternating with striding crotchet basses, seems to paw the ground, impatient for some shocking discovery. The beauties of the locale are described without fuss—they neither help nor hinder this tense vigil. He is soon to be rewarded (if that is the right word) by the sight of a good-looking, velvet-suited man coming out of his lover’s house—the inference is that the interloper belongs to a higher social class than either the girl or her betrayed paramour. Brahms allows the singer an entire verse, twelve bars, where the voice of the faithless and sexually rapacious girl is piped in merciless parody—and yet the singer cannot allow these words to be funny. The observer cannot be anywhere near enough to be hearing these intimate exchanges between the clandestine lovers, but this is after all a ballad.
At the end of the third verse the dominant of B minor, an F sharp major chord, pivots into E flat minor via a common F sharp = G flat, and the music is now marked ‘Lebhafter’. In the poem’s fourth verse the spy from outside, the man who is supposed to be safely far away and unaware of the treachery, promises revenge, and in verse 5 we are led to believe he delivers it. He notices that his opponent is wearing a sword and promises to bless the erring lovers’ illicit affair with a duel by moonlight. For this confrontation the key signature changes to two sharps and there is a sudden shift to the subdominant—the putative battle is joined in an energetic E major that leads back to B major for ‘Ja segnen’ and two bars of chords, leaping about the stave and hammered out in both hands, signify mortal combat. For the poem’s sixth, and last, verse there is a modified return to the music of the opening; the narrative ‘ich’ disappears, seemingly, in favour of a narrator. The final twist in the story is that although someone lies dead, and the girl will be grief-stricken to find his body in the morning, we are not entirely certain which of the two rivals has been slain, and who has fled the scene.
In the songs of Brahms we often hear, at one remove, the voice of the composer’s own frustration, disappointment and heartbreak. The lieder are habitually his confessional, but it is rare to be given a window such as this into his more violent emotions, his anger and his jealousy—both of which must have played a significant part in his mostly unfulfilled private life; he was, after all, a man of great passions. It is significant that Brahms has selected a poem where the betrayed man wreaks revenge on his male rival, but makes no attempt to upbraid, much less harm, the female who has badly let him down. By inference, and in the context of this story, it is possible that he imagines paying with his own life. It seems to have been Brahms’ lifelong tendency to suffer in brooding silence, and never actually confess to the various women how very much he had been hurt by them for one reason or another.
from notes by Graham Johnson © 2018