The text is about the difficulties of the creative process as experienced by the poet Klaus Groth, although the opening line suggests, wrongly, that he is describing a specifically musical struggle. Eric Sams quotes Karl Kraus in this connection, a writer who was also afraid that his best ideas would be demolished by the banality of the inadequate words with which he sought to frame them—‘Art must be fought for’ warns Kraus sternly. Groth admits that his initial inspirations are like melodies, something for him that cannot be put down on paper (after all, he is not a composer); these are ideas that seem to flower lyrically within him but they disappear all too easily in perfumed evanescence. In the second verse the poet has to go about finding actual words, his stock in trade after all, that can pin down the expressive nature of the imaginary fancies that have already gone through his head like music. He fears that mere words will not be up to this task, and that they will somehow destroy the delicate nature of the primary inspiration. The third verse explains that after hard work and the polishing of his poem Groth hopes that a residue of that initially wordless and musical inspiration will remain deep within these verses. During its painstaking gestation the finished poem has hopefully become infused with hidden music that will touch its readers’ hearts, not only their minds. The poem thus acknowledges that a poet’s aim is to create a musical lyric (not necessarily a lyric for music) with the power to bring a tear to its readers’ eyes, with a vestige of the same power that music exerts over its listeners. Thus the poem, in acknowledging the primacy of musical inspiration, seems to be intended by Groth as a tribute to Brahms himself.

The composer almost certainly took it as such. In this song it has always seemed easier for performers to imagine another, less abstract, scenario whereby it is Brahms himself, rather than the poet, who is the narrator: first comes his great tune (first verse), to which are added the poet’s words (‘Doch kommt das Wort’, second verse), resulting in the final work of art where lied-text and lied-melody are combined to make a masterpiece. Even if this is not at all what the poem actually says, it is an interpretation which seems far more straightforward to singers and pianists. It also suits the strophic nature of the song whereby three stages of creativity seem conveniently outlined—the appearance, one by one, of two participant muses, and their eventual conjunction. It is usual for this last strophe to be performed with a fuller tone as if the combination of music and poem has brought about a quiet artistic triumph. That music came first, on this occasion at least, is underlined by the melody having been part of the opening Allegro amabile of the A major Violin Sonata, Op 100, also composed in the summer of 1886, almost certainly before the song.

The word-melodies that Groth had heard, the musical threads that set his brain aglow with poetic inspiration, are surely metaphors for long-cherished memories. Brahms accordingly composes music that seems rich with autumnal nostalgia and gentle regret in the major key. Especially memorable are the third and fourth lines of the second strophe where the phrases ‘Wie Nebelgrau erblaßt’ and ‘Und schwindet wie ein Hauch’ seem to dematerialize in the modulations descending to a hushed F sharp minor. At this point all seems lost, like inspiration vanished into thin air, but the return to the home key after two bars of D minor figurations conjures a miraculous solution: the reappearance here of the home key of A major at ‘Und dennoch ruht im Reime’ charts a journey—an artistic challenge surmounted with lateral harmonic thinking and ingenuity. Just like Komm bald, and not altogether to the delight of Brahms’s older muse Elisabet von Herzogenberg, this song was destined for the contralto Hermine Spies. The depth of that singer’s range is to be heard in the final vocal bars of the song. The four-bar postlude, a reflection on all that has gone before, is one of the composer’s most touching.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2012

Composed in Thun in August 1886, published in October 1888. The song’s autograph is lost.
D minor (original key C sharp minor), 2/2 Langsam und leise

This is one of a handful of famous deathbed songs in the repertoire. In Schubert’s Der Tod und das Mädchen and his equally famous Die junge Nonne, young women face their ends with considerable anguish, although in both cases their final moments are more peaceful than they had feared. Brahms’s slightly earlier Heine setting, Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht, from 1884, and his later O Tod, wie bitter bist du from the Vier ernste Gesänge treat death as a welcome guest, a solution to the harrying cares of life. Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer is unique in that instead of attempting to depict the actual moment of death, the song illustrates the process of dying, a fading away rather than a definitive departure. The woman is almost certainly suffering from tuberculosis, and she is clearly not expected to live beyond the early spring, a season fast approaching if the request to ‘come soon’ is to be taken seriously. What seems certain is that there will be no visit; the scenario—that of an abandoned woman—is a familiar one in Brahms’s songs, and this lieder-singing Violetta will have no last-minute reconciliation with her Alfredo.

From the beginning, the music hovers—as if floating and feverish—several feet off the ground, unanchored. The listener, like the suffering patient, is disorientated. (Pfitzner in his Op 2 setting of a decade later achieves something similarly unworldly.) The tonic chord in root position is fleetingly reached at the end of bar 3, but it has been far more important that the music has begun out of nowhere on the second inversion of that minor triad. A slow cortège of dotted crotchets and quavers in sixths might be interpreted as the gliding footfall of death, an eerie presentiment of the stricken world of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. The unusually extended gaps in the vocal line (as between ‘Niemand wacht’ and ‘und öffnet dir’) cannily denote a consumptive’s shortness of breath. Slowly drifting arpeggios in second inversion—rising from the fifth step of four different and carefully chosen chords—are at the heart of the song’s musical architecture. The use of this harmonic device was bitterly criticized by Elisabeth von Herzogenberg as ungrammatical, but in the interests of drama, Brahms breaks such old rules and conventions and is here an unlikely partner in crime with Richard Strauss, already a famous name. The composer builds an astonishing forte climax, culminating, after several cleverly engineered key shifts, at ‘o komme bald!’ in the second inversion of the tonic major. It is only much later, with the singer’s final word in fact, that we reach the root position of the chord. It is as if the desperately ill woman has summoned every last ounce of strength to make this impassioned plea, before sinking back into the pillows while murmuring again ‘o komme bald!’. Her almost epic weariness and at the last minute her tragic grandeur make this song one of the most theatrical that Brahms ever composed. No histrionics are required in performance: the singer has simply to obey the requirements of the score for the drama of this scenario to come across most powerfully.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2020

Probably composed in 1888, published in October 1888. The song’s autograph is in the Bibliothek im Rathaus, Vienna.
F major (original key), 3/4 Einfach und ausdrucksvoll

Here is yet another song from a deserted girl, this time sung to a friend, a sister perhaps, another woman who is sure to find herself in the same boat should she not heed this warning. Brahms found these words in Zuccalmaglio, but the melody, one of his most touching, is entirely different from the one to be found in that source. Although this is not a mother-daughter poem, it is similarly a word of crestfallen advice given from one woman to another. The accompaniment, as in most of Brahms’s folk-song-like lieder, is disarmingly simple, and the two pages of the printed score are exactly the same, apart from the words—two strophes on the first side, one on the second. There is not much to say about this song apart from the fact that only Brahms could have written it, and that its simplicity masks a lifetime’s mastery, as well as a lifetime’s loneliness.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2020

This is another masterpiece of concision where we encounter, in telescoped form, the dramatic mixture of recitative and aria to be found in the great oratorios. Windswept pianism—arpeggios landing on icy minim chords, a barren musical texture, these denote a stormy day in a god-forsaken cemetery, inspired by Brahms’s visit to a run-down Swiss graveyard (as he recounted to Kalbeck). The reading of the partially effaced epitaphs on the old gravestones, and the stooping and peering necessary to do so, are all marvellously suggested in the dovetailing interplay of voice and piano. There are two appearances of the storm motif, the second of these sections ending with a stentorian, downwardly plunging setting of ‘Gewesen’. For the poem’s two final lines (after a Schubertian key-change from minor to tonic major, cf Gute Nacht from Winterreise) there is a chorale in calm crotchets that offers comfort and consolation. Kalbeck informs us that this is the melody that Bach harmonized as ‘O haupt voll Blut und Wunden’ in the St Matthew Passion. Sams believes that Brahms was thinking of the same Leo Hassler melody when it reappears (also in the St Matthew Passion) as ‘Wenn ich einmal soll scheiden’, words that made the composer ponder the manner of his own future death, rather than the Crucifixion. Like O Tod, wie bitter bist du from the Vier ernste Gesänge, Op 121 No 3, death’s healing (here signified by an imagined ‘Genesen’ written on the tombstones) has nothing to do with redemption or an afterlife. The source of the poem is Adjutantenritte und andere Gedichte by that great Hugo Wolf admirer, Detlev von Liliencron, the title of his first poetry collection an indication of his military background. Both poet and composer were non-believers with conventionally religious upbringings. Their knowledge of sacred texts was such that they were able to produce works that avoided any outright declaration of atheism, while subverting the prevailing orthodoxy with an irony and pessimism often unperceived by the general public.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2015

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