Brahms’s response to this great poem predates Hugo Wolf’s wonderful setting by exactly thirty years but it has very little to fear by comparison. The Wolf has a broader emotional range and a more lavish piano part, and few things can compete with its other-worldly postlude, but Brahms is here inspired to write his first great song—if the definition of a great song is a wonderful lyric matched by equally wonderful music. It is here that he shows the world, perhaps for the first time, that he has right of entry, alongside Schubert and Schumann, to the royal enclosure of Lieder composition. (Wolf was later to claim his place in the same elite company.) The opening recitative (‘Angelehnt an die Efeuwand’) is supported by nine bars where semibreves provide the minimum of understated harmonic support. It is only on the word ‘Geheimnisvolles’ that the music, now marked a tempo, stirs into life with mezzo staccato chords, crotchet triplets, that throb high in the treble, star-like, for the next fourteen bars. These magical pulsations signify the rustling of the wind through the instrument, a wooden box with sounding board and strings. Aeolian harps were usually placed near an open window, or were designed to hang outdoors where they would produce random sounds depending on the strength of the breeze. When the strings are tuned to different notes the instrument produces chords, and in stormy weather the disembodied sounds can sometimes be mistaken for human cries. It is this strange characteristic that astonishes Mörike at the heartrending climax of his poem.
As in the Wolf setting the first section of the poem is a recitative, an extended upbeat to the main aria-like part of the work. The phrase ‘Deine melodische Klage!’ is the magical entry-point to the heart of two very different songs. The rapturous rise and fall of Brahms’s setting of these words, an inspired bridge passage, exceeds Wolf’s in eloquence. At ‘Ihr kommet, Winde’ the younger composer makes use of the full scope of the piano keyboard, hands far apart, but Brahms elects—somewhat uncharacteristically—to restrict both hands, modestly and sweetly, to the treble stave for twenty-six bars of music of the greatest ethereal beauty, the vocal line plaintive, the piano-writing wafting in triplets and duplets. After this the bass clef is deployed and the arpeggio triplets are transferred to the left hand. The stirrings of emotions matched by this strange outdoor music become gradually more intense as the poet’s grief and longing harmonize with the fragrances of spring, and with memories of his recently dead brother. It is this young man, and his fresh-greening burial mound, that are referred to in the lines ‘Ach! von des Knaben, / Der mir so lieb war, / Frischgrünendem Hügel’. Eric Sams makes the point that it is unlikely that Brahms knew this biographical information concerning Mörike, and that he might have assumed the narrator of the poem to be a girl, deserted or bereaved. If this is so, perhaps Brahms imagined her to be related to the abandoned servant girl, Das verlassene Mägdlein, one of Schumann’s settings of the poet which Brahms would have known well.
Perhaps this accounts for the essential modesty and restraint, one might even say fragility, of a setting that lacks the more dramatic sweep of the later Wolf, particularly at the phrase ‘Aber auf einmal, / Wie der Wind heftiger herstößt’. Here Brahms prefers to revert to recitative and to play down the shock of the phrase ‘Ein holder Schrei der Harfe’. For this we return to the treble-clef modesty where the voice expresses regret and sorrow in a far less dramatic way than the searing manner employed by Wolf. But we have to remind ourselves that this composer was twenty-seven years younger and writing in a post-Wagnerian world; the poet Mörike himself, devoted musician that he was, would almost certainly have preferred the classical containment, the almost shy gentleness, of the Brahms song.
There is one more wonder to be savoured in this setting: for the words ‘Und hier—die volle Rose streut, geschüttelt, / All ihre Blätter vor meine Füße!’ Brahms marks the music poco più lento, a winding-down that serves as a kind of concluding benediction. The duplet chords high in the treble gradually waft their way down the stave supported by the left hand’s undulating triplets. This is a perfect tonal analogue for nature’s sad ceremony, the strewing of rose petals, albeit in slow motion, as if they were floating slowly through the air before settling. The etiolated postlude, gradually evaporating into silence, permits us to imagine the narrator, momentarily shattered by a surge of painful emotion, regaining his composure in a convergence of happy and sad memories. We hear in this resolution the acceptance of his loss, as well as his gratitude for a combination of sensations, chiefly aural, that have enabled him to gain access, if only for a moment, to a happier past—a Proustian epiphany avant la lettre. And for capturing the essence of that inward journey, and for writing a great song about the power of music to evoke the hinterland of vanished happiness, the listener feels similarly grateful to Brahms.
from notes by Graham Johnson © 2011