The gap in this programme between tracks 10 and 11 is nearly a decade. This song is the last of Op 48 and concludes a gathering together of songs composed in the 1850s. It was presumably meant to give some ballast to a group of lighter weight settings, and what a counterweight it is! It was immediately saluted as a masterpiece by Clara Schumann. She told Brahms that this song always made her weep—although she was concerned, and rather alarmed for his sake, to hear that the poem matched his own mood. This period was an exceptionally unhappy one in the composer’s life—including career disappointments in Hamburg and the death of his mother.
This lyric is by the immensely cultivated Adolf von Schack, an authority on painting and an expert on, among many other things, the art and literature of Spain (his work on this subject was owned by Brahms). Schack, born in Prussia, eventually settled in Munich at the invitation of the Bavarian king. Some years later the young Münchner Richard Strauss, no doubt dazzled by the poet’s local reputation, chose no fewer than fifteen Schack poems to set to music, the first of which, Ständchen (‘Mach auf, mach auf! doch leise, mein Kind’), is among the most famous of all lieder. It was Brahms, nevertheless, who was the Schack pioneer, setting three poems to music, all of them remarkable. As Eric Sams put it, ‘even if Schack has no enduring lyric voice of his own, such works give him one’. The poet’s style is elegant and fluent (sometimes too fluent and verging on sentimentality) but two of the finest lieder composers (and Hans Pfitzner and Joseph Marx after them) found the work inspiring enough to set to music. Schack also left a remarkable collection of German Romantic paintings, and the Schackgalerie (in Munich’s Prinzregentenstraße) is hardly an insignificant memorial to someone who could easily be written off as a negligible figure in German cultural history.
If one can sometimes accuse Brahms of fulsomeness in his songs, this is the antidote—and it is the underplayed nature of the music that counterbalances Schack’s tendency to wallow in somewhat synthetic emotion. There is not one note too many in an accompaniment that begins with eight bars of bare two-note chords in the right hand, the left hand joining fitfully in bars 9 and 14, before a richer two-handed texture is established from bar 18. The music seems as frozen and bleak as the greyest kind of autumn day. At the end of the first verse the music for ‘im Windhauch schwankt’ will seem eerily familiar to those who listen regularly to lieder. The second verse is suddenly given over to a passionate forte outburst with an accompaniment in triplets—these too seem familiar. After a denuded interlude where the piano writing seems unusually bare for Brahms, as bare as the trees described in the poem, the third verse signals a return to the frozen music of the opening, again extremely parsimonious by this composer’s normally effulgent standards—as if each chord were played by fingers disabled by frostbite. For the last line of the poem the time signature changes to 6/4; at the second hearing of that haunting cadential phrase (this time to the words ‘bald stirbt sie auch’, themselves reminiscent of ‘balde / Ruhest du auch’ from Goethe’s famous Wandrers Nachtlied) we can identify it as a quotation from the end of Schubert’s song Der Doppelgänger, where the same notes are sung to the words ‘in alter Zeit’, accompanied, as in Brahms, by chords also in dotted minims. This famous Heine setting from Schwanengesang was a favourite of the baritone Julius Stockhausen whose accompanist on many an occasion was … Johannes Brahms.
Brahms also accompanied Stockhausen in Schubert’s cycle Winterreise, and when we realize this the inspiration behind Herbstgefühl becomes even clearer—the mention of a season (although autumn as opposed to winter) prompts Schubertian echoes in Brahms who was himself one of the very first among the great composers to acknowledge Schubert not only as an equal, but as a superior. Upon reading this poem Brahms must immediately have thought of Letzte Hoffnung in the Schubert cycle, that song where the poet ponders the fate of the last withered leaf on the tree. Those strangely familiar piano triplets in the middle section of Herbstgefühl can be traced back to Erstarrung and Brahms’s memory of having played them for Stockhausen. The very fact that the first and third verses are separated by a stormy middle section also seems profoundly Schubertian in the instrumental sense—one thinks of the slow movement from the String Quintet, D956, where the extraordinarily static music of the opening returns after a windswept interlude.
from notes by Graham Johnson © 2019