The Spanisches Liederbuch, a collaboration of translations by Emanuel Geibel and Paul Heyse from the Spanish, was published in 1851 in a pocket-size format with an exquisite Moorish design gilded on to a binding available in various colours. Hugo Wolf discovered the beauties of these texts nearly four decades later and set no fewer than forty-four of them in 1889–90. The same collection had attracted Brahms when it was more or less hot off the press, although he only selected a single item from the book. He had loved Geibel’s work since his youth, and his mentor, Robert Schumann, had used many of the poet’s earlier translations for two cycles on Spanish themes for vocal quartet. Brahms’s setting of this lyric (a translation of the anonymous ‘Á la sombra de mis cabellos’) is an early indication of his admiration for southern women (Bizet’s Carmen was later to be his favourite opera, something of a guilty secret) and a fascination with gypsies—the brown cheeks (‘braune Wange’) of the girl in this song suggest that she too may be a gypsy. The Zigeunerlieder of Brahms, his most openly erotic songs, date from the other end of his career. Reading a book where it was not clear who had translated what, Brahms could not have known at the time that this particular translation from the Spanisches Liederbuch was not by Geibel but by Heyse, a writer the composer later came to admire profoundly, both as a man and artist.

Like his idol Friedrich Nietzsche, Wolf the ardent Wagnerian had become deeply fascinated by Mediterranean culture; his subtly suggestive setting of In dem Schatten meiner Locken (recapitulated in his opera Der Corregidor) has certainly been more regularly performed than the Brahms setting which has beauties of its own despite being rather more stolid and less mercurial. Brahms had lots of practical experience of Italy with a number of (probably naughty) holidays there, but Spain remained somewhere theoretical—the Schack Serenade, Op 58 No 8, is the other Spanish stylization in his song output. In the wonderful Geistliches Wiegenlied with viola obbligato, also from the Spanisches Liederbuch, and Vom Strande (track 14), a Spanish poem translated by Eichendorff, Brahms makes no attempt to suggest, in musical terms, the Iberian origin of those poems.

Both settings of In dem Schatten meiner Locken tend to be performed too fast for their own good; Brahms’s song is often whipped up into a hectic allegro, and so is Wolf’s, despite its ‘nicht schnell’ marking. The undertow of eroticism is lost in perky or arch performances. We must remember that the girl, probably still sleepy herself, is still lying next to her lover while shading him from the sun with her tresses. Her desires are put on hold, allowing him some recuperative rest before embarking on the next round in their love-making. Like Duparc’s Phidylé (where the gender roles are reversed, and it is the girl who is permitted her post-coital doze) the poem’s imagery suggests ongoing al fresco love-making. How chastely Victorian and fully clothed is that great English classic, Vaughan Williams’s (and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s) Silent Noon, by comparison! After a great Spanish singer had elected to sing Cherubino while pregnant, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, mirroring the Germany of her parents’ generation, remarked in my hearing that ‘these southern women have no shame’. It is precisely this shamelessness that both Brahms and Wolf relished. Spanish or Italian female protagonists were given permission to misbehave because German-speaking audiences shrugged off such misdemeanours as being endemic to southern culture, however intolerable they may have seemed in a Teutonic context.

In Spanisches Lied (Brahms’s own title) the composer adopts the gentle swing of a bolero. This music is evocative enough to conjure an Iberian idyll, while remaining sufficiently muted to suggest one-on-one intimacy. Harmonically speaking there is little shift in position, suggesting the stasis of the lovers, but the piano writing is inventive enough to evoke soft summer breezes and sighs of longing. The song’s repetitive rondo-like form (A-B-A-B-A) gives the work a folk-song-like simplicity.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2019

Despite the later opus number, this is the earliest song on the recording, and it sounds it—we find it harder to detect the authentic hand of the precocious master than in the lieder of Op 3. Mendelssohn is clearly the model here and we cannot forget that this music predates the meeting with Schumann or detailed knowledge of that master’s music. That the song is uncomplicatedly strophic is another indication of a youthful effort. Whole dotted crotchets of the vocal line are given over to inessential words like ‘und’ and ‘der’ (or ‘dem, was sie’ sung to three dotted crotchets in the second verse) but this is not especially to do with Brahms’ inexperience; he was always inclined to leave it to the singer to smooth away the unnecessary accentuations of a prosody sacrificed to the exigencies of recurring melody.

There is nothing wrong with the opening tune—indeed, there is something to admire in the phrases that rise in effective, if conventional, sequence. The richness of the chordal structure in triplets is already effulgent in a way that is unique to Brahms; the strength of the bass lines shows sound compositional technique; the elongated cadences, as if somehow to underline the emotional import of their message, are a feature of the composer’s songs of the period. As for word-setting, ardent words like ‘glühen’ are part of a mezzo-staccato triplet, as are verbs of movement like ‘schwanken’ or ‘säuselnden’ and ‘zitternden’. There was a youthful carelessness in transcribing words from the second edition of Meissner’s Gedichte (1846), thus in this performance the first ‘säuselnder’ in the third verse is replaced by the original ‘schweigender’ (thus avoiding a repeat of the word in the same line) and ‘Bienlein’ with ‘Bienen’.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2018

The title of the poem clearly reminds Brahms of the ‘Juchhe! der Wein ist da’ chorus in the Autumn movement of Haydn’s oratorio The Seasons, where the music moves into an ebullient 6/8. In this way a touch of Vienna at the turn of the nineteenth century is artfully combined with echoes of the North German school; the song’s speed, energy and lightness of touch would seem to mark the young composer out as the inheritor of Mendelssohn’s mantle. In the deft staccato passages and fleet semiquaver runs of the accompaniment we hear the sparkle of the Midsummer Night’s Dream by Felix, the erstwhile boy-wonder from Berlin who had died five years earlier, aged only thirty-eight. Such parallels can be deceptive however: Brahms, the nineteen-year-old boy-wonder from Hamburg (albeit less rich and less socially well-connected than Mendelssohn) was already his own man, and a young master—as the fluidity and ebullience of this music makes clear, as well as its skilful handling of sequential repetitions. There is also something about the spacing of the chords, heftier than Mendelssohn’s, that betokens a weighty musical personality—as if someone rather too solid for ballet had decided to do a balletic turn in a tutu, just for the fun of it. This kind of moto perpetuo, composed more than a year before his meeting with Schumann in Düsseldorf, is hardly characteristic of the Brahms we know best: there are no two-against-three rhythms and no hemiolas. The are also evident musical drawbacks born of inexperience—the singer is allocated awkward vowels on high notes that can too easily sound squawky, and the vocal line is rather too often doubled by the piano (a challenge to the accompanist this, in terms of balance). In the piano-writing of the final verse, where syncopated chords bounce off accented bass octaves under ‘Im Herzen vor lauter Freud’!’ the song acquires a genuinely Brahmsian effulgence. This propensity for grandeur is confirmed in the postlude which concludes with three loud dotted-minim chords, a plagal cadence that Eric Sams characterizes as a ‘massive Amen from the world at large’.

The poet and painter Robert Reinick had become one of the Schumanns’ close friends during their time in Dresden (from December 1844). At the farewell ceremony for the Schumanns on their move to Düsseldorf in September 1850, it was Reinick who penned and delivered the poetic address to the departing couple. He died in February 1852, still only in his forties, and it seems likely that Brahms was encouraged to turn to this verse by the press evaluations and obituaries of a poet who was saluted at the time for his artistic versatility, and for his word-pictures of an idealized German society and landscape. He was freer and deeper than many a Biedermeier poet, but he belonged, at heart, to this epoch (as seems clear in the Reinick settings of Marschner for example), and he was ill-at-ease in post-1848 Germany. It would have mattered to Brahms that Reinick, though no Eichendorff, had been one of Schumann’s collaborators (six Reinick poems date from 1840—Sechs Gedichte aus dem Liederbuch eines Malers, Op 36). Brahms’s first published song (Liebestreu, Op 3 No 1, composed in November 1852) was his only other Reinick setting.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2011

This beautiful and little-known song is full of genuine Brahmsian resonance, in that one can sense the size of the young man’s musical personality, his fabulous gift for melody, his expansive manner at the keyboard in terms of his accompaniments. His is clearly a genuinely new voice. Much of the song is in a piano dynamic, but the theme is epic, with the singer’s journey, Icarus-like, destined for the sun, only to be followed, in each successive verse, by the dying fall of failed aspirations—making for four spacious musical arches. The shape and style of the song with its strophic repetition of the first twelve bars is prophetic of the extended ballad-like songs from Die schöne Magelone in its broadly lyrical, almost instrumental, structure: it is no coincidence that the key of B major, as well as the poise of the unfurling melody, places us in mind of the Piano Trio Op 8, composed six months later. Musical depiction of specific poetic details is not yet as important to Brahms as it was later to become; in this regard he was yet to absorb the lessons of Schubert and Schumann. Nevertheless, we notice that in the bars following ‘Sterbend ihr am Busen hangt’ the piano-writing is balanced pendulously between the pianist’s hands, as if something on a cosmic scale were being weighed between them; the flapping wings of the eagle are heard in right-hand piano triplets at the beginning of the third verse (where there is also a change to the minor key). The chromatic descent down the stave for ‘Blind zur Erde niederfällt’, though not the most subtle of the composer’s musical illustrations, shows that it is his intention to match verbal image to musical deed, something he would do with increasing mastery. In the poem’s final verse the insistence on the repeated word ‘Und’ (with first three beats, then four) is an example of Brahms’s indifference to prosody of a kind that would later shock Hugo Wolf. But this infelicity (a good singer and pianist can easily handle problems such as these, and Brahms knew it) is soon forgotten with the touching, and appropriate, setting of the word ‘vergehn’ at the very end of the song.

Hoffmann von Fallersleben was another Schumann poet, famous for his left-wing politics as well as his prolific output as a lyricist and children’s poet. Lieder enthusiasts encounter a bewildering array of sources: Gedichte (Leipzig, 1834), Gedichte (Breslau, 1837), Gedichte (Leipzig, 1843, an expansion of the 1834 volume) and Gedichte, 1853. This song (and the famous Nachtigallen schwingen Op 6 No 6) comes from the third of these collections. Wie die Wolke nach der Sonne is No 89 of a sequence of poems entitled Buch der Liebe, a placement that suggests that Brahms had read almost the entire book before he found a lyric that struck his fancy.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2011

Brahms happened to meet the poet Heinrich Hoffmann (born in the town of Fallersleben) very early on in his career and this chance encounter under friendly circumstances explains the youthful settings of Opp 3 and 6, poems that the composer dutifully copied down into his poetry notebook and set to music. Hoffmann was already famous for his politically motivated writings and his texts for children’s songs (there was also a connection with Schumann’s Op&nsbp;79 Lieder-Album für die Jugend of 1849), but these aspects of Hoffmann’s output passed Brahms by. Instead he was drawn to a poem like Nachtigallen schwingen which begins (both poetically and musically) in a blaze of uplift and ends in pathetic hopelessness.

It may well be that the twenty-year-old Brahms was already embarking on the pathway whereby his lieder would become a kind of diary: it was often the content of the poems, rather than the distinction of their authors, that governed his choice of texts. Like most ordinary people he was capable of being touched by poems because they seemed to give voice to his own emotional quandaries. When he came across just such a poem he would make an indentation on the relevant page, using his thumbnail to mark the paper with grooves (which are still visible in his library kept at the Musikverein) that seem to underscore the depth and intensity of otherwise hidden feelings. As the years go by we encounter a number of Brahms songs that seem to have been composed in the confessional or, more accurately, in the therapist’s waiting room (only figuratively speaking, of course—Freud was not yet practising in Vienna). In Nachtigallen schwingen the idea of the narrator being excluded from fulfilment while the rest of nature overflows with happiness is a perfectly accurate signpost towards many of the choices of lieder texts in Brahms’s maturity.

The throbbing staccato triplets of the opening in A flat major, chords chattering in both hands in the treble clef, are exhilarating and almost virtuosic. Cartwheeling above this, as if reflecting birds in full flight, is a wonderful sweeping vocal melody. In the midst of this ebullience one easily forgets that the song of the nightingale (and there is no attempt here to depict that bird’s song accurately) signifies impossible or unreciprocated love. For the second strophe of the poem, an isolated four lines, the key switches to an enharmonically related E major. The panting accompaniment in off-beat sextuplet quavers, like a series of suppressed sighs, is famously tricky, and it is clear that this composer’s fascination with awkward two-against-three cross-rhythms is already a trademark and thumbprint of his pianistic style.

The poem’s third strophe returns to the opening music with a perfectly geared modulation. This is the first of several in this song, all engineered to reflect the dawning realization of emotional deprivation in the midst of nature’s abundance. There is real pathos here, but as Eric Sams observes, ‘if the audience fails to share the poet’s predicament the song will sadly sag’. In the course of the song’s final page, all that confidence and joie de vivre have dissipated; left-hand triplets are replaced by a line of crotchets that rove around the keyboard, as if asking questions via exquisite modulations and in search of a solution to an intractable problem. The final cadence is reflective and beaten down, in some respects an unsatisfying ending for the many listeners who might have expected a song that starts like this to develop into something truly sensational by its end. This is, of course, another Brahms trademark: a withheld consummation, the type of song that in ending piano rather than forte denies the public a rousing conclusion, a reminder that life often fails to deliver our dearest hopes.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2019