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