On 21 April 1877 Brahms wrote to his close friend and publisher Fritz Simrock (1837–1901) about the idea of a collection of
Mädchenlieder—he had already written the song
Mädchenfluch and he saw this as the beginning of a larger project. In the event, Brahms’s various
Mädchenlieder were spread between different opus numbers at different times of the composer’s life. After Fritz Simrock’s death, the firm was taken over by his nephew Hans (1861–1910) who, in 1904, conceived the idea of honouring Brahms’s original intention by gathering the
Mädchenlieder into a single volume, clearly meant to be performed as a set. It is unlikely that Brahms himself had any say as to the ordering (there is nothing to this effect in any of the surviving letters). The note attached to the published Simrock collection (including a printed facsimile of a part of Brahms’s 1877 letter) was signed simply in the firm’s name—N Simrock GmbH—but it mentions that Brahms had spoken about this project on other occasions, and that it was now a pleasure to see his wishes fulfilled. Simrock was delighted, even if for sheerly commercial reasons, to offer singers a group of songs that might be in demand—sung perhaps alongside Schumann’s
Frauenliebe und -leben. We shall probably never know whether the composer himself would have approved of exactly how the songs from different opus numbers were put together, but the would-be cycle remains effective in performance, and it is always possible that Brahms himself had given some verbal guidance, transmitted from Franz to Hans Simrock, as to how it should one day be assembled. There are of course a number of ‘maiden songs’ by this composer that are not found in this particular set. The famous
Von ewiger Liebe Op 43 No 1, for example, is only narrowly disqualified as a
Mädchenlied because it is not narrated by a girl from beginning to end. The songs that follow here all fit that criterion.
The Op 95 No 6 poem is a fragment—the last two strophes of a four-verse lyric by Paul Heyse entitled In der Bucht. This is printed in the Heyse Gedichte (1872) as part of a sub-section entitled Landschaften mit Staffage (Landscapes with adornments)—in this case referring to a picture of an Italian washergirl, scarcely fifteen and sleepy-eyed at dawn, who relieves the drudgery of her work by singing a song. The verses that follow, though original Heyse, are worthy of his Italienisches Liederbuch translations. Brahms is not interested in the social realism of the picture, or that the girl is exploited and probably unhappy. Instead he takes the poem-within-a-poem on its own terms. Heyse’s washergirl, struggling to keep awake, is clearly unable to go to sleep in the middle of her working day, but Brahms’s postlude here suggests that the singer of this song, having decided against paradise as a viable alternative to earthly love, drops off to sleep again. The theme of someone preferring to remain on earth with the loved one, rather than entering paradise on one’s own, is famously explored in Schubert’s Seligkeit D433. The marking of Behaglich ('contentedly') is self-explanatory. The skill with which a trifle such as this has been assembled is awe-inspiring: the innocent ear perceives a charming tune with a gracious accompaniment, much of it in alternating quavers beneath the hands, but Brahms is powerfully, if unobtrusively, at work with dove-tailing sequences in both voice and piano, one seeming to shadow and answer the other, the art that conceals art. The piano-writing has a marvellous feminine delicacy about it, and the thirds in both hands, treble and bass clef, at ‘O Herzelied, du Ewigkeit!’ clearly represent male–female companionship in an ideal world. ‘If only’ is the theme of this song, sunlit with the good nature of Mediterranean life.
from notes by Graham Johnson © 2011