If Brahms was wary of treading Goethean paths already trodden by Schubert, the same applies to the poetry of Heine as set by Schumann. Heine placed this poem (and the following one) towards the end of the Das Heimkehr section the Buch der Lieder where it had escaped the attentions of nineteenth-century composers. (The text was later set by Othmar Schoeck.) It also avoids the ‘Ich’ tone of a great many Heine settings, and finds musical refuge in a moon-bathed landscape, a purely descriptive sensuality rare in this poet of self-absorbed emotions. Whether Heine means this bathing ‘Elfe’ to be supernatural, a water-nymph like Undine, or simply a beautiful young woman, is unclear. The song opens with two seventh chords in semibreves (C7 and F7) which gently ease us into the B flat major of the opening. The opening melody is made up of a pair of two-bar phrases, the second a tone lower than the first, a simple enough pattern that here creates a wonderfully serene atmosphere as the vocal line meshes with the piano’s left-hand harmonies. The pianist’s left-hand syncopations in the D minor middle section subtly depict the chirping of crickets and the distant sound of splashing water. After this comes a short piano interlude—a musical oasis where semibreve chords, deep in the bass, are echoed and overshadowed by drooping minims in the treble, a tonal analogue perhaps for the breathing mentioned in the text. This transition ushers in a repeat of the serene opening melody. It is as if we have gently parted a forest’s fronds and branches to reveal, in a pool of light, a gently erotic scene, as if Heine were Actaeon encountering the bathing Diana (without her surrounding nymphs), or a latter-day King David stunned by the water-flecked body of Bathsheba.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2015

The idea of adjoining this song to its predecessor, Sommerabend, in order to make a tiny contiguous suite is entirely the composer’s. The poems succeed each other in the Buch der Lieder and moonlight is common to both. Brahms remarked that it was ‘very annoying for a musician to have to use four pretty lines only once, when he might repeat them with suitable and pleasing variations’. This is exactly what he does of course, although the wayfarer of the previous poem has disappeared, and Heine himself reappears (in his familiar first-person form) in the poem’s concluding pair of lines; these are his troubles that melt away and his eyes which give way to tears—and Brahms’s of course. The first two lines of the poem are set to a descent of solemn, trudging crotchets in B flat minor / G flat major, music with a chromatic ache suitable for ‘unknown pathways’, sickness and fatigue. After a spectacularly engineered return to B flat major via an extended, and very slow, setting of ‘müde Glieder’ (the first syllable of the second word encompasses a semibreve), there is a return to the moonlight melody (with its obbligato of pianistic quavers) first heard at the beginning of Mondenschein. After ten bars an interlude of syncopated right-hand B flats (immer langsamer) leads to falling semibreve basses (B flat–A flat–G flat). The following bars, where nocturnal description is replaced by personal involvement, are among the most magical in all Brahms’s lieder. At ‘Es zerrinnen meine Qualen’ the vocal line floats slowly upward as the key of G flat major is established, and the voice seems caught in a gentle cross-weave of the accompaniment’s two-against-three quavers. Never were sorrows so wonderfully, and sadly, delineated in the major key. We progress through the rich domains of C flat major; this, in turn, yields magically into F7 (at ‘Augen’). The gradual unwinding of the song, as if falling dew in slow motion, leaves the music suspended for a moment in ineffably ethereal regions before the beginning of a slow descent into the bass clef. With a sublimely logical simplicity the song ends in a cadence that brings the song back to B flat major, and the same semibreve chords with which Sommerabend had begun.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2015

The Serbian girl in this poem is utterly alone, and this forms a stark contrast with the sunnier mood of the Italian girl of the Heyse setting. Here there is no lover; mother, sister, and brother are also all ruled out by the orphan protagonist of this typically Eastern-European lament. The poem is taken from the Frauenlieder section of Siegfried Kapper’s copious anthology Die Gesänge der Serben (1852) where its title is ‘Röslein, was erblühst du mir so frühe’. For these rather heavy-footed verses the composer has had to provide, most unusually, a 5/4 time-signature—in this case simply 3/4 + 2/4. Gliding, if somewhat viscous, water music in right-hand sixths serves as introduction and interlude; the postlude recycles the same music but instead of the song ending with a piano solo, the voice adds a mournful descant in minims and crotchets while repeating the words ‘Jenseit dreier kühlen Wasser!’. In mood and even musical colour this song seems as genuine a product of the Balkans as Brahms was able to furnish. It shows his interest in, and sympathy with, those poverty-stricken regions, far from Vienna, which shared something of the Austrian empire’s cultural history.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2011

This was the first Geibel poem that Brahms set, despite the composer’s frequently professed enthusiasm for the poet, especially in his youth. The return of an interest in Geibel in 1878 may have been occasioned by the nostalgia of a composer aged forty-five reading a new publication (the collection Spätherbstblätter of 1877) by a writer dear to him in his younger days, and selecting a poem to set to music that spoke of a mid-life crisis, a longing to blossom once more, like a tree coming once again into flower after a tiresome winter. The text is a reworking of the theme of Mörike’s famous poem Er ist’s. When Wolf set that text he also chose G major as good tonality to express the exhilaration of returning spring.

This is a song that has never entered the mainstream Brahmsian repertory; because it stands outside the canon it poses interpretative puzzles—‘Lebhaft’ being a marking that can cover a multitude of speeds. Although there is mention of slumbering and gentle winds, the composer clearly wanted a freshness and impetus to the music, the rising of the sap, a celebration of rebirth betokened by the two-bar postlude, a surge of sound leading to a triumphant forte chord. The effusion, over all too quickly, is characterized by the familiar trademark confluence of left-hand triplets and a descending arpeggio in quavers, rather a dense enmeshment, except in the middle section where the vocal line duets with an oscillating succession of dotted crotchets and quavers. In this way, a simple idea and a rather hackneyed choice of poetic subject are given a Brahmsian gloss that is not entirely convincing. The fact that the composer held up the publication of this song for four years after composition indicates a struggle along the way, one that does not seem to have provided an entirely successful outcome.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2019

In this powerful masterpiece, as is often the case in Brahms’s songs, we sense an autobiographical echo. Elisabet von Herzogenberg wrote that it was ‘born from a deep inward experience’, as if she might have guessed from something Brahms told her that it described a real incident. The song is closely related to Wir wandelten, composed six years later, where Brahms once again described an emotional closeness, a twinning of souls, which transcends sexual inferences. Admittedly, Waldeseinsamkeit describes physical proximity—trembling hands on the beloved’s knee, a head in her lap—which might have led to a full-scale erotic encounter for the poet Lemcke. But the fact that Brahms, in publishing this song, was prepared to share these long-internalized emotions with the rest of the world strongly suggests that there was no sexual outcome, which is not to claim that the repression of his desire in favour of anguished chastity, in this instance at least, was emotionally healthy. The poem probably stirred memories of a walking holiday shared by Clara and Johannes in Switzerland in 1856; she was thirty-seven, and he a stripling of twenty-three. An album of lovingly labelled cut flowers (published in 1991 in a beautiful facsimile) was assembled by Clara and kept in memory of their time together. It would seem likely that Clara might well have contemplated an affair at this time, and that this was seemingly impossible for Brahms.

The opening bar of piano prelude seems to suggest a diminution of light; the sun is setting and the forest fronds create a sylvan oasis of repose. The slow-moving quavers of the accompaniment entwined with a heartbreakingly beautiful vocal line suggest intimacy, complicity, a kind of rapture without contentment or quietus. The gently restless chromaticisms of ‘senkt’ ich / Das Haupt in deinen Schoß’ allow for those small movements and adjustments while a comfortable nestling position is found on the forest floor. It is then that suppressed desire and physical closeness engender potentially dangerous electricity. Beyond mastery is the musical setting of the following passage (‘Und meine bebenden Hände / Um deine Knie ich schloß’ and the subsequent repeat of those lines) where three musical phrases follow each other, a semitone lower each time, a subtle musical analogue for detumescence. Within this time-span physical temptation almost too hard to bear is gradually mastered by a combination of fear, awe and will-power. Perhaps the singer has momentarily had his mind on other parts of the body than the beloved’s knees, but when he finally settles for these, renouncing all temptation, the harmonic return to the F sharp major of the opening is like a ship coming safely, and unnoticed, into port, or the return of a hero, unbesmirched and unannounced, who has survived every kind of trial. Or so the music powerfully implies. Locked in this position for some minutes of speechless intimacy, this couple seems spiritually related to the lovers in En sourdine (Verlaine, Debussy, Fauré), who find the sadness of their love contained within the shadows of the branches that shelter their outdoor idyll.

The final strophe of the song unfolds within this moment of speechless intimacy. The music, a recapitulation of the opening, is heavy with such a mixture of sadness and happiness, relief and regret, as only a great song composer could have created. Verlaine’s poem ends with the poet saying on behalf of his lovers ‘Voice of our despair, / The nightingale will sing’. The Lemcke text, written eight years earlier, says something similar, and it is the same bird who trills its perennial theme of love that is doomed to failure. We hear ‘ferne’ three times, twice on the rising third of D sharp to F sharp, harmonized in B major, then in B minor. This word also represents the unbridgeable distance between the two figures clinging to each other in the forest, and when D sharp slips to D natural followed by F sharp (now harmonized in D major) the acknowledgement of loss, the giving up of hope, is almost unbearably poignant. When the nightingale itself is mentioned in two of Brahms’s most beautiful (and difficult to sing) phrases we are aware that nature gives voice to a sadness unchangeable by any human power. The first ‘Nachtigall’ is sung to the same notes as the word ‘Widerhall’ in Brahms’s later Nachtigall, Op 97 No 1, where it is indeed an echo of this earlier masterpiece. The second ‘Nachtigall’ (D sharp and F sharp, the same phrase as ‘ferne’) has the voice rising as the piano descends. Their meeting on the tonic chord for the word’s final syllable leaves the accompaniment in the depths of the keyboard, the singer dangling exquisitely, out on a limb, as he contemplates a life of loneliness and regret. Consummation is not to be; from the very beginning every note of this extraordinary song has pointed to the same, sad conclusion.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2011