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