The eight songs of Op 14, all but one folksong-inspired, represent another remarkable achievement on the part of the twenty-five-year-old composer, and none of these songs is more substantial than this, the first of the collection. It pleased the somewhat contrary composer to put his cards on the table as a man of the people, finding stronger inspiration in the folk poetry of Germany (or Russia, Hungary, Scotland, Finland, Sweden, an international brotherhood of folk art) than in the musical salons of the big city. The composer, born and brought up in Hamburg, one of the busiest ports of Germany, had many opportunities as a working-class youngster to experience the multifarious excitements of a European melting pot.

Not all of Brahms’ folk material, whether musical or literary, is authentic of course; his work in this area came well before the era of real scholarship in this field, but authenticity would only be important to us if the composer making the arrangements and settings claimed to be a musicologist and was not a genius in his own right. So even if we know that Brahms adapts, and sometimes invents, his so-called folk material, we accept that this style was a huge part of his expressive world, and his way, perhaps, of distancing himself from the increasingly effete and sentimental texts of his song-composing contemporaries, the many mediocre composers who were attempting to provide lucrative and popular musical fodder for an increasingly spoiled and frivolous public.

One would give anything to hear Brahms himself accompany Vor dem Fenster—it would give us a very clear idea of the latitudes of freedom permitted to interpreters of the mid-nineteenth century in a modified strophic setting such as this. The time signature of 3/8 is rather perverse: in terms of performance the piece must be sung in 6/8 with a two-in-a-bar andante, but it seems that Brahms has opted for bars of three quavers that look simultaneously more simple and more archaic on the printed page. This apparent simplicity disguises enormous sophistication, and the alternating thirds, fifths and sixths of the piano writing simulate horn-calls of melancholy farewell.

A great deal of narrative versatility is asked of the singer: in verse 1 he (or she) must adopt the voice of the suitor; in verse 2 a narrator refers to the same male suitor in the third person; in verse 3 it is the girl, having leapt from her bed, who replies and tries to quieten the boy down. The minor-key music for these three strophes, together with irregular piano interludes adding to an impression of folk-music asymmetry, is identical—on the page, if not in artful performance. In verse 4 the boy breaks free of the constraints of being cowed in the minor key with an impassioned outburst of major-key defiance. In this context his heartfelt protest is overwhelming. Verse 5 returns to the narrator and the minor-key music of the first three strophes. The song ends with the boy singing once again, the same notes, if not with the same emotions, as verse 4. As in so many Brahms songs, a lover’s determination and defiance are dampened, melting into sadness and impotence. There is a simple but very eloquent six-bar postlude. As in a popular song from our own time, it is completely left to the performer to determine the tempo variations, rubato and (often) dynamic variations of the various strophes.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2018

The original literary source for this poem was a collection of Chansons choisies, a three-volume anthology of French romances with attached airs that was edited by Monnet and published in Paris in 1765. This was the collection in which the young Mozart, dallying in Mannheim with two pretty sisters, found the texts for songs composed to impress them, Oiseaux, si tous les ans and Dans un bois solitaire, K307 and K308. Over one-hundred-and-fifty years later, Francis Poulenc found in the supplementary fourth volume of the same set (for sale in the eighteenth century under the counter in Paris and Ispahan) the scabrous and erotic poems for his Chansons gaillardes (1926). Brahms owed the text of his Sonett (though hardly a sonnet at all) to the fact that Johann Herder took an interest in the poem written by Thibault, Count of Champagne and King of Navarre, which is printed at the beginning of the first volume (‘Las! si j’avais pouvoir d’oublier sa beauté, sa beauté, son bien dire et son très-doux, très-doux regarder’) and translated it for his Stimmen der Völker in Liedern (published in 1773, and of which Brahms owned the 1827–30 reprint).

The poem with its subtitle (‘from the thirteenth century’) has prompted the composer to find a musical solution that suggests the venerable provenance of the text. The accompaniment is four-part writing of rigorous restraint (at least in the beginning), not a medieval pastiche, but sufficiently archaic-sounding to suggest the epoch of courtly love. It is curious that thirty-six years later Gabriel Fauré, in Une sainte en son auréole, the opening song of his cycle La bonne chanson, conjures an identical musical texture of flowing quasi-contrapuntal crotchets, and in the same key, to evoke an imaginary chatelaine in her tower in the time of Charlemagne. Brahms was to use this kind of time-travel again for his Magelone poems inspired by courtly love and Minnesang, a musical equivalent of the Nazarene painting—allusively medieval but not genuinely so of course—that was very much in vogue at the time.

The vocal melody is hymn-like and ardent in the extreme, the flowing crotchets in the inner voices of the accompaniment pull at the heart strings, the strength and masculinity of the vocal line constrained by the etiquette of the bar line, heroic passion suppressed in favour of gallantry. But such feelings can only be contained for so long—a marking of Poco più animato allows the voice off its leash as it climbs higher and higher in describing the divine madness that affects the suitor. And then a dominant pedal for thirteen bars in which the vocal line, now crestfallen and intent on obedience, attaches itself to the piano’s right-hand chords weaving a dance of attendance on the beloved in a sarabande of devotion. The high note on ‘nie’ denotes undying, unswerving service with no thought of reward. This passage sets up the return to A flat major, more or less the same as the opening of the song, except for the passionate and masochistic outburst at the end (‘Viel lieber nimmer genesen!’). The singer in his closing bars is first vehement then downtrodden, leaving nothing for the piano to do but provide a solemn ‘Amen’. This vocal cri de cœur exceeds the otherwise courtly boundaries of the piece; it is here that we can perhaps detect the subjective voice of the twenty-five-year-old Brahms, already a veteran of the non-love affair with Clara Schumann, and now unhappily involved with Agathe Siebold in a courtship both intense and eventually doomed. The song praises a matchless madonna on a pedestal, perpetually unavailable, especially for a heart-injured young man from the lower classes, no matter how he might try to disguise himself as a knight. It also permits us an early glimpse of a recurring pattern in the composer’s life when dreams of reciprocated love (permitting the sweetness of painful longing) were shattered as soon as they threatened to turn into reality, seemingly the last thing that Brahms felt he deserved.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2011

Using an old and anonymous folk text allows the composer to write a song about an illicit sexual liaison where the boy must leave the girl’s bed early enough to prevent discovery by the neighbours. Earthy scenarios such as this simply do not occur in mainstream, well-mannered German poetry of the time; the equivalent song in the Hugo Wolf canon is Geh, Geliebter, geh jetzt, a German translation of an old Spanish text. In both the songs by Brahms and Wolf it is the girl’s task to wake her sleeping lover before it is too late: in Trennung one can infer that this encounter has been a one-night stand with a young man, a nameless ‘junger Gesell’, someone passing through who will not return. After such a memorable night of love, the girl feels that she is letting the love of her life slip through her fingers.

Unlike Vor dem Fenster with its expansive and flexible triplets, Trennung is performed at a more or less constant (and very fast) tempo and the effect of the music is mainly dependent on the sheer Schwung of the piano writing—there is little scope here for vocal inflection beyond the clear and meaningful delivery of the text on the back of the restless accompaniment. This kind of speed, where singer and pianist hurtle through a song, is relatively rare in Brahms who is usually a much more reflective composer whose ruminations, according to his detractors, err on the side of the ponderous. This music, however, gives us a glimpse of the sheer energy of the composer at twenty-five—and one is also tempted to imagine that he has some first-hand experience of quick and discreetly conducted sexual encounters with a broken heart (not his) left in their train.

The vocal line is in duet with the pianist’s left hand throughout. The climbing fourth in the vocal line (‘Wach auf’) is exactly mirrored by a falling fifth in the viola register of the accompaniment. The texture is filled in with pulsating right-hand semiquavers that bounce off the left-hand basses. In the first three identical strophes of merry music-making the discreetly pummelling pianist could not be blamed for thinking that the girl is attempting to wake up the young man by tickling him. There is a change of mood and also of vocal melody in the fourth verse, a moment of observational commentary: it is as if a canny outside observer were predicting that someone’s death would ensure that this encounter would be their last. The left-hand octaves and fifths are replaced by a legato line of single quavers; the formerly cheery harmonies between the hands undergo metamorphoses of harmonic subtlety, at one moment plunging into the lower regions of the keyboard hitherto avoided. The return of the hearty opening music for the final verse, despite the grief of the girl at parting, serves as a brutal reminder that many a night of love that ends in the major key for one participant (in this case the young man) has sown the seeds of emotional destruction in the person left behind.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2018

Brahms took the text from the second volume, p.465, of Zuccalmaglio (already a favourite as early as 1858) where he was not afraid of changing words. In the song’s opening line, for example, ‘allerliebster’ becomes simply ‘liebster’ the better to suit the composer’s rhythm. And rhythm here is the main driving force. The young Brahms, already a creator of extraordinarily accomplished chamber music, clearly conceived this song in instrumental terms. One might imagine that the Ländler-like lilt of this kind might have turned up as a trio section of a scherzo movement in an instrumental sonata. This is an enchanting moto perpetuo, somewhat in the manner of Mendelssohn, or Schubert’s Die Sterne D939; in that famous song there are similar twists and turns, explorations of unexpected harmonic byways, but those tonal shifts, unlike the excursions in Ständchen, are prompted by verbal nuances. In any case, it is perhaps unfair to compare late Schubert with early Brahms. There is little in this Brahms song where the words themselves make a real difference (apart from the generalized geniality and teasing affection that is built into the music itself). The delicately chugging rhythm with its staccato articulations is culminative in effect—the longer it continues the more one is drawn into a Bewegung that becomes almost foot-tappingly hypnotic as the three verses progress. The word ‘von’ set on a strong downbeat minim (verse 2, bar 13) would have been studiously avoided by others, but the experienced performer will attempt to disguise this fault in Brahms’s prosody. This weakness is not entirely untypical of the composer who was inclined to brush aside such details as long as the vocal line remained attractive; he was disinclined to specify the minute rhythmic adjustments of a composer like Wolf. This evocation of guitar music was conceived for a piano from the mid-nineteenth century rather than a present-day instrument. The pianist of today should not be afraid here of creating a lighter and drier texture than the pedalled and opulent texture which is a trademark of the later Brahms.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2011

Throughout his career Brahms returned to writing songs, often folk song, expressed in very simple and verbal terms—as if he were deeply touched by those whose lack of education permitted no literary beating about the bush regarding their feelings. His music in this mode, simple yet passionate, is far removed from the coy shepherdesses of earlier musicians who emulated peasant life in the manner of Marie Antoinette’s games at Versailles. There was something of the class warrior about this composer, proud and defiant regarding his humble roots, even if at times oppressed and diminished by them. On the other hand he was no man of the Left and, at the same time as being liberal on many social issues, harboured some rather simplistic and right-wing political views when it came to German nationalism.

The themes of this beautiful little piece, one musical verse on a single page, are familiar: love and loss, and the sheer impossibility of struggling against the size and cruelty of the world. Perhaps the girl’s lover has joined the navy for lack of a better job, a familiar occurrence in Brahms’s Hamburg. In this mood the composer can write music that seems always to have been there, his own Volkslieder. Here touches of modal harmony reinforce the impression of age-old sorrow and injustice transferred from one generation to the next.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2019