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