Any pianist on encountering this song for the first time will notice that the undulating thirds in the key of E major bear an uncanny resemblance to those that accompany ‘Soave sia il vento’, sung by Fiordiligi, Dorabella and Don Alfonso in Mozart’s
Così fan tutte. The sixth line of Schack’s lyric (in the poem’s second strophe) refers to moist evening breezes, but the connection between Schack and the Da Ponte trio in E major goes further than this single image: Schack promises joy after the long sorrow of separation, a blessed peace that descends from heaven; Da Ponte with his gentles breezes and waves promises an equally benign outcome. After a long journey, we are told, all will surely turn out for the best.
Another rather less likely composer also comes to mind. The opening seven bars are a gentle moto perpetuo with clearly defined part-writing and an extended bass pedal; we might also imagine the participation of woodwind and strings. When the voice in quasi-instrumental fashion initiates its welcome to the twilight hour (‘Sei willkommen, Zwielichtstunde!’) it dovetails effortlessly with the continuing sinfonia, each strand of the intensifying texture independent, and yet co-dependent, exactly as in a cantata by J S Bach. The syncopation across the barline of ‘Zwielicht’ strikes an eerily baroque note. With mighty musical ghosts such as these presiding at the birth of Abenddämmerung it is clear that Brahms took the song very seriously indeed. Whatever his own religious convictions, or lack of them, he treats Schack’s poem as a kind of religious homily and without a hint of cynicism.
Once the tempo is established the song glides along on predestined rails. We realize that it is meant to signify a remembered journey, the journey of an entire lifetime, and then another Mozartian resonance comes to mind—the song Abendempfindung, of which Abenddämmerung is a Brahmsian equivalent, the gathering together of evening thoughts in preparation for the soul’s onward journey. There is no room here for romanticized variations of tempo and gratuitous rubato, although the disruption of seraphic certainty is planned for later in the setting. For the poem’s second verse the plush Così fan tutte undulations are temporarily replaced by rising semiquaver arpeggios shared between the hands, but this is only for four bars.
It is only at verse 4 (‘Und zu Jugendlust-Genossen’) that there is a change of key-signature (from four to three sharps). Brahms cannot resist replacing the smooth mechanisms of near-pastiche with music entirely his own—trademark hemiolas and trompe-l’oreille conflict between voice and accompaniment where four crotchets’ worth of semiquavers in every bar seem to turn into six disorientating groups of triplets. This A major section incorporates two searching verses of poetry; aided by the marking sempre un poco animato, this music provides the necessary turbulence and sense of striving to break the almost monotonous security of the eighteenth-century-inspired pulse that has so far driven the song ineluctably forward. Clara Schumann did not like this passage and made it clear to Brahms that she preferred the E major section. But it is a necessary foil, a moment of struggle (a musical metaphor for passing though the various tribulations of life itself) that must be endured and surmounted in order to give any significant meaning to the resolution of the final verse. When this arrives we return to the safe certainties of those wonderful thirds in E major; it is as if a ship, hitherto in danger, has reached the safety of port at last. And this reminds us once again of Così fan tutte and of a trio where angels could not have provided more seraphic part-writing and greater melodic and harmonic felicities.
There is no mention of God in Schack’s poem, so the agnostic, even atheist, Brahms is not to be accused of hypocrisy; after all, themes of remembered childhood and lasting love were always dear to him. Nevertheless, the placing of this setting in a kind of stylized baroque frame could serve as the composer’s defence against criticism for writing a song that describes the afterlife. The evocation of Bach-like certainties plus the blessing of an extra-terrestrial Mozart, make of this piece an oblique homage to two great composers and the unquestioning pieties of the past. One also senses how deeply Brahms might have wished to have lived in an age when an unshakeable belief in such fairytale endings was shared by everyone as a matter of course.
from notes by Graham Johnson © 2011