This is a charming trifle of a song, pure and simple. But it is a Goethe setting and Brahms, who composed only five solo Goethe songs, takes the text and its provenance seriously. The lyric is from the Singspiel
Claudine von Villa Bella, which Schubert set to music in 1815 (there is, unfortunately, only one surviving act). The genial bandit-chief Rugantino (Crugantino in another version of the play) sings a serenade to the two main female characters, Lucinde (with whom he is enamoured) and the eponymous heroine Claudine. The song is meant to communicate with both girls, a kind of double vision that Brahms translates into music in a most unusual way: the opening words ‘Liebliches’ is set to a descending phrase of quavers—D sharp, C sharp, B. At the distance of a dotted crotchet the pianist’s right hand comments on this in canon—once again, D sharp, C sharp, B—but this time in semiquavers and twice, albeit in adjoining octaves. This device, laborious in explanation, winsome in effect, is applied throughout the first page of the song; one Rugantino phrase in sung quavers is followed by the same notes played in diminution, two little sets of semiquavers, one for each of the girls, all within the context of an ingenious canon between voice and piano.
The music is everything that is required, charming and ingratiating and somewhat condescending to the fairer sex in the Italian manner, although this stems directly from Goethe’s playfully remonstrative text. For the final ‘Kannst du mir’s sagen’ (the song’s final ten bars) the nature of the canon changes: two sets of semiquavers in the piano-writing are replaced by a more straightforward mirroring of the vocal quavers by pianistic ones at the distance of a bar: it is as if Rugantino has now focused his attentions on the one girl, Lucinde, who really interests him. There is no surviving Schubert setting of this text, but Brahms must have known the setting of these words, one of a collection of Serenaden, by Beethoven’s teacher Christian Gottlieb Neefe (1748–1798). It is from Neefe that Brahms has taken the title of the song, Serenade, and not Serenate as printed in the Peters edition. There are also two settings by Johann Friedrich Reichardt, and much later ones by Bruch and Medtner.
from notes by Graham Johnson © 2011