Music in praise of the moon is usually diaphanous and atmospheric, as transparent as a beam of light. The fragility of the Brahms song
Mondenschein to a Heine text is a case in point. Occasionally, however, this friendly satellite inspires a more robust musical response, usually when the moon is addressed by an earthbound mortal. In Schubert’s Seidl setting
Der Wanderer an den Mond the tramp of the traveller is built into the music, as well as his somewhat misanthropic view of life, and he speaks to the moon (a masculine noun in German, feminine in French) man-to-man. Although it is not intimated in the text, it is likely that this poem by Simrock, certainly not the finest poem that Brahms ever set, was also meant to incorporate the determined trudge of someone unhappy who is making his way through a moonlit landscape. Perhaps the piano’s left-hand chords represent a guitar to indicate a serenade, whether stationary or ambulant.
Even if the singer is not on the move the moon is always adrift. The Bewegung in triplets is prophetic of the Heine setting Meerfahrt, composed some seven years later—an indication that Brahms imagines a ship at sea and the moon in the heavens both wading through a similar watery lagoon, a medium buoyant enough to encourage the rise and fall of triplets that gently bob above and below the water line, viscous enough to produce sonorous sixths in the middle of the piano—no Clair de lune this! Simrock’s metre results in a succession of three-bar musical phrases, one for each line of verse. The introduction to the whole song is also a solo of three bars, rather than the symmetrical four. This length of phrase is a continuing feature of the song and gives a curious limp to the music, a feeling of being out of breath, as if the singer were tired or disillusioned or at the end of his tether. Of course this is exactly the case as we are soon to discover. After an interlude, the traveller asks permission to confide his sorrows to his lunar friend (‘Sei Vertrauter meiner Schmerzen’). When there is clearly no answer from the long-suffering moon (implied by the verbal silence of another three-bar interlude) the narrator embarks on his fervent petition.
With ‘Sag’ ihr, die ich trag’ im Herzen’, the nub of the song, the triplets disappear from the music and the atmosphere changes completely. We may have expected a woebegone complaint from this traveller but Brahms supplies him instead with a declaration of love worthy of the beauty of his lunar intermediary. The marking is dolce. In the piano-writing (beginning in F sharp major, the dominant of the home key) there is a suggestion of distant muted horns—an evocation of the empty forests and the vast and peaceful terrain that separate the poet from his lover, distances that would be easy for the moon to traverse as a messenger and go-between. After this oasis of tranquillity the triplets reappear, a piano interlude that begins in G major and then reverts to B minor. With ‘Sag’ ihr, daß zu Tod getroffen’ the voice takes up the triplet motif for the next six bars. A return of those distant horn calls, now in G major (at ‘Nur ein schmeichlerisches Hoffen’), promises further peaceful reflection, but a shift to C major (‘Sei’s, das sie zusammenhält’) and a heightened tessitura turns the screw in terms of anguish. These two lines of poetry are then repeated even more ardently and desperately in B major. In the tenor of this writing the supplicant is no longer contained and dignified, perhaps because he realizes that the moon is powerless, or unwilling, to accede to his request. The eleven-bar postlude lavishly employs the materials of the opening, first to darker and more intense effect, and then distancing and thinning out the music as the traveller, embittered and disappointed, disappears over the horizon. Unlike Schubert’s moonstruck traveller he has learned nothing that might lighten his heart.
from notes by Graham Johnson © 2011
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