The composer had already set four Schenkendorf love poems for his Op 63 in 1874, and here he chooses a metaphysical text by the same poet who was more or less a contemporary of Schubert and who died not much older than that composer. Mention of Schubert is almost always apposite when discussing Brahms’s lieder, and one of the earlier composer’s most powerful songs comes to mind here, the Novalis
Nachthymne D687.
Todessehnen shares the transcendental nature of that masterpiece (also its two-part structure linked by a faster transitional section), albeit from a much more conventionally religious viewpoint. Thanks to a pious upbringing Brahms knew more about the Bible than any other composer—and believed it less than most. Thus it is not the religious aspect of the poem that interests him but rather the chance to express his innate pessimism and his genuine longing for release from a burden of emotional pain that he carried around with him all his life. His contemporaries noticed this and some of them classified it as a shortcoming; an acquaintance, Mosenthal, jokingly accused Brahms to his face of being far too ready to sing ‘Das Grab ist meine Freude’ (‘The grave is my joy’). Reactions to this composer’s music—and there are those who would reply unequivocally in the negative to the question Aimez-vous Brahms?—have always depended on the listener’s ability, or lack of it, to live with this aspect of the composer’s creative personality.
The lack of piano introduction is taken by Eric Sams to indicate the song’s seriousness—‘the emotion can no longer be suppressed’. The solemn incantation of the vocal line (it is hardly a melody) and right-hand minims offset by stately left-hand quavers suggest a pilgrim’s chorale in slow motion. Friedländer notes the rare appearance in Brahms’s work of an augmented chord under ‘meiner Seele’, as if to underline (and undermine) the composer’s own slim chances of salvation. The music is heavy and portentous, as if the accompaniment were attempting to shoulder an impossibly heavy burden while being crushed by the vocal line. Thus ends the first strophe, and there is no happier outcome for the second which ends with the word ‘Schmerz’. The depth of the original key, as performed here, makes something almost sumptuous, at least in musical terms, of this emotional cul-de-sac.
The poem’s third strophe occasions a transitional passage marked etwas bewegter, where syncopations in the piano-writing signify the stirrings of hope. The final two verses occasion a change from three sharps in the minor key to six sharps in the major. The marking is Langsam, but a change of time-signature to 3/4 and a lightening of texture (upwardly wafting quavers, spare left-hand chords with a staccato third beat) bring serenity, sunlight, exaltation—albeit of a muted kind. Sams notes here ‘a Biblical instrumentation of harp and psaltery’. The melody of ‘Hör es, Vater in der Höhe’ reappears, three years later, as a clarinet solo in the Andante of the Second Piano Concerto. There was a side of the agnostic Brahms that might have preferred to leave the song in the doldrums of the earlier verses, but he was too good a composer to ignore an opportunity for a maggiore passage of a kind that might offer musical, if not personal, redemption. (Although Love as a redemptive power on earth is something Brahms did believe in—cf. the last of the Vier ernste Gesänge). It is notable that the unequivocal quietus of the tonic chord, F sharp major, is avoided until the very end of the song when heaven is attained, metaphorically at least, in the final three bars.
from notes by Graham Johnson © 2012