This poetry of Christian Reinhold, the pseudonym of the Swabian Christian Reinhold Köstlin, came to the notice of Brahms on account of the recommendation of famous photographer Marie Fellinger, to whom we owe wonderful portraits of the composer in older age. ‘Reinhold’ (who was also an amateur composer) was Fellinger’s father, and Brahms must have been touched by this daughterly advocacy.

This is a justly famous song. Who would have imagined that in this Vorspiel Brahms would have been able to create such an uncannily accurate depiction of birdsong? There is nothing like this elsewhere in his music: the left-hand quavers staccatissimo, the almost convulsive dotted rhythms (grouped in semi- and demisemiquavers) in a forte dynamic, the acerbic alternations in the right hand of augmented sixths and diminished sevenths, the abrasive acciaccature; the creation of a succession of sounds, as if from nature, that seem mechanically repetitive, while at the same time remaining espressivo. When playing this I am reminded of Thomas Hardy’s Darkling Thrush, a bird who ‘Had chosen thus to fling his soul / Upon the growing gloom’. Of course this is nowhere near an accurate transcription of the nightingale’s song (Brahms is no Messiaen) but it remains a haunting evocation of birdsong filtered through, and distorted by, the stirrings of memory: echoes and sounds from long ago, a woman’s voice perhaps, someone long since dead who has lived on in the singer’s heart.

After four bars the voice enters in a mood of quiet lament. But those dotted rhythms continue, most unusually, now part of the vocal line and bringing with them a hint of menace—or are we simply hearing the reproachful angst of a singer who had not expected to be forcibly transported back to the past by these outdoor sounds? The musically charismatic Brahms gets away with various infelicities of word-setting—such as an octave leap in dotted rhythm on the unimportant word ‘Er’ that does not exist, moreover, in the original poem. Moments like these are mannered and awkward—Brahms was always very much defiantly his own man—but the strange contours work wonderfully well within this context. The middle section (from ‘Nein, trauter Vogel, nein!’) is recitative-like in quavers, and the phrase gathering up in ascending crotchets for ‘Das ist von andern’ masterly; it as if the singer is steadying himself to deal with the tidal wave of emotion that will sweep through the music at ‘andern, himmelschönen’—even if we have to wait until the end of a long sentence, and a ritardando, for the clinching (and rhyming) ‘verklungenen Tönen’. The whole of this passage is a marvel and, in its mixture of recitative and arioso, adventurous and moving.

Reinhold’s concluding ‘In deinem Lied ein leiser Widerhall’ links everything together: it provides the long-awaited concluding rhyme for which the ear has been left dangling since the much earlier ‘süßer Schall’ in the lyric’s second line. In completing the circle in this way, the poet shows that hearing the nightingale’s song, jarring though it first may have been, has also brought quietus. Brahms takes us through various musical and harmonic contortions where pain and pleasure fight for ascendancy, but the change to the major key for the song’s last three bars indicates an unexpectedly cathartic, and healing, experience. In Walter de la Mare’s King David (set to music by Herbert Howells) it is also the sound of the nightingale (‘Tell me, thou little bird that singest, / Who taught my grief to thee?’ asks the king) that allows the deeply depressed monarch to vent his grief in long pent-up tears. Nachtigall, Brahms’ telescoped depiction of repressed emotion coming painfully to the surface, an emotional wrench followed by the blessing of tears, is one of the lied’s most concentrated masterpieces.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2018

Brahms in such a playful mood is a delight at any time, and in the late songs especially so. The setting was sent as a gift to his dear friends the Fellingers. Maria Fellinger (not to be confused with the singer Marie Fillunger, lover of Eugenie Schumann) was the daughter of Christian Köstlin, the poet who wrote under the pseudonym Christian Reinhold. She was also an amateur photographer whose pictures of Brahms were used as the basis of several busts and lithographs. It was clearly pleasing to Brahms to send her a setting of her late father’s words that reflected the light-hearted companionship he enjoyed chez Fellinger in the last thirteen years of his life.

In Das Mädchen spricht Brahms had already proved himself a master of depicting the twitterings of birds as well as their unexpected and seemingly random flights of fancy. In this poem Reinhold (Köstlin) finds himself on a boat on the Rhine. The movements of the little bird who claims the poet’s attention seem even friskier when observed from aboard a moving vessel. The forte marking at the beginning rather shocked early listeners who might have hoped for something gentler to depict a dear little ‘Vögelein’: Elisabet von Herzogenberg refers, perhaps not altogether approvingly, to the ‘cheerful hammering of the ivories’. The accompaniment, where only the first two notes of a right-hand triplet figure are heard (resulting in a succession of chords that sound as if they are ornamented with a succession of snatched and ebullient acciaccature), brilliantly captures avian ducking and weaving, joyful chirruping, the disruptive energy of swoops and somersaults buffeted by air currents and gusts of wind.

The vocal line has all the persuasive bonhomie of someone who loves being outdoors and enjoys disporting himself on deck in glorious summer weather, perhaps singing or whistling the while. With the changing tessitura of the vocal line Brahms is clever enough to suggest that the singer’s gaze switches between the heavens and the horizon from the vantage point of the ship-deck. We are not altogether sure if this is a sail boat or a steamer; the poet lived during a transitional age when both would have been commercially available. If Brahms were imagining the former, the sforzati in the piano-writing might also have something to do with the clacking sound of sails filling with air and flapping in the wind. What the poet would have liked best is an aerial tour of the Rhine in a not-yet-invented aeroplane, but until that time he can dream of the freedom of being a bird himself. The setting by Schubert of Friedrich Schlegel’s poem Der Knabe describes a boy with a similar longing to fly. The Schubert song fades away dreamily, but Brahms ends his with two forte bars as if to say ‘too bad!’ with a cheery shrug of the shoulders: ‘what fools we humans are to even imagine such a thing!’

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2011

The original key of this song is the same as that of Brahms’s Violin Sonata in A major, Op 100; we hear a tune very similar to the main theme in first movement of that work in the opening of the vocal line, doubled by the piano-writing. The Sonata as a whole seems to have been influenced by Groth settings—Komm bald as well as Wie Melodien, Op 105 No 1 (see the following track on this recording). The closing movement of the first Violin Sonata in G major, Op 78, had been inspired by Groth’s Regenlied, Op 59 No 3.

The poem was written by Groth on honour of the composer’s fifty-second birthday. A copy of the text was sent to Brahms in manuscript and he set it immediately—proudly describing it to Kalbeck as a task he accomplished ‘a tempo’. The resulting song was then given to the charming alto Hermine Spies, whom both composer and poet admired. (A contemporary composer, albeit from another musical world, Gabriel Fauré, was equally susceptible to female singers with warm, motherly voices.) Although the poem is not specifically a love lyric—its theme is rather close friendship and the ability of friends to share the garden of life’s beauties—the setting’s similarities in mood and metre to the rapturous Ein Sonett, Op 14 No 4 (see Volume 3 of this series), indicate that Brahms himself thought of this work as a love song. Added to this, most Brahmsians will associate the song’s title, Komm bald, with the climactic line (‘Komm, ach komme bald’) from Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer, Op 105 No 2, a valediction and a song of faithfulness unto death.

In Komm bald the tender entwining of strands of melody in the accompanying introduction, and an upper pedal-point supported by a left hand anchored in the dominant, weave an atmosphere of gentle expectancy. A vocal melody of great tenderness and calm and a typically subtle harmonic palette have contributed to the song’s fame. The composer’s respect for Groth and the mutual affection and fellow-feeling between them, and his feelings for an admired singer (a passionate crush on her, truth to tell, suppressed and controlled as ever), have brought out the best in Brahms. He lays anguish to one side in favour of a kind of rueful gallantry; indeed the song has shades of the quiet nobility of a cavalier servente in troubadour times. This recalls, albeit in miniature, the altruism and idealism of some of the Tieck settings in the Magelone-Lieder, Op 33, from twenty years earlier, such as Treue Liebe dauert lange.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2012

Once again this is a song of a girl left lonely, a favourite Brahmsian theme. Eric Sams pronounces it as ‘one of the finest folk-inspired art songs ever composed’. Whilst respecting that verdict, one must also remark that folk-inspired art songs became a Brahms speciality and that he has few rivals in that particular discipline; in this case the same words appear in his vastly more popular folk-song arrangement, Da unten im Tale, one of the jewels of a collection of forty-nine assembled (though not all composed) in the composer’s late career.

Trennung is thus a kind of reworking of that folk song, as if refracted through a lens that lends a more sophisticated gloss to music already unbearably moving in a simpler version. Of course countless composers have taken folk songs as the basis of more elaborate works, but seldom has one offered their audiences rival songs, different yet in many ways the same, in the expectation that both would appear on the recital platform under his name. With the original melody (an old Swabian song, probably not even really a folk song) ringing in his ears, Brahms composed a kind of commentary—a different melody perhaps, but also a kind of descant to the original. The intent is clearly to pay the deepest musical homage, and Robin Holloway’s allusive conjurings of the echoes of Schumann’s Liederkreis come to mind.

The accompaniments of the two Da unten im Tale works are remarkably similar, especially in the closing bars; indeed we rely on that postlude to confirm the two songs’ shared parentage. The reason for which Trennung is relatively seldom heard is that, however fine it may be, the folk-song arrangement speaks to singers and audiences in a more direct way. But undeniably those who are fascinated by the way Brahms’s musical mind works find Trennung richly rewarding.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2019