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