The source is once again Heine’s Buch der Lieder and it follows on (No LXXXVIII) from the two twinned settings of Op 85. This is unquestionably one of Brahms’s greatest songs, one where it is a gently pulsating rhythm in 6/8 that unifies the music, rather more than any memorable vocal line. This heartbeat rhythm, when it appears in the left hand, signifies the deep undertow of a final leave-taking. In the second half of the song it is the nightingale’s sweet and melancholy song that floats into the bedroom from a tree above (the motivic rhythm is transferred to the right hand). In the opening the vocal line ascends the stave tentatively, beginning on the third of the C major scale (‘Der Tod’), moving up to the sharpened fourth then the sixth of the scale (coloured by diminished-seventh harmony) for ‘ist die kühle’. The crowning word ‘Nacht’ is once again harmonized with an accidental-free C major chord, as if emerging into a refreshingly cool, moonlit oasis in the middle of a tropical forest. Thus, within a few seconds, bedridden weariness is followed by a longing for release and an upward, aspirational gaze. These opening bars are followed (as day follows night, and antithesis counters thesis) with a winding return to the bottom of the stave for the poem’s second line, harmonized entirely in the subdominant and dominant of the tonic key (a two-bar G pedal): in contrast with death’s cooling night-time relief, day is humid and uncomfortable. The chromatic explorations of the second and third lines of the poem lead us to G minor, and then to G major. The effect is weighty and valedictory—the terrible tiredness of terminal illness. The poem’s second verse, describing the song of the nightingale, begins on a G pedal, a lilting berceuse where left-hand semiquaver arpeggios drift up the stave. (The entire song, based mainly on changes between tonic and dominant, has these, characteristic of a classic berceuse.) These four bars of fever and delirium are followed by four louder bars on a C pedal; the vocal line soars to a high A on ‘Liebe’, one of the most heart-wrenching—and short-lived—outbursts in the composer’s songs, a paroxysm costing the dying man superhuman and last-minute effort, and a reflection of what Brahms knew of Heine himself who, on his ‘mattress grave’ in Paris, longed for death’s release. The sequential repeat of this passage (involving repeats of the poem’s last two lines) begins a process of a downward spiral of energy—the change from semiquavers back to quavers, and thence to dotted crotchets. A rolled dotted-minim chord, the final quietus, closes a masterpiece that manages to combine Brahmsian grandeur with a farewell of heart-breaking simplicity.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2015

The poem by Daumer is No XXIII from the Magyarisch section of the poet’s Polydora (1855), a so-called Weltpoetisches Liederbuch. (The composer chose all the poems for his Liebeslieder Walzer from this anthology, and some of the most beautiful ones from this Hungarian section.) This is one of the most famous of all Brahms songs, radiating a calm and gentle happiness. It speaks of that close inner devotion, secretive and seemingly Platonic, that was part of Brahms’s relationships with such exigent women friends as Clara Schumann, Elisabet von Herzogenberg and others. In fact, Herzogenberg’s critique of the song (‘how permeated with feeling, how wonderfully passionate, and at the same time how finely and lovingly expressed in detail’) seems to express relief that the composer here dwells in regions neither openly erotic nor tragically dissatisfied. The very first word ‘Wir’ (‘We’) initiates the silent conversation, twinned ribbons of delicious concord and counterpoint that permeate the entire song. This six-bar introduction also prophesies the gentle ringing of bells in the poem’s third verse, a musical palimpsest of echoed interaction and sweet reverberation. The perfectly shaped and memorable vocal melody is in itself a wonder, accompanied by gently rocking quavers that underpin harmonies of gentle reminiscence, the whole of this song a narration of golden memories. The second verse of the poem (‘Was ich gedacht’) begins as if initiating strophic repetition, but soon turns a corner with a modulation into four sharps (E major) with a single bar of 3/2 inserted for the repeat of ‘Eines sag’ ich’, as if to emphasize that he intends to say only one thing, but say it clearly. This initiates a progress of crotchet chords, a gentle emotional pilgrimage. Having passed through regions of heightened intimacy—G sharp major and minor, and thence to B major—we return to E major for the poem’s third verse, the gentle chiming of bells delicately portrayed in the piano’s right hand, off the beat and high in the stave. In other hands this might have been a hackneyed response, but Meister Brahms manages to ring these aerial bells within a complicated context of deep-seated and constrained emotions. After a subtle and glorious return to the home key (G sharp, the third of E major = A flat, the fifth of D flat major) a variation of the opening vocal melody initiates the setting of the poem’s final two lines. There are several inimitably Brahmsian touches here: the gently eccentric hocketing quavers of ‘in der Welt kein andrer Hall’; the extended, languidly sensual cadences, with successively flattened harmonies, of ‘So wundersüß, so wunderlieblich’; the conversation in canon, as if between male and female thoughts, of the hushed postlude.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2015

Lemare’s Brahms transcriptions are not confined to the heavyweight orchestral repertoire: they also encompass chamber music, song and lighter orchestral pieces such as the Hungarian Dances. With the exception of Wiegenlied (the well-known ‘Lullaby’), Brahms’s best known song is surely Wir wandelten, wir zwei zusammen (We wandered, we two together). The act of transcription divorces the music from the text of the song, a potentially disastrous operation: in this case, Brahms’s music is so warm and immediate in its appeal that it stands perfectly well without Daumer’s elliptical, impressionistic poem.

from notes by Robert Quinney © 2006

Unlike the other Heine settings by Brahms, selected from the Buch der Lieder, this poem was never included in that collection. It had been first published in magazine form in 1822, only reappearing decades after the poet’s death. Brahms was clearly delighted to find something so obscure as to be unknown to hordes of contemporary Heine composers. At first glance gleaming sun and sparkling sea might seem optimistic images, but the original subtitle (‘Gedichtet im Herbste’) makes it clear the poem has an autumnal theme—the flowers now have a limited life, the sun will inevitably weaken, and everything is on the move towards disintegration. The windy turbulence of the six-bar introduction (clattering triplets in the right hand conflicting with left-hand duplets) encompasses exactly this feeling of transience and panic, as well as what Sams calls ‘the irresistible forces of nature’ (cf Schubert’s Herbst, D945). Above this moto perpetuo, the vocal line, passionately memorable, rises and falls with a kind of constrained anguish. In the second strophe the imagery refocuses its energies from the general to the particular—the poet’s songs and his beloved. The change to the major key here signals something more bitter than sweet. On mention of ‘Lieder’ the tempo quickens slightly and left-hand duplets give way to octaves off the beat. The repeat of ‘alle’ in heightened sequence has something desperately sad, even masochistic, about it. At ‘Nehmt mit meine Tränen und Seufzer’ we have piano-writing that combines the idea of sighs (right-hand triplets) with falling tears (single off-beat semiquaver droplets in the left hand). The way the last line of the poem is repeated as part of an upward vocal trajectory is reminiscent of the rapt ending of In Waldeseinsamkeit, Op 85 No 6, with its distant nightingale. But the song of that bird (‘Voix de notre désespoir’, as Verlaine describes it) is the harbinger of pain, and of hopes of love destined to be crushed. Similarly, in Es schauen die Blumen, Brahms’s setting of ‘wehmütig und trüb!’ in the major key, and within the context of a lifting vocal line, makes an ironic point. The long-held high F sharp at the end of the song seems to dematerialize in the ether, along with the poet’s hopes.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2015

This song has always been admired for its fourteen-bar piano introduction with its dramatic, horn-like, melody in Dorian mode, quite separate from the vocal line. This begins with a major second—E rising to a long F sharp, the sharpened sixth of the scale marked forte—and progresses, via an A minor arpeggio, to a delayed and emphatic G sharp, encompassing a grandiose, multi-dimensional shift to the dominant: nautical vistas seem to stretch across the horizon while ocean depths are plumbed beneath the pianist’s fingers. The continuation of that melody, and the way it prepares the ground for the entry of the voice, is equally eloquent: the forlorn sweep of the whole has a majesty and grandeur that are quintessential Brahms, reminiscent perhaps of the opening of the Piano Concerto No 2, Op 83. The skiff and its two vulnerable passengers are specks on a moonlit seascape of infinite breadth and melancholy. Accompanying mezzo-staccato left-hand triplets, often shared between the hands, row the boat slowly forward as the voice recounts what seems to have been a haunting dream. The opening words, ‘Mein Liebchen’, occasion little joy or affection (cf Hugo Wolf’s very different, major-key, setting of the poem from 1878). Brahms’s restlessly roving and plangent vocal melody is placed relatively high in stave; the last line of the first verse (‘Auf weiter Wasserbahn’) is repeated and expanded (‘Auf weiter, weiter Wasserbahn’) as if bitterly to underline the lovers’ hopeless situation. This cadence is accompanied by a transposed reappearance of the pianist’s opening Dorian-mode motif that leads us into the second verse. By now Brahms has led us into tragic realms, even if Heine himself had typically planned only a last-minute sting in the tail as the two voyagers are inexplicably denied the chance to enjoy the wonders of the magic island. In the song’s middle section, the depiction of that unattainable Cytherea of sweet music and dancing mists (cf the ‘Luxe, calme et volupté’ in Duparc’s L’invitation au voyage) is masterfully accomplished with eight bars of whirling chromatic abandon, accelerando and crescendo, a miraculously conjured Dionysiac. Just as suddenly, Brahms dissolves that enticing vision, and the return of the horn-call music of the opening (to coincide with the word ‘Trostlos’ for the poem’s final line) shows astonishing musical planning, not to say legerdemain. This is a song where every bar—right up to the postlude deep in the bass clef—is under the master’s peerless control. A similar mournful horn-like resonance appears also in an 1885 song: at the end of Auf dem See, Op 106 No 2, a stentorian E in the same register emerges, as if from a distant fog-horn, to depict another Brahmsian boat, floating as if in space.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2015