Paul Fleming, if not quite so ancient a poet as Ulrich von Württemberg, is nevertheless an early enough literary figure (and far more famous than Ulrich) to have tempted Brahms to write another piece of musical time-travel when setting these words. But it seemed more important to the composer that Fleming’s poem is a German translation of a famous anonymous Italian lyric, entitled
O fronte serena. This charming poem, a veritable ‘sweet nothing’, was set as one of the celebrated villanelle for various vocal combinations by Giovanni Girolamo (or Johannes Hieronymus) Kapsberger (
c1580-1651), a German-Italian composer whose works Brahms, a scholar of early music in his own way, would have been interested to know. What the composer invents here is not a tribute to the past, but rather a kind of tribute to a country where he was always a happy and relaxed holiday guest. This is a thoroughly genial and elegant Italaniate song, not quite a pastiche, but more or less strophic with a high-note coda at the end to suit the poem’s country of origin.
The melody is a simple one built on a descending, and then ascending, arpeggio, but it avoids banality and achieves charm. (It is perhaps easier to appreciate its popular-song character in the much higher tenor key.) The accompaniment in triplets plays no large part in the proceedings, save lending harmonic support and stirring up excitement at the end of the verses. At bar 13 (and similar places in the other strophes) we suddenly depart from the cantilena and find pulsating little tremors in the piano writing providing emphases for tiny verbal exclamations like ‘schauen’ and ‘grüssen’ (‘Himmel auf Erden’ and ‘komme, komm eile’ in the other verses). These lead, in turn, to excited semiquavers in the bass, and extended cadences on the key words of each strophe. These cadences take the form of a two-bar phrase in ritardando, and a follow-up coda in four bars, a tempo at first, but then pulled back at the end in the manner of an Italian popular song. The two bars before the final top note veer between the tonic minor and major and teeter on the boundaries of good taste depending on how well they are sung—which is also the case in similar passages in real Italian music. Eric Sams is right to point out that this song in praise of ‘superabundant beauty and charm’ calls for restraint and seriousness in performance, as well as sincerity and humour. This is a real lied masquerading as an Italian hit, but not all that convincingly.
from notes by Graham Johnson © 2018