Daumer issued three volumes of poetry entitled Hafis: the 1846 edition, with an expanded, revised and more decorative edition issued in 1856, and a smaller-format ‘Neue Sammlung’ in 1852. Botschaft, the most famous of all the Daumer settings, is No XXXVI in the latter volume; Brahms had to supply his own title. The song is notorious among accompanists for its awkwardness, and as result many a performance has sounded like a cavalry charge as pianists attempt to come to grips with the sidling double thirds that rove crab-like across the keyboard. The key to playing this ingenious and famous song is the marking Grazioso (as well as the piano marking, plus leggiero, in the first bar of the piano part) and a reminder that, like the Schubert songs of Suleika, this is a message delivered to the winds: the opening ritornello is supposed to depict the ‘Lüftchen’ thus addressed. The left-hand staccatos are deliciously helpful in making this music airy rather than opaque, and in insisting on a mood of delight rather than dark passion. It is rare enough to find Brahms in this mood of teasing charm (the collaboration of the winds has to be something effected cajolingly, rather than as a result of an imperious command). There are many felicities in this music: particularly clever is how Brahms employs his signature two-against-three effect (triplets versus duplets) automatically to brake the hitherto unimpeded flow of the music on the words ‘Eile nicht’. At the end of the first ‘strophe’ (the composer has divided the eleven-line poem into three for his purposes, 4 + 2 + 5) the opening ritornello in the minor key reappears in the major. The poem’s fifth and sixth lines, the song’s central panel, is a holding pattern of tender, hovering music, and this leads to the quasi fermata of ‘Sprich’ followed by a gap of hesitation as the singer decides exactly what needs to be said on his behalf. Here Brahms surely takes his inspiration from Schubert’s Eifersucht und Stolz (Die schöne Müllerin, No 15), where the miller boy similarly concocts a message in the third person for the brook to deliver to his beloved. In Brahms, as in Schubert, we can hear the wheels go round before the crucial wording of the message (or ‘Botschaft’) is formulated. And here the composer provides a touch of humour—the message itself wears its heart on its sleeve with a shift to a higher tessitura and dramatic repetitions, a message indeed somewhat roguishly calculated to move and sway the beautiful girl to whom it is addressed. The tricky four-bar postlude brings the song to a (rare for Brahms) triumphant conclusion—the suitor seems highly satisfied with his wind-borne collaboration.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2015

This Daumer setting, following on in the same opus, lacks the naturalness and charm of Botschaft. The source is Hafis (1846, XXIII) and despite the fact that it is printed in three seemingly conventional strophes, the form is influenced by the Persian ghazal. In this case there is a great deal of clever rhyming of words with the ending ‘-ehlen’, ‘-ählen’ and even ‘-eelen’. The stormy introduction offers a musical representation of flickering flames. The same music is heard as an interlude between the first and second verses. With these new words new music illustrates different ideas—such as the dry staccato triplets against the vocal rhythm that suggest dust rising on the pathway. After this, the first two lines of the third verse are given a page of portentous music as voice doubles piano—lots of unisons as if to draw attention to the immutability of a solemn law. The main note here is ‘E’, which Sams takes to be a musical pun for the ‘ew’ge’ (‘eternal’) of the text. The words ‘Wie alle sollten ihre Wege wählen’ form a bridge passage—as if a massive colon in terms of musical punctuation—which leads us so grandly into the song’s final section that we are set up to hear the distillation of a lifetime’s experience. Instead, with the intimate confessional beginning ‘Da wurde deinem Lockenhaar der Auftrag’, we learn that all this grand philosophizing comes down to a woman! The triplets of the opening are ironed out and the wild flames are now replaced by the calmer quavers of adoration and surrender—familiar Daumer territory. The girl, he says, has stolen his honour, religion and reason. Brahms depicts the swaying movement and texture of her hair (cf. Schubert’s Versunken, D715) in sensuously undulating duplets; these fall gently down the stave, as if the composer were running his hands through her locks whilst appraising their glinting chromatic highlights. Such imaginative word-to-music details are to be found on each of the song’s four pages, but Liebesglut remains something of a portmanteau song that somehow fails to coalesce into a convincing entity.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2015

Composed in 1859-60, published in October 1868. The song’s autograph is lost.
G major (original key F major), 3/4 Nicht zu langsam

This beloved song represents a major achievement on Brahms’s part. Although not an actual folk song, the melody is simple and memorable enough to satisfy folk-song purists (and the text is from Uhland’s anthology Alte hoch- und niederdeutsche Volkslieder); it is also as God-fearing as any moderate church-goer might wish (only hardliners would find the lad, who clearly belongs to the same congregation as his sweetheart, culpable in his affections). And yet there is no whiff in this music of the worthy, or the interesting-but-dull; the song has always been a populist success and still receives countless performances on the recital platform—as a modern political pundit may opine, it’s the tune, stupid.

The rhythm is that of a Ländler, with flowing quavers in the right hand, while the left hand is anchored in undulating crotchets providing a strong downbeat to a melody with an undeniable swing. This suggests the rhythm of pealing church bells but, like every lad before and after him, our young man would secretly prefer to be worshipping his beloved, or at least dancing with her. The scenario is that of a boy for whom Sunday is an extremely precious day off; he is possibly an apprentice like the protagonist of Henry Carey’s famous Sally in our alley: ‘Of all the Days that’s in the Week / I dearly love but one Day, / And that’s the Day that comes betwixt / A Saturday and Monday; / For then I’m drest, all in my best, / To walk abroad with Sally.’

Brahms’s achievement is to give church-going Sunday its due without becoming austere: he carefully combines strands of piety and dumbstruck infatuation so that they are not mutually exclusive. The boy respects his girl in a very proper manner, but there is also a glint in his eye. The song’s first edition has only one ‘Wollte Gott’, not two, in its refrain; as the non-believing but very religiously brought-up Brahms explained to his publisher Simrock, this self-imposed restraint seemed fitting. The composer was persuaded, nevertheless, to add the second ‘wollte Gott’ to balance the shape of the tune, which it does marvellously. At that frequently indefinable intersection of folk song and art song, Sonntag is a real triumph.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2020

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

Goethe’s sonnet of 1807–8 fascinated three great song composers. In October 1819 Schubert set it (D673), although it has never been ranked among his acknowledged Goethe masterpieces. In August 1831 Mendelssohn composed a heartfelt and superbly emotionally gauged setting (Op 86 No 3) that is a firm favourite with singers and listeners, and deservedly so. Brahms’s version has never been as popular as this (he was never quick to set Goethe, and five solo Goethe songs is hardly an enormous tally for a composer of his stature), but it is nonetheless a masterful setting and unaccountably neglected on the recital platform. The song was composed earlier than its opus number suggests: the other numbers of Op 47 were written a full decade later. In 1858 the composer was less experienced in terms of what suited singers’ voices—and the tessitura of the original key is uncomfortably high for almost all sopranos and requires transposition (as recorded here). Nevertheless Brahms found an original and sensitive solution to the thorny problem of setting a sonnet’s fourteen lines to music. The first eight (rhymed abba, abba) are separately framed as the first part of an imploring letter that is passionate while conserving the ladylike decorum which is an inherent part of Goethe’s poem; Brahms’s pictorial delicacy in this regard is remarkable. The tempo is such that one may almost imagine the letter being written in real time. The first three of the next six lines (which are rhymed cde, cde, from ‘Die Träne trocknet wieder unversehens’) are treated as an aside—as if the girl has lifted her pen from the paper and reflects on the pain of her situation in a soliloquy. The reader could not be blamed from reading in these lines, and between them, that she has been seduced and then heartlessly abandoned (although this is not the scenario of Goethe’s sonnet sequence, see below). In this section, because she is no longer controlling her emotions for letter-writing purposes, she allows herself to explore a more distraught world of chromatic harmonies, culminating in an impassioned four-bar interlude for piano. After this she regains her composure and finishes her letter—the last three lines of the poem—in which she pleads for a reply while somehow retaining her poise and dignity. All of this is as superbly stage-managed by Brahms as if he were envisaging an opera scene. The four-bar postlude, made up of sighs and suppressed tears, offers little hope and simply fades away. Throughout the song the texture of the accompaniment is thinned out so that every note, like every word of her letter, is made to count. It would be easy to transcribe the spare piano-writing of this piece for the intimacy of string quartet, and Brahms’s bass-clef writing, normally full of chordal ballast, is mostly here a single etiolated line. In the first verse this rocks, cello-like, in phrased duplets that tug at the sleeve of the absent lover to whom the letter is addressed. In the song’s final verse this motif is transferred to the imaginary first and second violins of the pianist’s right hand, a musical economy that superbly reflects the letter-writer’s concentrated attempts to salvage her dignity in the midst of emotional uncertainty.

Goethe’s Sonette is a sequence of seventeen poems of which this is the eighth. In his late fifties Goethe conceived a crush on the ward of his book dealer in Jena, the eighteen-year-old Minna Herzlieb (1788–1865). He was understandably reticent about this attachment, and perhaps Minna herself was never fully aware of it. These sonnets chart both sides of a complicated relationship between an older man and a younger woman—an earlier form of the dialogue between Suleika and Hatem in the West-östlicher Divan. The imaginary parting depicted here is part of an exchange of sonnets that gradually enrichens and spiritualizes a friendship that has begun passionately. This is a scenario that could not possibly be reflected in a single song from the sequence chosen for musical setting. Goethe’s very special purpose in writing these sonnets was to justify a somewhat inappropriate attachment, more dream than reality in all likelihood, while preserving his own self-respect. When read out of this context, however, the poem, inevitably suggests the time-honoured scenario of a woman who is scarcely able to come to terms with the fact that she has been abandoned by someone who no longer loves her.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2011