I remember accompanying Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in this song and her husband, the great impresario and record producer Walter Legge (a Hugo Wolf fanatic who adopted some of that master’s antipathy to Brahms), remarking that he found it a positive relief to find in Blinde Kuh a song by ‘Holy Joe’ with real energy and humour. Without sharing Legge’s condescending attitude to a composer who was one of Wolf’s bugbears, one must admit that the light and fleeting texture of this song, as well as its merry energy and its ebullient ending, are hardly typical of the Brahmsian lieder style.

The Italian origin of the poem may have inclined Brahms to respond in carefree manner to this text from one of his beloved holiday destinations. In the Gedichte of Kopisch (1836) the title is one word, Blindekuh; a footnote names the Sicilian version of the game as ‘Mosca cieca’—Blind Fly. The composer’s desire to set this text almost certainly goes back to a real memory, an incident movingly described in the memoirs of Eugenie, the Schumanns’ youngest daughter. In the summer of 1858 in Göttingen (when Eugenie was six years old) a group of friends, including Brahms and the Schumann family, played a game of hide-and-seek. Eugenie never forgot that her mother was so excited that she stumbled and fell down as she ran from her hiding place. Judging by the fervent enthusiasm of this song, Brahms also remembered this incident in connection with a game for grown-ups that had many more undertones; his greatest desire at the time was almost certainly to run to help Clara and sweep her up in his arms—although of course he never actually did so. Accordingly, it is scarcely surprising that Eric Sams identifies several appearances of the Clara motif in this song.

In the lieder of Brahms we are accustomed to chords in the left hand that anchor the music and give it solidity. In Blinde Kuh there is no such ballast: instead there is a stream of semiquavers in both hands that gives the music an ungrounded contrapuntal texture. What better musical solution could there be to depict someone feeling their way ‘in the dark’ while blindfolded in a game of blind man’s buff? Under the fingers this song feels like certain passages of Bach, a Brahmsian two-part Invention perhaps. The piano writing’s vitality has something of the Bachian sewing machine about it, ideal to depict weaving movement, the blindfold-wearer on one hand (one of the accompanist’s hands, that is) and on the other those trying to avoid collision with the person designated as ‘it’. Semiquavers in both staves sometimes almost overlap and touch, but each one just manages to preserve its own independent path. Also rather Bach-like is the quasi-Baroque vocal four-bar melisma at the end of the musically identical first and second strophes: the verb ‘verschmachten’ (‘to languish’) is well suited to this treatment, and the words ‘Ich irr im Kreis umher!’ equally justify the identical playful elongation of the noun ‘Kreis’ with the voice seeming to run around in circles.

The third verse of the poem begins by hammering home a change into the tonic major (G minor to G major in the original key). Added to this, an animato ups the ante in terms of speed and tension. This last verse seems to be something of a denouement, as if the mask has finally slipped from the player’s face, and what has seemed a light-hearted game becomes unabashed pursuit. The concluding ‘Come out here!’ (‘Komm herzu’ repeated four times, once without the ‘Komm’) is increasingly determined and confident, as if the singer is assured of victory and claiming the prize that is his at last. In the setting of these words, the repeated plagal cadences, normally associated with ‘Amen’ (subdominant to tonic), seem to acknowledge a long-awaited blessing, as if saying ‘At last! There she is! The lord be praised!’ The final ‘Herzu’ is set to an ascending minor seventh (unique in this composer’s songs) but Blinde Kuh has been entirely untypical of Brahms from start to finish, not least in the final pianistic flourish that sweeps up the stave to bring the song to a gripping conclusion.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2018

This charming song is graced with an ingenious and remarkable accompaniment. I can think of no other lied where, apart from the last page, almost every note (a couple of dotted minims and some mezzo staccato groupings excepted) is marked staccato in both hands. Very seldom has water music been more delicate and more elegant, a shower rather than a torrential downpour. Raindrops are also a metaphor here for a shower of kisses. The difference between the left-hand staccato in crotchets, and the right-hand notes in quavers, can be discussed as a finer point of pianism—presumably the bass-clef crotchets have slightly more weight: slightly longer lasting, thus signifying larger drops of rain (or longer-lasting kisses) in comparison to the quaver droplets that bounce off them in the treble stave.

The mood is one of delicious intimacy. It seems that the weather has made it impossible for the couple to venture outdoors, or perhaps they have taken refuge in a summer house or gazebo after having been surprised by a change in the weather. (There is something almost perfect and relaxed in this entirely major-key music—despite its incessant Bewegung—that indicates that this is music for an idyllic summer day.) Discretion is necessary, and we gather from the tone of the poem that the girl is the dominant personality, the singer her hopelessly infatuated cavalier servente. She feels fairly certain that as long as the rain lasts, she can permit her besotted paramour to kiss and caress her in this unexpected, and temporary, period of privacy. As soon as the skies clear he fears that she will cancel his carte blanche and bring this interlude of kisses to an end. May the rain last for ever he says! Nothing in the touch employed in playing this song indicates any activity more strenuous or forbidden than a kiss—each osculation as feather-light as a rain drop. This is not to say that we are left unaware of the singer’s more passionate needs.

The sensuality of the melismas on words like ‘Regengüsse’—and twice on ‘entlassen’—betokens twinges of longing; melismas are also used to augment the profusion of kisses (on ‘Mehren’ and ‘mehr’) and elongate time (on ‘immer’). If the shower turns into a storm the lover believes he will be really in with a chance. In the last line of the poem he longs for raindrops that are denser (‘Tropfen, tropfet immer dichter!’). The response of Brahms for the closing six or seven bars of the song is to allow the graceful right-hand figurations to be played more legato, as if the staccato raindrops were now, almost imperceptibly, becoming heavier with water and more substantial. Two bars of forte postlude smilingly bring the curtain down on the scene, the listener’s permission to spy on the proceedings summarily cancelled.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2018

Composed by the autumn of 1871, published in December 1871. The song’s autograph is in the Pierpont Morgan Music Library, New York.
A major (original key), 2/4 Grazioso

August Kopisch was a fascinating character: an energetic jack of all literary trades, just talented enough to stand on the fringes of everything, yet master of nothing. He numbered several members of the Schubert circle among his Italian-based friends. He was a connoisseur of Neapolitan life (his famous account of the Blue Grotto of Capri encouraged tourists worldwide) and he was handsome and charming enough to have made August von Platen suffer pangs of unreciprocated infatuation in 1827. Kopisch was fortunately long dead by the time his translation from the Italian of this Sicilian lyric was improved, for the song’s second edition, by Paul Heyse at Brahms’s own request. Blinde Kuh, one of the other two Kopisch settings of Op 58, is one of the composer’s liveliest songs and a far more skilful translation of the Italian.

The marking ‘Grazioso’ is ideal for the music’s winsome mood. Quavers drooping across the bar line denote a snubbed suitor’s plaintive sighing in the pianist’s right hand, while teasingly pliant semiquaver triplets descend the stave in the left. The repetition of the second line of each couplet adds to the sense of a game of lovers: a suitor cajoling someone coy who might relish being addressed as a wild tigress—exaggeratedly exotic imagery not to be taken too seriously. The music for the fifth and sixth couplets takes a new direction with the clever insertion of two 3/4 bars suggesting a superfluity of emotion. As tension mounts, ‘Holdsel’ge Kleine’ is the only second line of a couplet not to be repeated, the song hurrying forward in ardent haste on its way to a seemingly precipitous conclusion. But this is to reckon without the typical Brahms last-minute undercut: ‘Du lachst zu meinem bittern Grämen’ is repeated together with a ritardando (and a very rare ad libitum) to mark and underline the pathos. In the muted postlude the note-values are doubled, the opportunistic sighs of the opening are now real sighs, and the key is now minor rather than major, the wind entirely taken out of the lover’s sails.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2020

A racy song for a racy text, and what a delight it is to find Brahms in this mood! The piano’s right-hand triplets move up and down the keyboard glistening and sparkling, as if influenced perhaps by a Chopin étude, the famous one in G flat Op 10 No 5. These triplets transfer to the left hand in ambidextrous manner and hunting-horn thirds and sixths, symbolizing the chase, and also alternate between the hands. The lady (‘die Liebe’) is here to be conquered and the flower imagery is frank in sexual terms—a line about the ‘opening up of sweet laps’ (‘Da öffnen ihren süßen Schoß’) mischievously tells us whose sweet laps (‘Violen’ or violets) only in the poem’s next line, and almost as an afterthought. For a second of risqué speculation we are allowed to believe this sentence might have human, rather than floral, relevance. But as suggestive as this may be, there is nothing crude or vulgar about the music. The musical flow, unlike many a Brahms song that can be broken down into sections and sub-sections, seems to unfold in a single, graceful arch. The final cadence is a marvellous and elaborate construction: we fail to return to the home key on the first ‘Das lose’ (a reference to the wanton beloved). The words ‘Das lose’ are repeated and on the second syllable the singer holds onto a semibreve tied to a minim high on the stave while the pianist’s right hand ascends the keyboard across three-octaves in search of the tonic chord. This is the most extended and gently insinuating plagal cadence imaginable—with the left hand, now in triplets, rumbling and palpitating within the subdominant harmony. This delightfully engineered homecoming leaves the final resolution into the root position of the tonic to the pianist—three bars after the singer has finished, and not until the very last chord of the piece. Only at this moment does the music slip into F sharp major (E major in the mezzo transposition) with a beatific smile: the long-desired return to somewhere warm and familiar, comfortable and safe.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2010

This is one of Brahms’s lesser-known songs, and he permits himself, as is quite often the case in the ‘diary’ of his lieder, a quasi-autobiographical entry reflecting the intensity of his own solitary unhappiness. While assembling his Op 58 songs, he might also have delighted in the mischievous juxtaposition of such a lugubrious lament with the preceding song, the light-hearted and life-affirming O komme, holde Sommernacht (see Volume 1 of this series). The translation of ‘Schwermut’ as ‘Melancholy’ seems unequal to the depth of pessimism on display here, and depth is a key word with so much of the piano-writing placed in the sonorous regions of the bass clef. The key is E flat minor, rich in gloomy resonances; it was with this tonality that Brahms embarked on his song-composing career with Liebestreu, Op 3 No 1. The tessitura makes this an ideal song for the bass voice. The stately Bewegung is that of a funeral cortège. The aim here is clearly to recreate the atmosphere of a graveside chorale while harmonic archaisms hint at time-travel in the direction of non-specific Gothic grandeur. On the song’s first page there is very little sign of movement—the accompaniment hugs the vocal line with static dignity. For the setting of the poem’s final line, eight bars of music, the accompaniment quickens into left-hand quavers and the major key is tentatively broached (and unequivocally voiced in the song’s concluding bars and postlude). In this way death is revealed, despite its finality, as a merciful releaser (this is a theme that will be encountered a number of times on this disc). There are touches of quirky prosody in this setting (the word ‘in’, for example, twice tied across the bar-line) of a kind that moved the composer’s critics to scorn, and little troubled his admirers.

The composer’s sympathy with Karl Candidus, an obscure Alsatian poet (there are seven solo-song settings of which this is the first) goes back, perhaps, to Robert Schumann’s fleeting connection with his poetry. Candidus was a German-speaking Alsatian patriot. Brahms, admirer of Bismarck, was also a patriot: he firmly believed the Rhineland was German territory, rather than French, and he might well have been more inclined to champion the poems of Candidus at a time when Germany was at war with France over exactly this contentious issue.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2012

Composed by the autumn of 1871, published in December 1871. The song’s autograph is in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.
D minor (original key), 3/4 Gehend

Friedrich Hebbel was regarded as a literary giant by his contemporaries. Schumann revered him and based a great deal of his only opera Genoveva on Hebbel’s play of the same name. In his final deteriorating years, Schumann also composed Hebbel melodramas, one of which describes the brutal murder of a child. When it came to almost revelling in the darkest sides of human misfortune, this playwright was the equal of Thomas Hardy whose Jude the Obscure so shocked the Victorians, and Hebbel was far more sexually explicit. Brahms took Hebbel’s work very seriously, but to say the two men were friends would be an exaggeration; they knew of each other’s huge reputations and kept their distance. Few of the poet’s long and complex poems were suitable for setting, and he was anyway not very interested in music.

Brahms must have been pleased to find a Hebbel text concise enough for a song. The original title of In der Gasse was Spuk. The obvious link (in terms of someone walking past the house of his beloved at night) is with the Schubert-Heine Der Doppelgänger, but in that case it is the impending demise of the doomed narrator (a dead certainty after seeing his own ghostly double) that provides the horror. In this Hebbel poem the beloved has perished, although this is not clear from the text alone. Natasha Loges points out that the song’s musical reference points seem related to Winterreise: the introduction in octaves between the hands of Die Wetterfahne (a song which also looks back to the lover’s abode) and the ominous succession of falling intervals in Irrlicht.

The song begins in a terse folk-song style and progresses to something much more complex. After twelve bars the clarity of moonlight unveils things barren and horrible reflected by dark mutterings—obsessively drooping intervals—from the pianist, with both hands in the bass clef. What is the point of illuminating this nullity, this black hole, the poet asks, when there is so much else to occupy the moon’s attention? The idea of eerie and ghostly happenings is cleverly suggested by unusual left-hand patterns and figurations twisting and turning beneath the surface. It is as if the moonlight has burnt through a protective layer of memory and revealed the writhings of a snake pit. But even this revelation is an illusion; in reality there is nothing to be seen and this is indeed a ‘Stätte des Nichts’—a place of nothingness. Accordingly, the music itself retreats with gradual etiolation and bars of silence, and a return to the empty octaves between the hands of the opening. In this case, and most unusually, perhaps evoking the peremptory fall of a curtain in a Hebbel play at a climactic moment, the composer opts for the drama of a forte ending.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2020

A play by Friedrich Hebbel was the inspiration behind Schumann’s only opera, Genoveva, as well as the Ballade vom Haideknaben, for reciter and piano. This late melodrama, featuring the rape and murder of a child, is a signpost to the poet’s determination to treat dark subjects with unflinching and sometimes brutal realism. For this daring and persistence, and his scorn of bourgeois proprieties, Hebbel was considered an essential modern artist and both the Schumanns and Brahms (who knew the writer from the beginning of his career) seem to have been honoured to visit him. Hebbel happened to share with Brahms the unusual twinned biographical trajectories of childhood poverty in Hamburg leading to fame and fortune in Vienna; he was just as celebrated in Austria as Brahms—indeed he was regarded as a Titan of the Burgtheater with long runs of plays like Agnes Bernauer, Maria Magdalena and Judith. Brahms saw productions of Hebbel in the theatre on many occasions, including his Nibelung trilogy of 1863 which Wagner tetchily regarded as a rival to his operas on the same subject.

There are two Brahms songs and one vocal quartet to Hebbel texts, hardly indicative of a passion for the poetry on the composer’s part. The truth is that Hebbel was more admired and respected than loved, and his work was regarded as heavy going. Brahms was given to dark thoughts and pessimism, but it had to be a very dark and pessimistic day in his own life for his mood to chime with Hebbel’s. Vorüber seems to have been composed on just such a day. It is a song that one never hears in recital, but it is a potent and worthwhile discovery for all singers and pianists who work on it.

The marking ‘Sehr langsam’ has to be observed faithfully; the performers must yield to the stillness of the opening picture and resist the temptation to move the music on, even though a dotted minim on an inessential word like ‘dem’ (in bar 7) was the kind of thing that drove Hugo Wolf to distraction (sloppy prosody in his eyes) when hearing songs by Brahms. The key of F major and the hypnotic steadiness of the left-hand quavers bring to mind another song, Feldeinsamkeit, where the protagonist lies down in similar fashion on the ground and also contemplates death. Brahms’s ravishing and high-flown musical embroidery for the aria of the nightingale is unusually florid for a song of this kind, and the repetition of ‘der währte’ is appropriate for the meaning of the words.

The poem’s second verse, the bitter confession of a death wish, has infinite peace; and then dreams yield to the horrors of reality, and the music follows suit. There is no official change of tempo, but throbbing triplets and uneasy syncopations gradually screw the tension towards the almost unbearable climax. The song’s final seven bars depicting the glowing of a corpse’s ashes (the poet’s own, and presumably also the composer’s) are as violently bitter and showy as might suit the denouement of a grisly verismo drama in the theatre. This passage seems to be an acknowledgement of the fact that Hebbel was a great man of the stage. That Brahms imagines death to be a sweeter option than life is shown by the fact that, in a most unsettling way, the song ends gently in the major key—the addition of a note of solace certainly not envisaged by the unbending poet.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2019

Like the much earlier Spanisches Lied, Op 6 No 1, this song has Brahms in Mediterranean mode, with touches of harmonic colour and a gentle rhythmic swing (a mournful bolero) that evoke a discreetly Spanish style. Spain is not mentioned as such, but we know we are somewhere in the warm south with mention of a vine-covered trellis, a balcony and cypresses. In the poem’s fourth verse we hear the name Dolores (chosen no doubt to rhyme with ‘Ohres’) and the Iberian inspiration of the poem comes into focus. Besides, Adolf von Schack is far more likely to have written about Spain than Italy as he was an expert on Spanish history at the time of the Moors. A north German who ended up a Bavarian grandee by adoption, Schack was also a great collector of paintings (one can still visit the Schack-Galerie in Munich). He is a useful, rather than a great, poet (a better-known Schack serenade than this one is the famous Ständchen of Richard Strauss) but the three Brahms settings of his poems (Abenddämmerung, Op 49 No 5, and Herbstgefühl, Op 48 No 7, are the other titles) are all substantial and special songs.

This serenader plays on a zither according to the poet—‘Zither’ conveniently rhymes with the word ‘Gitter’ (the latticed window that screens the demure beloved, also appearing, featuring another Dolores, in William Walton’s song to Edith Sitwell’s Through gilded trellises). The zither is hardly a portable serenading instrument, but fortunately in this case, and also in Schumann’s Der Hidalgo to a poem of Geibel (who also rhymes ‘Zither’ with ‘Gitter’), the word can encompass, with poetic license, a number of stringed instruments; it may be translated, at a pinch, as lyre or lute. The gently staccato accompaniment suggests that Brahms had the strumming of a guitar in mind, as well as the sound of fountains plashing gently into the marble basins mentioned in the poem’s first verse. (Unlike the previous song on this album, the falling water—‘das Wasser niedertropfend’—does not emanate from the skies.) The serenader’s heart palpitates with longing, and this too falls within the illustrative remit of this kind of accompaniment. The choice of minor key betokens a suit without much hope of success.

Broadly speaking, Brahms casts this song as a rondo, A-B-A-C-A, where the length of the each section is different, and where melodic lines are always slightly altered better to suit the words. The A section is the initial serenade, the first fourteen bars of the song, the poem’s first verse. The B section is the second verse where the music passes through a number of different keys before reaching the dominant where the singer’s feelings are reflected in a more active vocal line supported by swathes of left-hand semiquavers. For verse three we hear what seems to be a return of the A section (although subtly varied). For the C section, 6/8 expands into a sensual 9/8 with euphonious thirds and sixths in the pianist’s right hand, intervals symbolic of the dearly desired intertwining of hearts and limbs. There is nothing quite like this music in all of Brahms, three verses of poetry and twenty-six bars of music addressed to the lovely Dolores that seem fashioned from the ghost of an Italian, rather than Spanish, popular song, but too serious to be intended as a parody. We also feel we are being allowed a forbidden glimpse of Brahms’ own delighted response to the girls of the south. At this point Brahms cuts the fifth and sixth verses of Schack’s nine-strophe poem. The poem’s seventh verse (now the song’s fifth) is altered by the composer with a tiny, but meaningful change: at ‘O dem Freund nur eine Stunde’, ‘nur’ (only) replaces the poet’s ‘noch’ (once more) which implied that he had already sampled Dolores’ delights. Brahms identifies more closely with a protagonist who has never experienced reciprocation: at ‘Freund’ and ‘Stunde’ piquant and untypical harmonic clashes in the accompaniment underline the singer’s, as well as the composer’s, longing. The return to 6/8 and the lilting serenading music of section A of this rondo (verse six of the poem as set to music) is extended by reminiscences of the B section—this on account of Schack’s near repeat of the second verse of his poem for the poem’s (and the song’s) conclusion.

A masterly coda, including six final bars for the piano alone, brings this remarkable song to a close. It was criticized by Max Friedländer for not being Spanish enough—and it is true that one would be surprised to find it today in a programme devoted to Spain—but the erotic middle section is unique, as sensual, and self-revealing, a passage as we might ever expect to find in the lieder of Brahms.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2018