Ferrand’s life was cut tragically short and Brahms may have been aware of this, even known some of the background, when he composed the song. He could have found the poem in a volume of verse published by Ferrand in 1834 or perhaps in the second edition (1835) which is in the library of Robert Schumann, who sketched, but never published, a small song (Ein Gedanke) to words by Ferrand. From this volume Schumann only set this one poem; similarly Treue Liebe is one of a handful of songs by poets whom Brahms also set only once.

The attraction to the genre of Mädchenlieder (songs for maidens, often with their mothers in tow) is another Brahms thumbprint evident from early on. Treue Liebe is printed in the earlier pages of the first Peters volume of songs—a sign that it was popular once, certainly more popular than now. It was a mainstay, for example, of the recital repertoire of the great dramatic soprano Kirsten Flagstad. The subject matter of death at sea, and the unendurable bereavement of sailors’ wives and girlfriends, was perhaps a subject about which Brahms knew something at close quarters, having grown up in the less salubrious quarters of the great maritime city of Hamburg. It also seems clear that the composer found intensely moving the story of an utterly faithful woman, prepared to kill herself rather than live alone. The thought that someone might one day love him enough to jump through self-sacrificial hoops (cf. the famous Von ewiger Liebe), or even die for him, was clearly the kind of fantasy that sustained Brahms’s lonely bachelordom, and from early on. In the midst of his unreciprocated fixations with female lodestars, numerous women longing to give him that kind of devotion in real life were either ignored or dismissed.

The song, despite its contained opening bars and pianissimo dynamics, is in the grand manner. Accompanying semiquavers purling between the hands are marvellously descriptive of waves lapping at the seashore. In the course of the song these develop into more sweeping breakers—but never violent enough to drown the voice. The first two verses of the poem are set to the same music with repeat marks—a sign that Brahms already regarded it as his responsibility to honour the North German tradition of strophic song brought to its apotheosis by Schubert. In a marrying of genres, another important influence is the balladry of Carl Loewe. In the accompaniment to the third verse there are sea-inspired bravura outbursts for a couple of bars—descending semiquavers phrased in duplets that foretell, albeit in miniature, some of the passagework in Brahms’s first piano concerto. Schumann, not yet an inmate of the asylum, could never have written anything like this dramatized folk song with links to the sad lives of the working class—these were the people with whom Brahms grew up. In this narrative with a touch of Grand Guignol, the composer’s grasp and mastery of atmosphere are complete. The music is heart-on-sleeve yet passionately sincere, expansive in mood yet pithy and compact in terms of actual length: an astonishingly mature achievement for someone not yet twenty years old.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2019

In the modern world where we can be constantly in touch with each other, no matter how far separated across the globe, we should spare a compassionate thought for those many lovers since the time of Ulysses and Penelope who have been separated, sometimes for many years, at a time when there was no technology, nor even any kind of postal service. The traveller’s longed-for reappearance (if it ever happened) was a matter of daily hope and disappointment, also occasionally (as in Parole) overwhelmingly joyous surprise. In the recital repertoire the most famous example of the sadder scenario is Au pays où se fait la guerre. As in this famous Duparc mélodie, the woman in this Brahms song hears sounds that she initially mistakes for signs of her lover’s return.

In Parole, a song seldom performed, landscapes of castles and forests, essential ingredients of Eichendorff’s magic, suggest ancient times, but not before the invention of gunpowder. When she hears a rifle (or a musket) going off she will recognize this as the ‘password’ for her lover’s return. That such a sound should be audible from afar betokens both the quiet and seclusion of her isolated domain, and the idyllic lack of the extraneous noise of modern life.

The introduction (in a major key distant from the song’s minor tonality) strongly recalls the opening of the famous Mendelssohn setting Gruss, but with the added element of a horn call; as the absent lover is a hunter, the depiction of horn music (as in the left-hand chords accompanying the middle two verses, also in the major) is entirely appropriate. The composer declines, however, to mirror the words ‘ein Schuß’ with anything explosive in either voice or piano, although the pianist can choose to vary the dynamic somewhat. These two inner verses are in the major key, but the final strophe reverts to the minor and the music of the first verse. It is here that the semiquaver accompaniment, flowing downwards across both staves, depicts springs gushing forth from cliffs, as well as a twittering chorus of birdsong. This shift to the home key in the minor sets up a move into the tonic major via a number of ingenious modulations, and (unusually for Brahms) a triumphant and almost operatic vocal peroration. This is one of the few love stories in his lieder that seem to lead to a happy conclusion, although the postlude’s unexpected diminuendo to a concluding piano chord reminds us that triumph can be undermined at any time, and in a very Brahmsian way, by unexpected disappointment.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2019

This song is a glorious exercise in poetic and musical minimalism where the loneliness and bleakness of the poem (together with its implied personal tragedy) are perfectly reflected in a musical setting that seems equally simple and bleak on the page. A slowly grinding tension is provided by the accompaniment’s pervading off-the-beat syncopated rhythms, signifying the turning of an inexorable spinning wheel perhaps, but also a displacement of orientation that makes even the house (described as being ‘high over silent heights’) seem perilously balanced, as if about to slide into an abyss at any time. (In Eichendorff’s novel Ahnung und Gegenwart this is what happens to it as part of a grisly denouement). The woman, clearly abandoned, could be young and beautiful, but she could also be as old and withered as Miss Havisham, her great expectations having come to nothing, spinning her trousseau and caught in the webs of time. Loneliness, desolation, perhaps even madness (listen to those ominous thick chords in the bass in the song’s first page) are all possible but, as in the best works of this kind, and of which Eichendorff is a master, impressions are fragmented, nothing can be pinned down. That something terrible and dramatic is happening, or has happened, is clear in the forte climax towards the end of the song on the words ‘Zu ihrem Hochzeitskleid’ (‘for her wedding dress’). The last ten bars are fixed on a pedal note that tolls the knell of hope although, almost perversely, Brahms gives a glimmer of a reprieve by choosing to end the postlude in the major key.

If this lied could be linked to any other in the repertoire, it would a song from Schumann’s Liederkreis, Op 39: Auf einer Burg. That Eichendorff masterpiece, with its high uninhabited castle, its stone knight, and the weeping bride on the Rhine, is said by many to encapsulate German romanticism. Brahms’s Anklänge offers an equally eloquent minimalism that also mirrors, though far less famously, the economy and austerity of Eichendorff, and the elusive darkness at the heart of his imaginings.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2019

There are some who attempt to see hidden cycles in every opus number of Brahms, as well as imagining convoluted connections between songs that are otherwise not related. In my opinion this is most often not the composer’s deliberate intention, but Brahms’s placing of this Volkslied (in E minor) to follow the A minor of Anklänge in his Op 7 is surely no coincidence, indeed it seems a conscious expansion (and possible clarification) of the mystery of the Eichendorff song. In Anklänge the girl who spins her trousseau in vain is given no voice, but here she could be imagined to be singing of her loneliness and unhappiness while observing the swallows, birds that could easily have been visible outside the windows of that house high in the mountainous forest. One might even argue that the oscillating quavers in the accompaniment to Volkslied, on one level clearly suggesting the wing-beats of the birds, also suggest the movement of a spinning wheel more accurately than anything in Anklänge.

We are reminded that most of the creative impulses of Johannes Brahms were formed at an early age; the master who was devoted enough to the subject of German folk song to make forty-nine settings towards the end of his life, is here revealed as taking a profound and very mature interest in folk-song style at the tender age of nineteen.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2019

Without missing a beat in the construction of this opus, the composer moves a continuing narrative of abandonment from the treetops of Eichendorff to street-level, from blameless bride to repentant sinner (for there must be some reason that this girl is a pariah), from the exalted realms of high German to the purlieus of dialect. Eric Sams writes: ‘This country lass is a Tess of the d’Urbervilles, betrayed and deserted, and hence dear to Brahms.’ It should be noted that the undocumented friendships, of which we know nothing, in the composer’s life were with the fallen women who greeted him on his walks in the Prater. He had been made to work as a child in Hamburg playing the piano in the parlours of the brothels of St Pauli. It is reasonable to suppose that in feeling at home with such women (in later life he was no stranger to their company) he felt compassion in hearing the stories some of them must have told him about their pathways to ruin.

This is music that conveys the austerity of the church, or at least a life where the rules of the church are rigorously applied; it is of such daring economy and bareness that it conveys the hopelessness of an outsider, the lack of harmonic variety reinforcing the notion of being trapped. Everything here underlines the fact that options for returning from the status of outcast are severely limited, and that suicide may be the only choice. Of course, this is merely one way of reading a poem that is elusive and clothed in typical folk-song obfuscation: ‘die Trauernde’ could also be anyone ugly, depressive, abused, abandoned, but in any case as fundamentally unloved (and unlovable) as Brahms thought himself to be. The unexpected eloquence of this tiny song stems from consanguinity of feeling.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2019

This text, although never set by him, would have been well known to Schubert as the last of Conradin Kreutzer’s Wanderlieder, Op 34 (1811), a celebrated Uhland cycle by a song-composing rival that also included a song entitled Winterreise. Like Treue Liebe, this song printed in Edition Peters Volume 1 must have been once a great deal more popular than it is now. It is also the first to be composed on this album (the composer was just eighteen years old) and it allows itself a kind of rampant optimism that becomes exceedingly rare in the later Brahms. Needing an upbeat conclusion for his Op 7, the twenty-one-year-old composer rummaged in his files and came up with this mini-explosion from the past (at that age, three years ago seems a lifetime).

The tempo is swift, and the mood is valiantly rhetorical, particularly in the quasi-virtuosic five-bar introduction and the storming postlude. Between these bookends the literal lack of breathing space for the singer suggests that Brahms was still more at home with piano or chamber music than the lied. There is an impressive independence of part-writing (an eloquent left hand with a melodic life of its own), but we have scarcely time to notice such a felicity. This is one of those songs that must be carefully placed in a recital: it should be sung between two longer songs that relate to it in terms of poem and key. In the wrong position this can seem more of a sudden invasion than a return home, a musical firecracker almost comical in its intensity simply because it is too short and over too soon.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2019