This poem (again from Kapper’s
Die Gesänge der Serben, and there entitled ‘Fluch ihm, Mutter, ich auch will ihm fluchen’) has a complicated scenario. The mother clearly hates the man who has seduced her daughter Mara and taken her virginity—thus all the references to the bleaching of linen with its tell-tale blood-stains. As the mother had always suspected (and the girl had not) this Serbian Lothario, Jawo by name (although Kapper calls him, perhaps more authentically, Jowo) is a bad piece of work—or at the very least he has been unfaithful. The mother curses him roundly, and so does the daughter. But there is a major difference: the girl still loves Jawo with uncontrollable passion and with the single-mindedness of the dangerously jealous she still needs to possess him, dead or alive. Yes, he deserves to die a horrible death (as a suicide, in prison, drowned) but she still needs him and longs for him, and will have him back on any terms, even if only as a corpse. Each of these outcomes whereby Jawo is cursed to a miserable end is subverted mid-stream, and mid-strophe, into equally violent erotic imagery. Love and hate are felt simultaneously and Brahms embraces the musical challenges of all this with considerable relish. It is a big song on a large emotional canvas. A bar of opening triplets, an octave apart between the hands, and already seething in intensity, announces both the folksong aspect of the coming music, and its dark, Eastern-European provenance. The vocal line in Brahms’s best tradition of newly minted folk music is accompanied by broadly strummed chords—all in all a grimly earnest Serbian mazurka, rather more heavy-handed than the Chopinesque variety. The mother’s question is heard in the minor key, but with the daughter’s first reply (‘Nicht in’s Wasser, liebe Mutter’) the music moves into A major. With the vehemence of ‘Fluch’ ihm, Mutter’ the minor key re-establishes itself. The music now progresses via a stringendo to a new section with a change of key and time signatures (F sharp minor, 2/4) and a new tempo marking—Schnell und sehr lebhaft. Hungarian Rhapsodies have their contrasting slinky slow and madly fast sections—Lassú and Friss; what we hear now is a fast section (the French might have termed it a
galop) which has an almost Lisztian extravagance. In this thrice-repeated music, semiquavers rattle in mad oscillation and left-hand octaves chase these down the keyboard in swift pursuit. The vocal line takes on an almost operatic cast. Right-hand broken chords encompass, most unusually, a stretch of a tenth. The boy is envisaged hanging on a tree … and then, in a soaring moment of vocal expansion … hanging on her white neck. The same music has her imagining Jawo imprisoned … and imprisoned on her breast. The next verse casts him in chains … but chained in her arms. There is a short return to the slower music of the first section (Wenig langsamer) and this leads to the song’s final page and a return to the faster of the two tempi. We then realize that from the beginning of the faster section Brahms has envisaged this as water music, not the music of the stream where the women do the washing and bleaching of linen, but of the destructive storms and floods that regularly bring death and havoc to this benighted part of the world. Waves of arpeggiated sound, as powerful as any Brahms accompaniment, bring the body of the girl’s lover into her house, dead certainly, but once more hers alone. The postlude reflects this grisly and pyrrhic victory with triumphant glee. An alternative reading of the poem may have imagined the daughter deflecting her mother’s curses by pretending to partake in them and then defiantly expressing her love for Jawo before the curse is completed. But even if this were the case, the deeply engaged vehemence of Brahms’s music scarcely allows for such an interpretation.
from notes by Graham Johnson © 2011