There was no costly antiquarian copy of Paul Fleming’s Geistliche und weltliche Poemata (1660) in Brahms’s library. Bearing in mind that the composer’s discovery of Fleming (sometimes spelt Flemming), Saxon contemporary of John Milton, goes back to his Geistliche Chor, Op 30 (the period when he was accompanying the baritone Stockhausen in Die schöne Müllerin), it seems possible that his source was the small Fleming anthology put together in 1822 by Schubert’s poet Wilhelm Müller. Brahms sets only the first two verses of this poem, restless music in almost ceaseless quavers, but these are enough to encapsulate a state of mind, unconditional worship of unavailable women, with which the composer seems to have been ever familiar. With this poem, which begins in mid-speech, as if in a play, Brahms may be aiming to suggest a cavalier’s gallantry, seventeenth-century style. It is perhaps for this reason that this relentlessly flowing song fails to capture the anguish of the text. This unabashed lover is, in musical terms, either an inveterate optimist, or he finds hopeless courtship a bracing activity, despite rejection and wasted time. As Tennyson says, ‘’Tis better to have loved and lost, / Than never to have loved at all’. Towards the end of the second verse there is a dramatic setting of ‘Schmerzen’ low in the voice—a musical groan. But recovery is quick, and the statement that the Lady lacks a heart seems a rhetorical device rather than a statement truly meant. How different this song is from the genuinely lovelorn compositions of Op 32.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2015

The song is over in a good-natured trice: A minor followed by A major, the interlude and postlude both remarkable for their gleeful escapades, contrary-motion leaps between the hands. The metaphorical lizard who could flourish in a fire, as described in Pliny’s Historia Naturalis, gave its name to many families of real-life newts, some of them poison-secreting, who were also wrongly credited with being impervious to flame. The metaphor is here transferred to someone who is unburned by passion. Elisabet von Herzogenberg found Lemcke’s salamander, ‘a cool devil’, somehow repulsive without knowing why. She had also disapproved highly of the same poet’s Willst du, dass ich geh? where it was difficult for her to find her favourite composer fronting a text where a flagrant seducer bends the truth and crows with triumphant glee. If she expected Brahms to be self-referential in his lieder, what connection could there possibly be between the soulful master she knew so well (and who was clearly devoted to her) and these reptilian Lemcke characters, cold-hearted and callous? It may be that in this song we are hearing a different kind of Brahmsian confessional. We all know how deeply the composer felt for his Clara, and Agathe and Elisabet, not to mention Julie Schumann, various singers and so on, and how much he suffered thereby. It would be wrong, however, to imagine him as being repressed and non-sexual. He went on bachelor’s holidays to Italy and was known to the professional ladies of the Prater—each one possibly an example of a ‘böses Mädchen’. In this milieu Brahms almost certainly enjoyed a devil-may-care existence, enjoying the fires of physical passion, revelling in them indeed, without incurring emotional twinges and regrets. (The songs that own up to this fact he hid from Clara Schumann, the Zigeunerlieder, Op 103.) Gypsy temptresses and Delilahs were all very well, but he would never have fallen in love with someone who had acquiesced to his advances. If Brahms was weighed down by his ongoing reverence for his Madonnas, he could be a salamander when women were merely attractive to him rather than ineffably dear (unless, perhaps, we mean by ‘dear’, expensive).

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2015

This is the only text by Otto Gruppe set by Brahms (it is the fifth in a long sequence of poems entitled Das Mädchen spricht) and its newly wed happiness provides a welcome foil in the context of a set of Mädchenlieder that seems to contain a preponderance of tormented songs. Birdsong is always of interest to the great Lieder composers, and Brahms is no exception. This particular song is tailored to swallows and their rambling warble of trills and twitters (Schumann wrote a duet in his children’s album about these birds—Die Schwalben Op 79 No 20). The piano music of the opening, as joyfully hectic as a dawn chorus, glides downward in the most enchanting manner and settles on a tree to begin its conversation. The musical figurations combined here for the accompaniment (quaver + two semiquavers in the right hand and dotted quaver + single semiquaver in the left, or vice-versa) form as perfect a depiction of the unpredictable, jerky movement of birds, as they flit from branch to branch, as has ever been achieved in music. Indeed, the bar of piano music after ‘Sag, was zwitschert ihr’ sounds almost uncannily like the twittering of swallows in the right pair of hands. The vocal line, far better suited to a soprano than a lower female voice (the song’s most celebrated interpreter was Elisabeth Schumann), requires similar vocal agility to that required of the pianist. Brahms’s rather strait-laced friend Elisabeth von Herzogenberg heartily disliked the colloquialism of Gruppe’s line ‘Ist’s dein alter Mann’, words which she perhaps found ugly in themselves, but which also rather salaciously joke about the promiscuous life of birds and ‘last year’s mate’. There is indeed an aspect of the song (‘pillow-talk’ as Sams described it) which is somewhat risqué. But Brahms, always fascinated by the confidences exchanged between mothers and daughters, was clearly enchanted by the thought of two girls from different species, one in the air and one on dry land, comparing notes regarding their recently initiated domestic bliss. Listeners ever since have been similarly delighted.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2011

In Das Mädchen (1884) Brahms sets a Serbian poem, translated by Siegfried Kapper (1820-79). Musical interest is sustained by alternating bars of 3 beats and 4 beats, suggesting the characteristic seven-beat metres of Serbian folksong; by deriving everything from continuous development of the simple opening idea; and by the journey from the minor key first part to the bright major glow of the remainder.

from notes by Derek Watson © 2015

This can be a far more powerful song in performance than its two-page simplicity might suggest. Fischer-Dieskau used to end an all-Brahms recital programme with this little piece and it worked wonderfully as a kind of signing off, in a suitably enigmatic but rather blunt manner, from the entire world of this composer’s pain and loss. The folksong aspect of the music has a type of faux simplicity that masterfully mirrors the poem’s understatement and compressed emotion. The message of the poem in its two short strophes of three lines may be reduced to two words—‘Now’ and ‘Then’. The May catkins, extraordinary flowerings that resemble balls of cat-fur, have been broken off a branch to adorn the singer’s hat as a badge of spring. This is the ‘Now’ of the story, if such a terse little poem may be considered a story at all. All is well and good in this innocuous narration; the slightly doleful, but hardly tragic, melancholy that is to be heard in the following piano interlude will soon be explained.

In the second verse the May catkins have clearly greeted a much earlier spring. This distancing into the past of ‘Then’ is unmistakably accomplished by a flattening of the harmony on the words ‘erster Gruß’, now elongated as if stretching back in time and evoking a powerful nostalgia quite out of proportion to the simplicity of the musical means. The addition of ‘Einst’ (‘Once’) and the change of the present tense ‘breche’ to the past tense ‘brach’ are unexpectedly heartbreaking, as is the retention of the major key. This music may be tinged with a trace of harmonic regret, but any temptation to slide into the minor tonality of self-pity is resisted. The song is sung by a stoic who may still choose to pin a May catkin on his hat, but who has far too much dignity to wear his heart on his sleeve. A whole story of gallant love and painful loss, perhaps bereavement, is recounted in few words and sparse musical gestures, an economy of means entirely different from the emotional effulgence of many a Brahms song. We may very well detect here a musical portrait of the gruff North-German Liliencron, who detested sentimentality. The postlude is also remarkable: we may first imagine a drift into a mist of tearful reminiscence, and ruefully descending right-hand quavers seem to be leading into these regions for two bars. And then a planned surprise: two loud chords, almost brutally simplistic in their progress from dominant to tonic, and rolled for good measure, bring the proceedings to a peremptory close. ‘Such is life’, they seem to say, ‘and there is nothing much anyone can do about it.’

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2012

Composed sometime after the summer of 1886, published in October 1888. The song’s autograph is lost.
E flat major (original key), 3/4 Grazioso

This is one of those songs that could mean nothing, or everything, depending on both the performer and the listener. Detlev von Liliencron, delighted with Auf dem Kirchhofe, the other setting of his words by Brahms, and a justly famous song, thought that Maienkätzchen was worthless. In the same way, unbelievably, Schubert’s Die Taubenpost has been written off as a trivial afterthought. I first heard this Brahms song live at the very end of an all-Brahms evening by Fischer-Dieskau, and it was the most perfect signing-off—a recital epitaph that was pithy and heartbreaking. The poet plucks a May catkin and decorates his old hat with it—a Germanic custom that accords with the song’s Ländler rhythm. The hat’s wearer is also old, or so we may assume from the song’s presence in one of Brahms’s last song collections. Nevertheless, the musical mood is jaunty not decrepit, the song with a spring in its step. The second verse begins with the same folk-song-like nonchalance, but we travel back in time to an earlier May: the repeat of ‘erster Gruß’, introducing a D flat into the key of E flat major, powerfully evokes the most tender nostalgia telescoped into two sostenuto bars. We are transported to the ‘wunderschönen Monat Mai’ of nascent love. In those days he had someone to live for; in those days if he plucked a May catkin it was in order to put in someone else’s hat. This single gesture summarizes the difference between a shared and a solitary life. Brahms may have remembered his courtship of Agathe von Siebold that came to nothing. He retained his independence, but here we sense the consequent loneliness.

The postlude with its almost brutal forte cadence is, for me at least, one of the most eloquent in all lieder: ‘There, that is the story of your life; you have had your good times; love was wonderful but a thing of the past. Your life will soon be over … and that is all there is to it!’ For all its charm, I hear this setting as a disconcertingly cheery thoroughfare to the darkness and bitterness of the Vier ernste Gesänge.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2020

This is probably one of the most famous of all Brahms songs. The poem appears in Heyse’s Gedichte, the first of ten Mädchenlieder in that volume, but the composer would have long known the text from the Schumann setting, composed in January 1852. Both of these songs are in B minor. Is it only the strangest of coincidences that Schumann’s work is his Op 107 No 4, and that Brahms has numbered his setting of almost the same words Op 107 No 5? Eric Sams points out that the opening phrase of the vocal line contains the Clara motif, typically in B minor (C sharp, B, A sharp, B). If these pieces are bizarre numerical sequels, nothing much had happened in the thirty-six years between the composing of the two songs, not at least as far as the disciplined life of Clara was concerned. She had never remarried after the death of Robert Schumann, and had toiled ceaselessly at the piano, a spinning wheel of sorts, to provide for her large family, her hopes for loving companionship gradually extinguished within a life of iconic celebrity and maternal duty. Although equating village girl to great pianist may be too fanciful, it is unarguable that Brahms’s thoughts at this time frequently turned to the health and happiness of his beloved old friend Clara, and that his late piano pieces, miniatures playable by an ageing pianist, were conceived in part to give her pleasure. In terms of simplicity masking great compositional skill, this song is typical of the composer when he is pretending to be a simple folklorist. The spinning wheel motif in the piano, and the way the girl’s vocal line weaves in and out of it, sometimes following, sometimes diverging, provide the warp and woof of the song. This kind of interplay dates back to the threads of sadness woven by Schubert’s Gretchen. In the second strophe the smooth work routine is interrupted by hints of emotional turmoil. This precipitates falling tears in the mezzi staccati of the piano-writing: after the words ‘übers Gesicht’ four large teardrops come to life in an eloquent little interlude. The forte outburst on ‘Wofür soll ich spinnen?’ is heartrending and incorporates a hemiola whereby the loud piano chords cut the phrase into three sections of two notes each. Such longings, we realize, disrupt the rhythm and equilibrium of life and here the girl must somehow pull herself together and continue her work. The calm resignation of the closing vocal phrase together with the postlude (which descends to the bottom reaches of the piano) is one of the most extended and plaintive sighs in the Lieder repertoire—but by the closing bars of the song the wheel of the girl’s misfortune is spinning once again, and eternally.

from notes by Graham Johnson © 2011