4 Lieder

Sommerabend Op. 85 No. 1 (1879)

Am Sontag Morgen Op. 49 No.1 (1868)

Die Mainacht Op. 43 No. 2 (1866)

Ständchen Op.106 No.1 (1888)

More often than not in Brahms’s Lieder the wanderer figure – a recuring feature in German romanticism in general – finds himself in a tragically ironic relationship with his surroundings. Die Mainacht, the third song in this group, offers a particularly poignant example. In Sommerabend, however, he is not only at peace as evening falls on the forest and fields but positively enchanted by what he sees in the moonlight. For most of the song – between the voice and a melodious counterpoint in the left hand of the piano in the first stanza and under the unison voice and piano lines in the second – there is a gentle but naggingly persistent rhythmic syncopation. In the third stanza, after an almost Wagnerian erotic sigh in the piano part, the syncopations are stilled as the piano not only recalls its counterpoint but adds another happily euphonious line below it.

Hugo Wolf was not the first composer to discover Paul Heyse’s Italienisches Liederbuch. In Am Sontag Morgen Brahms’s anticipation of the manner Wolf would adopt in his settings from that collection more than twenty years later is nothing short of uncanny. While Brahms is probably more emphatic than Wolf would have been had he approached the same text, the generally light articulation and scherzando style concealing bitter jealousy, the brave-face major harmonies giving way to the minor-key truth of the situation are all features Wolf would have been proud of.

The wanderer in Die Mainacht is in a similar situation, amid moonlit fields and trees and nocturnal bird song, to that of his counterpart in Sommerabend. In this case, however, far from enchanting him, his observation of the beauty of nature around him intensifies his misery. After the distraught second stanza, the serenity with which the song began cannot be recovered in the closing section which, while echoing the opening, is tormented by alien harmonies and unsettling triplet rhythms. While Brahms might be over-romanticising a poem written nearly a hundred years earlier, Schubert’s no doubt stylistically authentic setting of the same words seems superficial in comparison.

Still out of doors in the moonlight, Ständchen is an entirely happy invention, wittily detailed in its keyboard imitation of the serenaders’ wind and string instruments, and – inspired perhaps by the ageing Brahms’s passion for the young singer Hermine Spies – refreshingly youthful.