4 Songs from Lieder und Gesänge Op.72 (1877)

No.1 Alte Liebe (1875)

No.2 Sommerfäden (1876)

No.3 O kühler Wald (1877)

No. 4 Verzagen (1877)

4 Songs from Lieder Op.105 (1886–8)

No.1 Wie Melodien zieht es mir (1886)

No.2 Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer (1886)

No.3 Klage (1883)

No.4 Auf dem Kirchhofe (1888)

With the excption of the fifth and last song – Unüberwindlich, a cynically witty Goethe setting not included on this occasion – the poetic theme of Brahms’s Op.72 is disillusion of one kind or another. In most cases it is a matter of lost love. In Alte Liebe, although the poem begins with an expression of happiness in the arrival of spring, Brahms is under no illusion, as the minor harmonies of the first bar of the piano part clearly indicate and as the change of key on the repetition of “neues Glück,” like the chilling minor arpeggio before the tap on the shoulder in the secod stanza, confirms. Sommerfäden refers to no specific illusion but, again in a minor key, to illusions in general, threads of gossamer intertwining in the contrapuntal texture of Brahms’s Bach-like setting. O kühler Wald is set in the major but, as the modulation to a remote tonality at the beginning of the second stanza suggests, the notion of identification with nature is another illusion. In Verzagen the poet’s raging heart and the surging sea, so vividly evoked in the turbulent piano part, are in sympathy but, the pressure of minor harmonies insists, there is no consolation in that.

The Op.105 songs are for the most part reflections on loss but not without hints of reconciliation – until, that is, they are contradicted by the murderous Verrat, which is omitted on this occasion. Exactly where Wie Melodien zieht es mir stands in the emotional range it is impossible to say: the beauty of the song is its elusiveness. The reference to “ein feuchtes Auge” in the last stanza seems to point in one directions, while Brahms’s melodic allusion to the first movement of his blissful Violin Sonata in A major Op.100 seems to point in the other, in spite of some harmonic equivocation on the first mention of the “feuchtes Auge.” Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer is based on another self-quotation, in this case from the cello solo in the slow movement of the Piano Concerto in B flat major Op.83. There, however, the melody is nostalgic in the major; here it is profoundly unhappy in the minor, a mood which prevails until finally, encouraged by the prospect of a last meeting, it settles in the major.

All the more poignant for the absence of self-pity in the simple treatment of its folk-song text, Klage is followed by one of the most theatrical of Brahms’s songs. In the desolate setting of Auf dem Kirchhof, however, there is reconciliation: the gusty minor arpeggios that blow cold over the first six lines give way to a quotation in the major of the Lutheran chorale “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” in anticipation of the final “genesen.”