5 Lieder

Auf dem See Op.106, No.2 (1885)

O wüsst ich doch Op.63, No.8 (1874)

Salamander Op.107, No.2 (1888)

Dein blaues Auge Op.59, No.8 (1873)

Unbewegte laue Luft Op.57, No.8 (1871)

Just as in his late chamber music, there is a special quality of inspiration in Brahms’s late songs - a serenity mingled with nostalgia which is nowhere better illustrated than in his Reinhold setting of 1885, Auf dem See Op.106, No.2. Unlike an earlier song with the same title and the same kind of subject matter, Op.59. No.2, it is not so much complacent as quietly ecstatic, floating on its barcarolle rhythms and buoyant piano arpeggios until a bumpy change of figuration in the accompaniment acknowledges the unrealistic nature of the sentiment of the last two lines. The restoration of the piano arpeggios in the closing bars scarcely recaptures the initial rapture.

Written eleven years earlier, O wüsst ich doch - one of three Klaus Groth songs grouped under the heading Heimweh (Homesickness) in the Op.63 set - is inspired by a more conventional kind of nostalgia. A longing for the security of childhood, symbolised by a recurring bass line in the first and last stanzas and undermined by the rhythmic syncopations in the slightly quicker middle section, is illuminated by the restless modulations passing through the rising and falling arpeggios of the piano part. Salamander, from the last set of songs before the Vier ernste Gesänge, is almost a parody of the Lied, a brilliantly ironic commentary on Die Forelle to which it makes a clear melodic allusion in the opening bars. Less vulnerable than Schubert’s trout, however, Brahms’s salamander thrives on the heartless treatment it receives, signalling its triumph with a change of harmony to the major and eventually escaping from the confines of the hitherto prevailing folk-song rhythms.

Dein blaues Auge is another setting of verse by the composer’s good friend Klaus Groth - but surely not “grieving Groth” as has been suggested by one respected authority. What the poet finds in the blue eyes of his beloved is the calm indicated by the uncomplicated major harmonies postulated in the opening bar of the piano introduction and at strategic points in the first stanza. True, there is a painful intervention at the beginning of the second stanza but that is a memory of other eyes gradually put to rest as further contemplation of these clear, cool eyes restores the calm of the opening of the song.

Like many of Brahms’s poets, including Klaus Groth, Georg Friedrich Daumer would probably be forgotten by now had Brahms not set his verse to music. He was best known even in his own day as the author of the words of Brahms’s Liebeslieder part songs and, to a smaller audience, of the texts of thirty or so solo songs written by the same composer over the twenty years between 1864 and 1884. While the eight Daumer poems included in the Op.57 set are clearly not the greatest examples of their kind, they did provide Brahms with the ideal text for what seems, on internal evidence, to be a cycle of songs inspired by his lasting love for Clara Schumann. In the nocturnal opening of the last song in the set, Unbewegte laue Luft, where the only movement is the splashing of the fountain, passion is apparently stilled. But then, with a sudden change of tempo, desire surges up again and, driven by an urgent version of the motif that so peacefully opened the song, it achieves its devoutly desired consummation in the closing bars.

Gerald Larner ©2005