6 Mädchenlieder

Mädchenlied Op.95 No.6 (1884)

Mädchenlied Op.85 No.3 (1878)

Das Mädchen Op.95 No.1 (1884)

Mädchenlied Op.107 No.5 (1886)

Das mädchen spricht Op.107 No.3 (1886)

Mädchenfluch Op.69 No.9 (1873-4)

There are enough Brahms Mädchenlieder - songs with “maiden” or “girl” in the title - to cover just about all the emotions commonly attributed to artless young women in romantic poetry. In the first of today’s Mädchenlieder, the earlier of two settings from Paul Heyse’s Italienisches Liederbuch, the girl’s naive tenderness is reflected in a simple strophic construction with the minimal but emphatic adjustment of a rhythmic augmentation on the last few words. The supple quintuple-time Mädchenlied Op.85 No.3, one of several songs based on Friedrich Kapper’s translations from the Serbian, is also most poignant near the end, where the voice abandons the strophic pattern and takes up the desolate material of the piano introduction.

Das Mädchen, which Brahms set as both a part-song Op.93a No.2 in 1883 and as a through-composed solo song Op.95 No.1 a year later, must have been his favourite Kapper text. Certainly, he treats it with affection here, never overloading its folk-song sentiments but spontaneously changing the key and the metre to match the girl’s progressively excited anticipations. The second of the Heyse Mädchenlieder is another strophic song with a difference: the unhappy maiden finally forgets even her spinning as the wheel runs on in the piano part. The two stanzas of Gruppe’s Das Mädchen spricht inspired one of the most delightful of all Brahms songs, the flight of the swallow shaping not only the graceful piano accompaniment but also the fluttering vocal line. In striking contrast, Mädchenfluch is one of his most dramatic. The earliest of Brahms’s settings of Kapper’s translations from the Serbian, it is perhaps not entirely innocent of irony: like the girl, whose feelings are mixed in spite of her betrayal, it seems to protest not only passionately but also a little too much.