7 Lieder

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

Wir wandelten Op.96 No.2 (1884-85)

Der Schmied Op.19 No.4

Ständchen Op.106 No.1 (1888)

Die Mainacht Op.43 No.2 (1866)

Wie Melodien Op.105 No.1 (1886)

Von ewiger Liebe Op.43 No.1 (1864)

The first two songs in the Brahms group are expressions of blissful peace in the intimate presence of another person. In Dein blaues Auge it is found in the cool blue of his or her eyes: the reassurance they bring is mirrored in the harmonic stabilty of the opening bar of the piano prelude and is then offset by the dissonances associated with pain once caused by another pair of eyes. Wir wandelten begins with much the same melodic phrase, now in canon as the two walk together, but is transcended by a magical modulation (“Eines sag ich”) and a middle section of unspoken thoughts ringing, as the piano part confirms, like little golden bells. The sound of bells is featured also in Der Schmied. But in this robust case it is produced by the reality of the hammer striking the anvil in unpretentious harmonic and rhythmic regularity.

The rejuvenating effect of Brahms’s friendship with Hermine Spies – a singer more or less half his age when he first met her in a performance of his Gesang der Parzen in Krefeld in 1883 – is illustrated nowhere better than in his setting of Franz Kugler’s Ständchen. It is not just a matter of its delightful detail, with its strummed zither and tuneful flute and fiddle in the piano part. It is even more remarkable for its youthfully romantic attitude as, stirring in her sleep, the object of the serenade dreams of her musician lover in the garden outside.

Brahms had such a high opinion of Ludwig Hölty’s “beautiful, warm words” that he felt his music was “not strong enough” to do them justice. “Otherwise,” he remarked, “you’d see me setting more of them” – though probably not as many as Schubert, who wrote 23 Hölty songs in his late teens. As a comparison of their respective settings of Die Mainacht demonstrates, Brahms was being unduly modest: his harmonically unshrinking interpretation, with its particularly distraught middle section, is actually more truthful than Schubert’s unmodified strophic setting.

With Wie Melodien zieht es mir the composer set himself a severe test. His friend Klaus Groth – author of 14 texts set by Brahms, including Dein blaues Auge – comes close to saying here that music, specifically melody, can express thoughts that elude words except in the most tenuous of poetic circumstances. His answer was to allude to what must have been a favourite among his own melodies, from the blissful first movement of his Violin Sonata in A major, while applying to it harmonies that subtly deflect it from the grasp.

The thinking in Von ewiger Liebe is very much more concrete – so much so that it reverberates with echoes from Brahms’s own life. The girl’s fervent melody in the second half of the song was written originally for a Brautgesang (Bridal Song) for Agathe von Siebold, to whom the composer had been briefly engaged six years earlier. One reason why he broke off the arrangement, it is generally believed, was his continuing attachment to Clara Schumann. It is quite possible of course that the song has no autobiographical relevance at all. Even so, it is tempting to speculate on whether – given the boy’s heroic minor-key protestations in the first half of the song and the girl’s major-key assertion that their bond is inviolable – it was inspired by his relationship with Clara. Certainly, there is a well-documented story that when Brahms played it to Clara one day “she had sat there in silence… her face bathed in tears.”