Four Songs

Auf dem Kirchhofe, Op.105, No.4

Spanisches Lied, Op.6, No.1

Nicht mehr zu dir zu gehen, Op.32, No.1

Von ewiger Liebe, Op. 43, No.1

The Vier Lieder, Op.105, were written between 1886 and 1888 and, although they were published in 1889 as songs for low voice, they were inspired by the composer’s relationship at that time with Hermine Spies - a soprano who was born twenty-four years after composer and who died four years before him in 1893. Auf dem Kirchhofe might almost be a premonition of that sad event. Even here, however, there is consolation, as the gusty C minor piano arpeggios that blow cold over the first six lines of the song give way to a quotation in the major of the Lutheran chorale “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” in anticipation of the final “genesen.”

Spanisches Lied - written at the other end of Brahms’s career, even before he had met the Schumanns - is an attractive setting of words that Hugo Wolf would even more memorably set to music in his Spanisches Liederbuch nearly fifty years later in 1890. The text, taken from a recently published collection of translations from the Spanish by Emanuel Geibel and Paul Heyse, fits happily into a fandango rhythm heightened by Brahms’s flirtatious hesitations and modulations.

Nicht mehr zu dir zu gehen is based on a translation from the Persian of Hafiz by Georg Friedrich Daumer. Written in 1864, it is the first of sixty songs to words by Daumer, whose reputation was much enhanced by Brahms’s setting - this one distinguished by the inexorable tread in even crotchets and minor harmonies in the outer stanzas offset by the sudden acceleration, the entry of triplet rhythms in the piano part and the change to the major in the central section. When Brahms called on Daumer, an otherwise obscure theologian and linguist, in 1872 he was surprised to find that the poet had never heard of him or his music.

If Von ewiger Liebe really were based on a German translation of a Wendish folk song, as is traditionally believed, Brahms’s 1864 setting of it would surely be too elaborate and too dramatic. It appears, however, that the text is by Hoffmann von Fallersleben and certainly the poetic content of the poem and the language of the lovers are both more sophisticated than the words of any folk song. Each stanza is set in a different way - the even pace of the walk through the dark and featureless night in B minor, the heroic statement of the boy to a heroic melody also in B minor, and the rhythmically lilting reply of the girl in sweetly chromatic harmonies followed by her emphatic conclusion in plain B major.