Ständchen Op.106 No.1 (1888)

Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer Op.105 No.2 (1886)

Die Mainacht Op.43 No.2 (1866)

Vergebliches Ständchen Op.84 No.4 (1882)

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.

In Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer sleep offers no such gratification. On the contrary, the voice outside is now only a memory which displaces the sadly dreaming melodic line (borrowed from the slow movement of the Second Piano Concerto) with sobbing syncopations in the piano part. The prospect of a last meeting does, however, induce an ending in the major. Night is an occasion for solitary introspection in Die Mainacht too. A sure indication that all is not well is the reference to the nightingale in the third line where, far from echoing the ecstatic aspect of its song, Brahms recalls its chromatic pining notes. Sure enough, the basically strophic structure is modified to incorporate a harmonically distraught middle section, after which, with the hot tears still running, the third stanza is scarcely able to sustain the major-key security with which it begins.

It is not at all likely that the rejected serenader of Vergebliches Ständchen (the composer’s own favourite among his many Lieder) will find himself so downcast. Irrepressibly cheerful in spite of its ironically chilly minor harmonies in the third stanza, Brahms’s setting seems to suggest that if one strategy fails he can always try another, preferably on a warmer night.