Weg der Liebe I Op.20 No.1 (1858)

Weg der Liebe II Op.20 No.2 (1858)

Phänomen Op.61 No.3 (1873–4)

Am Strande Op.66 No.3 (1875)

Walpurgisnacht Op.75 No.4 (1878)

Brahms took the art of writing for two or more solo voices and piano more seriously than either Mendelssohn or Schumann. Over a period of twenty years he wrote as many as twenty duets, including twelve specifically designated for soprano and alto. The earliest of these are the Three Duets Op.20 based on folk texts collected (and translated into German) by Gottfried Herder. Although the two Weg de Liebe songs actually derive from the same English source, ‘Love will find out the way’, Brahms treats them very differently. In the first he joins them in thirds and sixths, divides them in imitative counterpoint, re-unites them and, with the help of an eager piano, creates an irresistibly exuberant effect. The second, with the voices in parallel harmonies most of the time, is a slower, more thoughtful but no less fervent interpretation of the same sentiment.

In Phänomen , a philosophical setting of words from the ageing Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan , Brahms’s strategy with the two voices is to link them in sixths to begin with but then to set them apart in canon in the second stanza, where he drains the harmonies of their colour before gradually restoring them for the reassuring return to the texture of the first stanza. Canon is also a feature of the middle section of the quietly contemplative Am Strande (words by Hölty), where the voices are set in 4/4 against what is virtually 12/8 in the piano part.

One of the wittiest of Brahms’s duets is Walpurgisnacht which, with its deliberately overwritten, dramatically orchestral piano part could almost, as the Walküre -like writing for the two voices seems to confirm, have been conceived as a Wagner parody.