“Erste Begegnung” Op.74 No.1 (1849)

A Family Portrait

In the second part of the concert the focus shifts from childhood to adult experience - much of it shared by another member of the family, usually a mother. The Schumann group represents a progression from the first stirrings of adolescent love to marriage and from motherhood to grand-parenthood. The shorter Brahms group adds two folk-song pictures to the composite family portrait, one as tragic as the other is comic, and a mother-and-daughter encounter to end all mother-and-daughter encounters.

Robert Schumann

“Erste Begegnung” Op.74 No.1 (1849)

“Der Nussbaum” Op.25 No.3 (1840)

“Die Kartenlegerin” Op.31 No.2 (1840)

“Lied der Braut” Op.25 No.11 (1840)

“Muttertraum” Op.40 No.2 (1840)

“Familien-Gemälde” Op.34 No.4 (1840)

“Erste Begegnung” is one of five duets (alongside three solo songs and a quartet) in Spanisches Liederspiel, a collection of settings of German translations from the Spanish by Emanuel Geibel - whose “limpid and charming poetry,” as Schumann described it, was to furnish many of the texts for Hugo Wolf’s Spanisches Liederbuch forty years later. While a solo song might seem to be a more appropriate way to present the girl’s confession to her mother, Schumann’s writing for the two voices, linked in seductive harmonies over a strummed guitar-style accompaniment, is as intimate as it is attractive.

Julius Mosen’s “Der Nussbaum” is not be the greatest poem Schumann set to to music but, for a composer happily anticipating marriage and about to present a collection of songs to his bride - his Myrthen were to be addressed “To my beloved Clara on the eve of our wedding, from her Robert” - nothing could have been better suited to his purpose. Certainly, it inspired one of the most beautiful of all songs, the breeze gently animating the arpeggios in the piano part, the leaves whispering the dreaming melodic motif repeated in the right hand and taken up by the voice as they reveal their secret message. The fantasies of “Die Kartenlegerin” are more frivolous than that of “Der Nussbaum” and the mother-daughter relationship not as close as that of “Erste Begegnung” - a situation which results in a delightfully detailed, effortlessly flexible and yet perfectly constructed study in mischief. The devout daughter of “Lied der Braut,” the first of two consecurive songs under the same title in the Myrthen collection, makes up for any filial shortcomings elsewhere.

In the Chamisso volume he used when working on Frauenliebe und -Leben in 1840, Schumann also found a selection of his then favourite poet’s verse translations, including “Die Kartelegerin” from the French of Pierre Béranger and a group based on Danish originals by Hans Christian Andersen. He seems to have been particularly interested in three characteristically bleak examples, not least “Muttertraum,” which inspired an extraordinary musical reaction. On the one hand it is a cool, Bach-like three-part invention - a wandering arpeggio figure in the pianist’s right hand, a syncopated melody in the left hand, an expressive vocal line - modulating from minor to major and back again. On the other hand it is a dream with a slightly ominous introduction, a secure middle section as the mother kisses her child, and a grotesque ending. According to the reassuring harmonies and steady tread of “Familien-Gemälde,” however, for those who do not fall prey to ravens family life goes on and renews itself from generation to generation - or even, as the piano postlude seems to suggest, beyond.

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

“Schwesterlein” from Deutsche Volkslieder (1894)

“Och Moder” from Deutsche Volkslieder (1894)

“Walpurgisnacht” Op.75 No.3 (1877-8)

When he completed his collection of arrangements of 49 German folk songs in 1894 Brahms remarked - surprisingly for a composer who had achieved as much as he had - “It is the first time that I look back with tenderness on what I have produced.” Certainly, while the authenticity of much of his material, drawn largely from the two-volume Deutsche Volkslieder of Kretschmer and Zuccalmaglio, is open to question, his affection for it is not. With the most modest of means, he created the most telling of effects, as in “Schwesterlein” with its subtle change in accompaniment in the last two stanzas. And, as in the Low German “Och Moder, ich well en Ding han,” he let the comedy speak for itself. The “Walpurgisnacht” duet is comedy of a quite different order. With its deliberately overwritten, dramatically orchestral piano part it could almost, as the Walküre-like writing for the two voices seems to confirm, be a Wagnerian parody.