11. Lieder and solo vocal ensembles.

Brahms was a prolific composer of song. Over a period of 43 years (1853–96) he published 190 solo lieder, 5 songs for one or two voices, 2 songs with obbligato viola, 20 duets and 60 vocal quartets for solo voices, all with piano accompaniment. His earliest extant solo song, the exuberant Heimkehr op.7 no.6, dates from May 1851, his final work in this genre, the profound Vier ernste Gesänge op.121 for bass and piano, from May 1896. The published songs, though, represent only a portion of his total output. Supressed were many youthful settings of poetry by Joseph von Eichendorff, Emanuel Geibel, Adalbert von Chamisso and Heinrich Heine, as well as mature songs on poems by Geibel, Friedrich Halm, Heine and Paul Heyse, and possibly Georg Friedrich Daumer, J.W.L. Gleim, Hans Schmidt and Friedrich Rückert as well.

The opus number of a Brahms song is not always a good indication of its chronological position. Typically he would compose songs singly or in small clusters, as he became interested in a particular volume of poetry or the verses of a certain poet. Some songs might be published soon, others would be consigned to his portfolio, where they could reside for many years before being selected, revised and positioned in a carefully ordered collection (characterized by Brahms as ‘bouquets of songs’). He might also write a large number of songs within a relatively short period, for example, the 18 Liebeslieder waltzes of 1868–9 for solo quartet. Other concentrated outpourings occurred during autumn 1858 and summer 1864, and in March 1877. But many of the songs traditionally attributed to what Kalbeck called the ‘Liederjahr of 1868’ cannot be dated precisely, and others published then were written earlier, even as far back as 1853. Brahms's one extended cycle of solo songs, the Magelone Romances op.33, consists of pieces composed during at least three different times over an eight-year period (1861–9).

Brahms has often been criticized for the mediocre quality of his texts. Besides setting poems by leading writers such as Eichendorff, Goethe, Heine, Ludwig Hölty, Mörike, Rückert and Theodor Storm, he also settled upon lyrics by minor versifiers, fashionable in his time, such as Daumer (54 settings, including the two sets of Liebeslieder waltzes), Carl Candidus, Halm, Carl Lemcke, Adolf Friedrich von Schack and Max von Schenkendorff. The tendency cannot be explained by poor education or lack of literary taste. Like most cultured people of his day, Brahms was an avid reader of poetry by both established masters and contemporaries. Rather, the criterion he applied when selecting texts was whether the poem left room for enhancement by a musical setting. In 1876 he told George Henschel that all Goethe's poems seemed to him ‘so perfect in themselves that no music can improve them’. The mood and substance of the poem must have some special quality that lends itself naturally to music and the poem must affect the composer spontaneously, though not so strongly as to destroy the objective detachment that Brahms felt necessary for the act of composing. Once attracted to a poem, Brahms would recite it aloud until he felt he could achieve in his musical setting a declamation so effortless and natural that its metre, rhythm and form would seem inevitable (in this regard Schubert was his ideal). Yet Brahms, especially in the early songs, did not hesitate to alter poems, even to delete whole stanzas, in order to adapt the text to his musical interpretation.

On occasion Brahms's choice of poem was the result of external circumstance or event. Hermann Levi called his attention to Goethe's late masterpiece Dämm'rung senkte sich von oben, and after he had produced a setting of his own rather too reminiscent of one of Brahms's early songs, Brahms accepted the challenge and composed one of his finest songs, op.59 no.1. Similarly, he wrote the quartet O schöne Nacht op.92 no.1 as a corrective to a setting by Heinrich von Herzogenberg, even borrowing his colleague's opening bars to make the point clear. At times the mood and content of his texts clearly reflected his own feeling at the time of composition. Many of the 14 songs and duets that poured from his pen in autumn 1858 seem to be exploring aspects of his relationship with Agathe von Siebold. His infatuations with other singers, including Ottilie Hauer and Hermine Spies, certainly would have lent a personal meaning to songs written for them to sing. The five Ophelia songs of 1873 woo22 posth. were written with stage performance by the actress Olga Precheisen in mind. Brahms's most famous ‘occasional’ piece is the celebrated Wiegenlied op.49 no.4, composed in 1868 to mark the birth of Bertha Faber's second son and employing in its accompaniment an Austrian folksong that the child's mother had sung to Brahms many years before. Likewise, the Geistliches Wiegenlied op.91 no.2 for alto, viola and piano, which employs as cantus firmus the old Catholic song Josef, lieber Josef mein, was written to celebrate a birth, that of the first child of the alto Amalie Joachim and her violinist/violist husband Joseph Joachim in 1864.

Although Brahms could evoke lighter moods – as in the perennial favourite Vergebliches Ständchen op.84 no.4, the muscular Der Schmied op.19 no.4, the more convivial of the vocal ensemble pieces and Unüberwindlich op.72 no.5, a jocular excursion into the realm of opera buffa – most of his songs explore such serious themes as the passion of love, the true heart unrewarded, the loneliness of the solitary human, the longing for home and the passing of life. Some of his finest songs animate Nature with the emotions of the human heart. Among the early songs several express the viewpoint of young women in emotional distress (for example, Liebestreu op.3 no.1, Die Trauernde op.7 no.5 and Agnes op.59 no5), while others evoke scenes from the age of chivalry in their texts and archaic musical gestures (Vom verwundeten Knaben and Murrays Ermordung op.14 nos. 2 and 3 and Das Lied vom Herrn von Falkenstein op.43 no.4). With advancing age an autumnal tone is sounded, lost opportunities in love are lamented and the spectre of death is faced (Gestillte Sehnsucht op.91 no.1, Mein Herz ist schwer and Kein Haus, keine Heimat op.94 nos.3 and 5, and Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer and Auf dem Kirchhofe op.105 nos.2 and 4). As a culmination along this path, yet unique in Brahms's output – and indeed in the repertory of art song – are the Vier ernste Gesänge op.121, on scriptural texts assembled by Brahms himself. Composed in expectation of the death of Clara Schumann, this austere cycle harks back to Baroque sacred monody to explore the meaning of human existence.

The sketches for Brahms's songs confirm an approach to texture that is also obvious in the finished works. Fluent, expressive and essentially diatonic melodies are supported by strong basses that rival the vocal part in vitality and often engage it in contrapuntal interplay. The interior voices, indicated in the sketches mostly by figured bass symbols and left to be worked out in detail at a later stage, enrich the miniature with further counterpoint and chromatic inflection. Such a texture, as well as Brahms's predilection for simple as well as varied strophic forms and for melodic formulations that are found in folktunes, reveals the deep roots of his lyrical art in the folksong ideal embraced by poets and composers since the Enlightenment. At times it is difficult to distinguish his artless folklike songs from his artful arrangements of folk melodies. Brahms's original setting of the Lower Rhenish folk poem Dort in den Weiden op.97 no.4, for example, is in much the same vein as his arrangement of this poem using the ‘folk’ melody conveyed in the Deutsche Volkslieder mit ihren Original-Weisen of Kretzschmer and Zuccalmaglio, one of his favourite collections of folktunes. (That Kretzschmer and Zuccalmaglio heavily edited and rewrote many of their songs did not concern Brahms, who had little use for the authentic but inartistic collections of such folktune preservationists as Franz Böhme and Ludwig Erk.) In some songs, such as Magyarisch op.46 no.2 and Sonntag op.47 no.3, the folk melody with which the setting opens is wedded seamlessly to the original material that forms its completion. Brahms's first efforts at providing folktunes with piano accompaniments, dating from the 1850s and 60s, were inspired by the arrangements of Friedrich Silcher and Friedrich Wilhelm Arnold. The seven-volume set of 49 Deutsche Volkslieder woo33 (1894), which marks the culmination of a lifelong involvement with the study of folk idioms, presents Brahms's solution to the 19th century agenda of uniting folk simplicity with urban amateur music-making.

Despite a preference for poems cast in ‘Volksliedstrophe’ and a dedication to strophic song, Brahms also welcomed the challenge of more complex structures. Worthy of special note is the song Die Mainacht op.43 no.2, a setting of an Asclepiadean ode by Hölty. The song's first stanza demonstrates Brahms's seemingly effortless command of an intricate metrical scheme. A developmental central section follows the poem's structure less strictly, as does the varied and climactic close of the musical reprise. Such a form, allowing for continuing development as the poem unfolds, unites features of strophic song, developing variation and ternary form. (In this case, though, balance is achieved only by the deletion of the Hölty's second stanza.) Brahms also set to music a sonnet (the beautifully delicate Die Liebende schreibt op.47 no.5), a Sapphic ode (op.94 no.4) and a number of ghazals (in op.32). The extended ballads among the Magelone Romances (op.33) posed special difficulties for the creation of musical continuity and unity.

Brahms's songs up to the 1860s can be classified into three periods. As a whole the 18 songs published in 1853–4 (opp.3, 6 and 7) can be distinguished from later ones by their highly expressive vocal writing, bold though not always purposeful chromaticism and sometimes melodramatic accompaniments. On the other hand, the tension between musical means and structure is well controlled in such pieces as Volkslied and Die Trauernde (op.7 nos.4 and 5), based on traditional texts, and in the finest song of the group, Liebestreu op.3 no.1, which Brahms placed at the head of his first published set of songs. Three of the Eichendorff settings (op.3 no.6 and op.7 nos.2 and 3) evoke not only their texts but also the contexts of the poems in the novels from which they were drawn.

During the second period (1858–9), which yielded most of the songs in opp.14 and 19 and the duets op.20, Brahms focussed on folk and folk-inspired poems from Herder, Kretzschmer and Zuccalmaglio, Karl Simrock and J.L. Uhland. The original versions of two Mörike songs – the poignant Agnes op.59 no.5, with folk-style mixed metres, and the ironic duet Die Schwestern op.61 no.1, with a bow to the style hongrois – also date from this period, together with three settings of Goethe: Die Liebende schreibt op.47 no.5, Trost in Tränen op.48 no.5 and the quartet Wechsellied zum Tanze op.31 no.1. Strophic form predominates, and the excesses of the earlier songs are dispelled by simpler melodies and accompaniments. The influence of Brahms's study of early music is at times evident in his harmonic language and use of counterpoint. The first of the folksong arrangements – 28 Deutsche Volkslieder (woo32 post.) given to Clara Schumann and 14 Volks-Kinderlieder (woo31) dedicated to the Schumann children – were prepared at this time.

A clear stylistic shift is apparent in the early 1860s, during Brahms's ‘first maturity’. The ambitiously scaled songs of the nine Lieder und Gesänge op.32 on poems by August von Platen and Daumer and the 15 Romances op.33 from Tieck's Magelone reveal operatic aspirations in their proportions, interior shifts of tempo and style, illustrative writing, strong harmonies, forays into quasi-recitative and ‘orchestral’ piano parts. Such songs as Wie bist du, meine Königin op.32 no.9 and Von ewiger Liebe op.43 no.1, however, strike a more balanced pose and point the way to the future. Although Brahms indulged in the grand scale again in the early 1870s with the tempestuously passionate and intensely sensual eight Lieder und Gesänge op.57 on poems by Daumer, most of his later songs fall within the parameters of the ‘volkstümliches Kunstlied’ established by Schubert.

Brahms, Johannes