Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [179]
The pretty girl in question, Ottilie Hauer, was one of his periodic infatuations, once again a singer. (He knew Clara would not mind his mentioning a woman in his letter. By now she was prodding him to find a wife, preferably rich.) With this singer, though, Brahms came within actual hours of making a fool of himself. Ottilie had been part of the Vienna women’s choir with whom he had been working, and sang in the premiere of his Wechsellied zum Tanz—a piece quite seductive for him, in fact. The fair Ottilie had been troubling Brahms’s quietude for some time until, after who knows what mental thrashings and gnashings, he actually set out on Christmas Day 1863 to ask for her hand. But when he arrived at Ottilie’s house he discovered to his great dismay and even greater pleasure that earlier that very day, she had accepted the proposal of a Dr. Edward Ebner.53 As usual, the friendship persisted and Ottilie’s new husband, who had done Brahms a great service in relieving him of an obsession, was received into Brahms’s good graces.
ALSO AS USUAL, Brahms got some songs out of the bargain when fate extracted him from Ottilie, to whom he gave an astounding sixteen song manuscripts. One of the lieder she inspired may have been “Von ewiger Liebe” (Of Everlasting Love) from early 1864—one of his most enduring, a particular favorite of his own, and a classic illustration of Brahmsian lieder design. Amplifying the song’s connection to Ottilie, Brahms based one of its themes on his rejected Brautgesang (Bride’s Song).
Generally he wanted no great subtleties or ambiguities in his lyrics for lieder, but rather a simple situation with direct emotions, succinctly set forth. To a friend he once described his taste in texts as “the best, the most passionate, or those most like folk verses.”54 By “best” he was probably thinking of the ones from classic sources—especially Goethe and the Bible—that he used for his larger choral works, which on the whole are first-rate poetry. The passionate little lyrics of love and loss and the more ingenuous poems in folk style are the sort that tended to end up in his lieder.
Taken from a folk song, the text of “Von ewiger Liebe” begins, “Dark, how dark in forest and field!” A boy meets his sweetheart outside the village, tells her (Brahms may be thinking of Agathe), “If you are suffering disgrace before others on my account, let our love be sundered as quickly as we were formerly united.” The girl replies with a burst of passion: “Our love cannot be sundered!… Iron and steel can disintegrate; our love must endure eternally!” (That is an avowal Agathe had not made.) The surging, forceful melody in which the girl proclaims her certainty is the one that recalls the Brautgesang.
This is the kind of song Schubert might have dashed off on a napkin at dinner, and if the tune went well then fine, and if not there were plenty more where that came from. Even in a little lied, though, Brahms would not allow himself that sort of spontaneity. Nor did he chase after every image in a poem, as Schubert could do so memorably. With this text the older master might have suggested the distant lights in the village, the smoke from the chimneys. Not Brahms. Overt pictorialism and passionate outbursts of emotion were not his style personally, nor his style of expressiveness in music (though there are exceptions to