Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [180]
Brahms’s approach to a song text is to wrap it in a form that more subtly evokes the scene and feelings. “Brahms,” writes Eric Sams, “inhabits that hinterland of the lied where song borders on absolute music.”55 Characteristically, he sets “Von ewiger Liebe” straightforwardly and without theatrical passion in the vocal line; it is like a folk song where stories of blood and thunder unfold in the placid repetitions of strophic form. Here the dark setting of the poem is not evoked in details of tone-painting but rather in the sound and feel of the opening two strophes—the low, murmuring B minor of the beginning, the dark alto or baritone voice startlingly low. We don’t forget the dark dejection that opens this song. The straightforward declamation of the melody is inflected in the piano by drifting chromatic harmonies, but they evolve with a linear logic that veils to the ear how Wagnerianly far-ranging they are.
As customary with Brahms the vocal line follows the poem syllable by syllable, poetic foot by foot, line by line, and in its formal divisions the music strictly reflects the poem’s stanzas. In songs, he shapes thematic relationships as carefully as in his instrumental pieces. Here the bass line of the piano introduction prefigures the melody of the voice. (Once again: in Brahms the first considerations are form, melody, and bass, then the rest.)
The opening narrative of the scene between the lovers is set in a calmly striding, shadowed introduction. Then the boy speaks, the accompaniment repeating a figure over and over as his apprehension grows, until the piano part swells into the foreground, expressing at once the musical impetus surging to its logical climax and the boy’s breathless anxiety. With a turn to B major the girl responds firmly and confidently, “Our love cannot be sundered!” The rhythm of her reply is a lilting slow that calms the tense that preceded it. For her the piano figure repeats like the boy’s and rises to its climax, but in a different tone—her music logically derived from his, but with her own voice and emotions: he ambivalent, she assured. Thus expressive form. This lied was to become one of Brahms’s abiding hits.
As in “ewiger Liebe,” in a Brahms lied we are not likely to find the spontaneity of Schubert or Schumann, or Schubert’s conspicuous scene-painting. And it is significant that we tend to think of Brahmsian lyricism more in terms of his instrumental music rather than where we would expect it, in his lieder. It is as if when confronted by a lied text that demanded direct expression of emotion, he pulled back. Brahms was a personality hidden, indirect, oblique. His warmth and longing blossomed more often in the abstract context of instrumental music than in his lieder. There more often we find in the voice part the straightforward syllabic setting and simple rhythms of folk song, the piano accompaniment restrained, often within the capacity of amateurs who performed these songs at home. The characteristic ending is a brusque, efficient cadence. In those respects Brahms was closer to Schubert than to Schumann as a lieder composer.56 Brahms told his biographer Max Kalbeck that in his youth he set to music all of Heine and Eichendorff and the other complex, emotionally tangled high-Romantic poets Schumann had made his own. Those early songs, stacks of them, went into the stove, and in his maturity Brahms turned to less ambiguous kinds of lyrics.
But if everything in his songs is calculation and craft, often with a nod to practicality and saleability, and if on the whole they have never claimed the audience of Schubert’s and Schumann’s lieder, in the great ones like “Von ewiger Liebe”—many of them clearly from Brahms’s own life and feelings—there is an enfolding warmth and subtlety of expression that places his lieder among the finest of German lyric art, in the line that stretches from Schubert through Schumann to Brahms, and beyond him to Wolf and Mahler. Brahms wrote lieder throughout his life and straight to the end of it, gaining strength as he