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By Root 1644 0

he enjoyed a small creative surge during the summer of 1868. In June he visited Albert Dietrich at Oldenburg, and one afternoon went with Dietrich and family to have a look at the naval port of Wilhelmshafen. At the harbor Brahms seemed quiet and brooding. He told Dietrich that early in the morning he had opened a collection of Hölderlin taken from the family bookshelf, and was riveted by the poet’s “Hyperions Schicksalslied.” After they had toured the harbor for a while, he walked away from his hosts. Dietrich saw him sitting alone on the beach, writing as the waves lapped beneath him.2

There began the Schicksalslied (Song of Destiny), with its uncanny opening framing Hölderlin’s evocation of the gods: “You walk up there in the light/Upon soft ground, blessed genii!” After making the sketch Brahms put it aside for three years, to tend to more practical matters. In the choice of the poem itself, though, he had already prophesied an imminent destiny of his own. The text moves from the meditation on divine rapture to a brutal descent: “Suffering humanity falls blindly from one hour to the next, like water hurled from crag to crag.”

In the same summer Brahms wrote a new final chorus for his 1863 cantata Rinaldo and finished a collection of lieder to be distributed among Opuses 46–9, and maybe Opus 57. Nearly every lyric from that period, mostly by his favored poet G. F. Daumer, seems to echo his undeclared infatuation for Julie Schumann. In those songs a mélange of images of obsession and flight poured out of him:

I gazed into the sweet miraculous glow of the wondrous beauty’s eyes, and thereby forfeited the cheerful gleam in my own.… I shall plunge your image, obstinate and imperious woman, and those laughing lips full of the sound of lutes, the shadowy shimmer of the hair, and that heaving white breast, and that conquering gaze that darts through me—I shall plunge them into the cup of oblivion.… Do not pour down your love-inflaming songs so loud from the blossoming bough of the appletree, O nightingale!… Can I conceal the wild flame here, all the pains that torture me, when all the winds round about cry the causes of my sorrow?… O lovely visage, you make me yearn for this red, this white, and that is not all I mean; to see, to greet, to touch, to kiss—that is what you make me yearn for, O lovely visage!

In his next lieder collections Brahms mingled these new songs with old ones from the Agathe period—the present fascination with a woman echoing an old, the new songs likewise echoing old ones. His emotional life altogether was becoming a series of fading echoes.

An exception to the passionate tone of most lieder from that summer was the little “Wiegenlied” (“Cradle Song”), from Opus 49, written in honor of Bertha and Artur Faber’s second child.

Before long a considerable percentage of humanity was to know the Wiegenlied simply as “Brahms’s Lullaby,” if they knew its author at all. Out in the world it became part of the human community like so many faux “folk songs,” when millions took the melody into their hearts. Its verse (a second was added later) comes from the texts of Des Knaben Wunderhorn: “Good evening, good night; with roses bedecked,/with clove pinks adorned,/slip under the blanket./In the morning, God willing,/you will waken again.” In fact, the ingenuous little tune unfolds (so much of Brahms in this) as counterpoint to a lilting Viennese Ländler that Frauenchor visitor Bertha Porubzsky used to sing to him in Hamburg, when Bertha was young and he loved her, before he let her slip away. In the same way he had worked the old song “Josef, lieber Josef mein” into the “Geistliches Wiegenlied” for the Joachims’ child. The new “Wiegenlied” is entirely symbolic then, as Brahms hinted when he sent the song to Artur Faber in July: “Frau Bertha will realize that I wrote the ‘Wiegenlied’ for her little one. She will find it quite in order … that while she is singing Hans to sleep, a love song is being sung to her.”

So Bertha became the first person to sing Brahms’s Lullaby. Soon the song spread around the world