Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [221]
The parallels of the Magelone story to Brahms’s own life and loves—to Clara and Agathe especially—are manifest. Young Count Peter of Provence is inspired by a minstrel to go adventuring; in a tournament he wins the love of Magelone, beautiful daughter of the King of Naples; they elope but are parted when Peter is swept out to sea; for two years he lives as a prisoner of the Moors, yearning for his love, but meanwhile captivates the Sultan’s daughter Sulima; finally he escapes to be reunited with Magelone, who has faithfully awaited him in a hermit’s cabin. Thomas Boyer, examining Brahms’s identification with fair-haired Count Peter, notes the dichotomy between lustful Sulima and Magelone, avatar of his matron saint Clara. It mirrors exactly what divided Brahms all his life: the virgin and the whore. Lines from the songs seem to capture his dilemma with women: “How shall I bear/This joy, this rapture?/ Will my soul not take flight/From the beating of my heart?” And more poignantly, Nur lieben heisst leben: Only loving is living.19 Perhaps the tragedy of his life is that Brahms believed that sentiment but could never bring himself to act on it. Always, he fled the beating of his heart.
Echo of his life, testament to his Romantic Bildung and to his admiration for Julius Stockhausen, the Magelone Romances are also Brahms’s contribution to the German-Romantic tradition of the Liederkreis, the song cycle. The genre involves an integrated series of lieder presenting a narrative or other literary unit, epitomized by Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin (The Beautiful Miller’s Daughter) and Schumann’s Dichterliebe (Poet’s Love). In fact Stockhausen, often in performances with Brahms, did as much as anyone in the nineteenth century to popularize the Schubert and Schumann cycles.
Naturally, as Brahms carried yellowing sketches for symphonies and string quartets with him all over Austria and Germany, he also wanted to take on the Liederkreis. He approached it stealthily, as he did other genres resonant with the tramp of giants. But on the face of it, who more likely to make momentous contributions to the Liederkreis repertoire than Brahms the protégé of Schumann, experienced composer and performer of lieder, who during the long period of writing the Magelone Romances concentrated largely on vocal music? Yet he hardly seemed to draw on his experience. Their style is notably unlike that of Schubert or Schumann, for that matter unlike most of Brahms’s other lieder or vocal music. His songs tend to be laconic, relatively understated, often with a flavor of folk song including a distinct preference for strophic form. The Magelone songs are lush, expansive, passionate, mostly through-composed, at times almost operatic.
For all his experience and skill, they are also notably spotty, everything from wonderful to bland. The cycle did not really work as a whole, not in Brahms’s mind or for most critics since. Scholar Malcolm MacDonald calls it “a mass of fascinating detail … in search of an overall musical rationale.”20 To name one conspicuous problem—in contrast to Schubert’s song cycles, the point of the Magelone lyrics is unaccountable if the listener does not know the story. Some performances get around that by adding a narrative to connect the songs, but Brahms neither made provision for that nor encouraged it. In fact, his position after surveying what he had wrought was to try to obviate the notion that the songs were a cycle at all. He wrote critic Adolf Schubring: “In the case of the Magelone Romances one does not need many at one go, and should not pay any attention to narrative.… It was only a touch of German thoroughness which led me to compose them through to the last number.”21
His feeling about the results is also shown in this: the Magelone Romances are his first and last song cycle. Afterward Brahms returned to his usually laconic miniatures, issued in sets, each opus tending to be loosely related in literary theme (usually love, usually lost) and perhaps in a general musical unfolding. Opus 57, for example, sets a group of passionate