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To a degree few artists have achieved, nothing from the outside world interfered with his work, when he was ready to do it. The remarkable musical products of his 1886 summer in Thun were the Second Cello Sonata, the Second and Third Violin Sonatas (the Third not quite finished until 1888), the Third Piano Trio, and several songs for Opuses 104 and 105, including “Wie Melodien zieht es mir.” The latter is one of his most ingratiating lieder, a portrait of the effervescent Hermine for whom he wrote it and who made it her own. By then she was giving acclaimed performances of the Alto Rhapsody. All the same, Brahms had begun to beware of his current favorite songstress: “I’m now getting to the years,” he wrote Kalbeck that summer, “where a man easily does something stupid, so I have to doubly watch myself.”45 Before long Hermine would provide him with an excuse to pull back.

If he was warning himself about her, his yearning for Hermine is still written in more music from that summer, especially the Second Violin Sonata in A Major. He composed it as he waited for a visit from her; his means of symbolizing that agreeable longing took the familiar form of a song without words. The song is his own: the second theme of the sonata’s opening movement has, in the piano, a quotation of “Wie Melodien zieht es mir,” transformed from the original two-beat into a dancing three. But the feeling still echoes the opening words of Klaus Groth’s verse: “I feel as if melodies were moving through my mind;/they seem to blossom like spring flowers and waft away like fragrance.” (Some writers suspect echoes of two more Hermine-inspired songs in the Sonata, “Komm bald” and “Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer.”)

This Violin Sonata, like the First, is largely lyrical and songlike, the mood suggested in its tempo indications: Allegro amabile, Andante tranquillo (with three interpolated Vivaces), and the warm conclusion, Allegretto grazioso (quasi Andante). The Third Violin Sonata in D Minor, also sketched but not finished that summer, stands in contrast as the most passionate and dark-toned of the three—and maybe for that reason it is dedicated to passionate, dark-toned Hans von Bülow (the last work Brahms dedicated to anyone).

While the Second Violin Sonata paints a picture of Brahms at his desk yearning for Hermine, the rest of that summer’s work in chamber music and song seems to reflect, more starkly than usual, his feelings of age and loss. The Opus 105 lieder begin with “Wie Melodien,” but continue with “Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer” and its portrait of a dying girl wishing her lover to “komm’ bald”—“come soon, O come soon!” (a grim riposte to the flirtatious “Komm bald” earlier written to Hermine). The folk song text for the next lied, “Klage,” is set in a winter landscape: “Sweet girl, don’t trust him so he won’t break your heart!” Then comes “Auf dem Kirchhofe,” a scene in a graveyard, with the “Gewesen”—“departed”—written on the graves transformed into an ambiguous “Genesen”—“healed.” Are the dead healed because granted eternal life, or healed from life? The final song of the set, “Verrat” (“Betrayal”), is a melodramatic ballad in which a lover murders his rival on a barren heath. Elisabet von Herzogenberg found the text vulgar and shocking, but Theodor Billroth commended the song as “a treasure for all bassos.”46 None of these lieder suggests the musician’s truce with death, however provisional and secular it is, that Brahms had achieved a couple of years before in his setting of Heine’s “Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht”:

Death is the cool night,

Life is the sultry day.

It is already growing dark; I am sleepy;

The day has wearied me.

Over my bed rises a tree;

In it the young nightingale is singing;

It sings of nothing but love;

I hear it even in my dreams.

Two other products of the Thun summer 1886 also show contrasting trains of thought, musically and expressively. The Second Cello Sonata in F Major is a testament to the rich tone and musical fantasy of his friend Robert Hausmann, of the Joachim String Quartet—the