Ravinia 2024 Issue 4

Schumann eloquently stated his aesthetic credo in a review of songs by Carl Friedrich Zöllner. “The simplicity has to do specifically with the accompaniment. … The melody in the voice part is the main thing: in order to do justice to their spiritual depth, a singer must understand how to recite, and just as the songs follow ev- ery nuance of the poems, so we need a singer who is highly sensitive to these [nuances]. How often are we fortunate enough to encounter this? Good Lieder singers are almost as rare as good Lieder composers.” JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833–1897) Four Ballades, op. 10 “Ballade” remained a comparatively flexible mu- sical designation throughout the 19th century. Chopin, for example, approached the ballade as a dramatic genre emanating directly from Ro- mantic musical poeticism. In it, the musical “narrative” outlined an imprecise and unpre- dictable sequence of episodes often depicted through song-inspired thematic material. Other composers employed the term as a generic des- ignation for light, short, and tuneful keyboard pieces. Johannes Brahms explored the vast ground between those two points in his Four Ballades, op. 10, a collection completed in 1854. His first ballade most clearly approximates the dynamic Chopin model. Brahms evidently drew inspiration from the Scottish border ballad “Ed- ward,” published in a German translation in Johann Gottfried Herder’s Stimmen der Völker . According to the folk tale, Edward used a knife to kill his brother (in some sources, father). Countless variants of this piece have survived in the British ballad tradition. Most begin with the mother asking, “What makes that blood on the point of your knife?” or “How came that blood on your shirt sleeve?” Edward replies uncon- vincingly that the blood came from various an- imals. Then he confesses his brutal act. Several scholars have pointed out that Herder’s transla- tion fits almost exactly with the main theme of this ballade. Johannes Brahms Brahms instilled the second ballade with far subtler meaning. Its sweeping opening gesture, from which many thematic ideas are derived, outlines the pitches of his musical motto: F–A–F (in this case, F-sharps are used), which stands for “Frei aber froh”— free but happy . The third ballade is a scherzo-like piece entitled Intermez- zo , a designation Brahms employed with great frequency in his later piano collections. At this point, the listener begins to sense a large-scale plan for the set, perhaps a loose re-creation of a four-movement sonata. Some writers have described op. 10 as a “ballade cycle” with considerable justification. The first three pieces gravitate around a common tonic pitch, D (major in the second, and minor in the surrounding two), and there are perceptible mo- tivic links among them. This “cycle” reaches its end without a firm sense of climax or conclu- sion. Brahms transported the fourth ballade to a remote distance, both in terms of key (B ma- jor) and expression (ethereal and introspective), from what came before. The open-ended quality deprives the hearer of a definitive climax or con- clusion, a truly ballade-like effect. Songs on Poems by Heinrich Heine Brahms’s enthusiasm for the poetry of Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) spanned decades. By his own account, he composed songs to “almost all of Heine” in his youth, though none of those efforts have survived. The complete edition of Heine poems—a gift of Viennese bookseller Julius Grosser, in gratitude for the pianist-composer’s “wonderful playing” on March 4, 1864—took its place on the shelves of his extensive personal li- brary. Brahms must have owned earlier editions of Heine poetry, for he often favored language not found in the complete edition. Further, his poetry notebook, a handwritten collection of verses for possible musical setting, contained several poems from Heine’s Die Buch der Lie- der (The Book of Songs; first published in 1827). Brahms evidently entertained the possibility of a brief song cycle based on four poems from Die Heimkehr , a section within Buch der Lieder . Heine was the eldest child in a Jewish family liv- ing in Düsseldorf, the son of a textile merchant father and well-educated, ambitious mother. His hometown suffered almost constant political turmoil from the Napoleonic Wars and French occupation during his youth. Heine completed business school in Düsseldorf in 1816, then moved to Hamburg—coincidentally, where Brahms would enter the world 17 years later—to work at his wealthy uncle Salomon’s bank. An intense infatuation with cousins Amalie and Therese went unreciprocated, though it might have inspired his early Romantic poems. Realiz- ing that his nephew possessed little interest in banking, Salomon sent Heinrich to the Univer- sity of Bonn and, after being suspended for a dueling incident, to the University of Berlin to study law. The progressive environment in both cities transformed the young man. Heine be- came increasingly more politically engaged and, in 1825, converted to Lutheranism as Prussian laws increasingly excluded Jews. Throughout his long career, Brahms published only six Lieder for voice and piano based on Heine’s poems. His earliest—“Es liebt sich so li- eblich im Lenze!”—op. 71, no. 1, appeared with- in a multi-opus volume (opp. 69, 70, 71, and 72) published by N. Simrock in Berlin in July and August 1877. This work represents a recompo- sition of a song by his good friend the singer Julius Stockhausen, which Brahms presented as a gift to Stockhausen’s son (his godson). The dedication reads: “Lullaby for the Little and Big [Stockhausens], freely after H. H. and Jul. St. on a happy Easter Monday 1877 J. Br.” Soprano Lu- ise Dustman and pianist Cäcilie Gaul gave the first performance at the Saal Bösendorfer in Vi- enna on April 8, 1878. Heine’s poem, published as “Frühling” in Romanzen (1838), proclaims that love is so delightful in the spring. A shep- herdess weaves a dainty wreath and wonders to whom she shall give it. A young horseman rides by. She weeps and throws her wreath into the river. A nightingale sings. The following year, Brahms returned to Heine’s poetry, creating two Lieder during his holiday in Pörtschach in May 1878. The poems appear back-to-back (nos. 85 and 86) in the collection Die Heimkehr (1827), an ordering retained in the musical setting. Just as Heine’s poems occupy a similar spiritual plane, Brahms interrelates his songs through a common cadential pattern. The two opening chords of “Sommerabend” (no. 1) resolve in the song’s final measure; this same three-chord cadence concludes “Monden- schein” (no. 2). In “Sommerabend,” the summer evening is filled with colorful light and sound as a beautiful fairy bathes in the brook. The moonlight pours down to dispel the horror of night in “Mondenschein.” N. Simrock published these songs as the first two numbers in Brahms’s Sechs Lieder , op. 85, in Berlin in July 1882. Lena Bolzani sang the Title page of Heine’s Das Buch der Lieder (1827) RAVINIA.ORG  • RAVINIAMAGAZINE 79