Brahms : 29 Lieder

Description

"With what sweetness you oppress this heart and murmur here, between the strings, drawn by a melodious melancholy, rising in the wake of my nostalgia and then dying again," the poet confides to the winds that caress the aeolian harp (An eine Äolsharfe). Brahms is only twenty-five when he sets these verses to music, but his entire universe is already present: the solitude of man, nature reflecting his states of mind, the regret of a lost paradise, refuge in memory and dream. As in many later lieder, the musician keeps violent emotions at bay and indulges in a contemplative sadness that seems to provide him with a sense of serenity. Sometimes, he allows for an outpouring, accompanied by hope (Botschaft), more often by burning pain (Liebestreu, Es schauen die Blumen, Mein Herz ist schwer, Meine Liebe ist grün). Lightness and playfulness are especially heard in the "feminine" lieder and in the Volkslieder WoO 33, whose melodies come from collections of folk songs. A cheeky young lady asks her mother to marry her (Och Mod'r, ich well en Ding han!), rebuffs the lovesick suitor waiting coldly at her door (Vergebliches Ständchen), and lingers at the ball despite her young brother's urgings (Schwesterlein, Schwesterlein). But Brahms appropriates the material he borrows from collective culture and imprints it with the marks of his personal style. The pianistic swirls and creamy harmony added to In stiller Nacht (whose origins date back to the 17th century) relate it to the learned Geheimnis and Die Mainacht, other nocturnal landscapes. The modest authors (Candidus, Groth, Gruppe, Kugler) stimulate his imagination as much as the leading writers (Brentano, Heine, Mörike), for Brahms focuses on the general atmosphere without worrying about exploiting the emotional potential of each word. More like tableaux than dramas, his lieder are isolated vignettes, very rarely grouped into cycles. The voice resembles a broad instrumental line, surrounded by a piano that holds the value of a soloist. This is evidenced by the frequency of opulent textures, supported by solid basses (a writing already at work in Liebestreu, composed at the age of twenty). Most of the confessions unfold in major mode, at a slow tempo, as if to eternalize the moment. To disappear and interrupt the flow of time, is this not what the poet turned towards the clouds aspires to? "It seems to me that I have been dead for a long time and that I am going with them, blissful, traversing the eternal spaces" (Feldeinsamkeit). The fusion state with the mother forever lost (Heimweh II), paradise is found in the beyond. "Death is the cool night, life is the suffocating day": Der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht paves the way for the Vier ernste Gesänge of 1896, the ultimate meditations on the vanity of human existence (Hélène Cao).