Der Überläufer - No. 2 from Seven Lieder Op. 48

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See the shrubs all stripped of leaves! Why still trifle, like the wind in the bushes, With the withered happiness that remains? Surrender to rest, soon that happiness too will die. This lyric is by the immensely cultivated Adolf von Schack, an authority on painting and an expert on, among many other things, the art and literature of Spain his work on this subject was owned by Brahms. Schack, born in Prussia, eventually settled in Munich at the invitation of the Bavarian king.

It was Brahms, nevertheless, who was the Schack pioneer, setting three poems to music, all of them remarkable.

There is not one note too many in an accompaniment that begins with 13 bars of bare right-hand chords the left-hand joins in only in bar The music seems as frozen and bleak as the greyest kind of autumn day. The second verse is suddenly given over to a passionate forte outburst with an accompaniment in triplets—these too seem familiar. This famous Heine setting from Schwanengesang was a favourite of the baritone Julius Stockhausen whose accompanist on many an occasion was … Johannes Brahms.

No.1 Der Gang zum Liebchen (The Visit to the Beloved)

When he read this poem Brahms must immediately have thought of Letzte Hoffnung in the Schubert cycle, that song where the poet ponders the fate of the last withered leaf on the tree. The very fact that the first and third verses are separated by a stormy middle section also seems profoundly Schubertian in the instrumental sense—one thinks of the slow movement from the String Quintet D where the extraordinarily static music of the opening returns after a wind-swept interlude.

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Hamburg, ; No 2: Introduction English The seven songs of Op 48 are rarely heard as a complete opus on the concert platform. There may be some truth in this—by the time this opus was issued in the composer was sufficiently famous for the appearance of his songs in print to be awaited with impatience by singers, and there did not have to be any clever incentive to be built into the planning of the work in order to encourage sales.

And yet there are two unifying themes in this collection that are buried beneath the surface and which may, or may not, have been the result of deliberate planning. The first of these is homage to the past, both musical and poetic: In later years Brahms would issue volumes of folksong settings of his own.

Angelika Kirchschlager mezzo-soprano , Graham Johnson piano. Now this indefatigable performer and scholar turns to the songs and vocal works of Brahms. Hyperion is delighted to present t Brahms here revisits a poem that he had already set as a ravishing vocal quartet in Vienna in December Op 31 No 3 ; indeed this song began life in Hamburg as a choral item long before this, and resurfaced arranged as a solo song.

In a way this is something of a musical re-visit to the emotional realms of Scheiden und Meiden: But there is also great charm here, and the second half of each overall musical strophe which is to say the second and fourth verses of the poem are set to music of such delicate, Chopinesque enchantment including a gradual accelerando sanctioned by the single word animato at the top of bar 14 that one could place this folksong in Poland as easily as in Bohemia.

The buoyant accompaniment helps to give life to a vocal line that has been conceived in stubbornly static crotchets: The words tell of a perhaps imaginary rival who intends to seduce the beloved, but the shape of the melody when riding the crest of the accompanimental wave makes something almost coquettish of the song, especially if performed by the female voice.

This is also one of those textbook cases in the Brahms Lieder where the tempo is flexible and variable in a way that would be inconceivable for Schubert or Wolf; the wafting meanderings of the voice require a subtle sense of rubato, a coming and going, as if searching here and there for reassurance, lingering as well as hurrying. Brahms is not good at communicating to his performers exactly how these musical subtleties might be managed, but they form an important part of his style.

Composer: Johannes Brahms (1833 - 1897)

When assembling these Lieder for publication as Op 48, Brahms clearly decided he needed to shuffle songs of certain complexity with others in his portfolio that were more simple. This little song in mournful chorale style dates from a great deal earlier than most of the others, and it fits its purpose in the same way that Francis Poulenc confessed to assembling his cycles: There is a fourth verse left out by Brahms where the narrator hears a trumpeter on parade—the type of poem that might have appealed to Mahler who was a dab hand at songs about the execution of military deserters.

Whoever would see two living fountains, Should see my two sad eyes That have run quite dry with weeping. Whoever would see many great and deep wounds, Should look at my so wounded heart, That love has wounded to its inmost depths. If Brahms really had envisaged this opus number being performed as a single work and by a single singer, the presence of this text would strongly argue for a female singer to take over the whole of Op 48—for it is almost impossible to imagine male performance of this text.

Once again it is a miniature from an earlier time, but it has a depth of emotional import that can be astonishing in performance. For this reason this little offering seems to be a sketch for a song, an eloquent little fragment, rather than a fully developed Lied.

Little star with its sad light, If only you could weep! If you had a little heart, O you my golden little star, You would weep sparks. This is another little fragment of a song, quite different however from the two preceding items from Des Knaben Wunderhorn , apart from the fact that it is once again a plaint with distinctly female overtones.

Seven Songs, Op.48

Those two songs had been in distinctly folksong style, and conceived for the mezzo, or even alto voice. Although this poem comes from a collection of folk poetry it has all the airs and graces of a more recent poem, despite the theme of a lover being lured away by money—in this case a rich dowry—being age old. The piano writing has notes gently oscillating between the hands in a way that recalls the opening of the famous An die Nachtigall Op 46 No 4. This shows us that as interested in folksong as Brahms was, he was never doctrinaire about his enthusiasms; in opening the door that led to folksong authenticity he had no intention of closing all other doors behind him.

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Because he took whatever freedoms he deemed necessary, the imagery of starlight and the shedding of sparks of light, pinpricks of radiance, led Brahms into something rather more ornate and bejewelled in his vocal writing at least, the accompaniment remains simple than was typical of his treatment of anonymous Slavic texts of this kind. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe This is a very famous lyric, and one that has more or less defeated every composer who has attempted it. Welcome to Hyperion Records, an independent British classical label devoted to presenting high-quality recordings of music of all styles and from all periods from the twelfth century to the twenty-first.

Hyperion offers both CDs, and downloads in a number of formats. The site is also available in several languages. Please use the dropdown buttons to set your preferred options, or use the checkbox to accept the defaults. The other possible unifying theme is to do with a reading of the texts where everything is to do with fear of betrayal Nos 1 and 2 , suffering as a result of a doomed love affair Nos 3, 4, and 5 , or an overwhelming sense of permanent exclusion and icy isolation Nos 5, 6 and 7. Whether the composer deliberately planned this collection to capture these moods, or whether he simply responded more readily and more regularly to poetry of this kind, is a moot point.

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List of compositions by Johannes Brahms by opus number

Don't show me this message again. Sieben Lieder, Op 48 composer. Hamburg, ; No 2:

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