Adolf Frey (1855 Aarau – 1920 Zurich)

Summary

‘Meine Lieder’ Op. 106 no. 4 (comp. summer 1888, publ. Oct. 1888)

BRAHMS met Adolf Frey through two Swiss friends: Widmann and Keller. Widmann found Frey ‘highly talented’, and turned to him to correct linguistic and metric errors in his own work. Keller and Frey first encountered one another on 22 June 1876 at the annual celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of the Siege of Murten by Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. Brahms greatly admired Keller, and Simrock drew his attention to Frey's account of that poet's decline and death in the Deutsche Rundschau in November 1890. Equally, in his 1903 biography of Arnold Böcklin, Frey mentioned the visits of Brahms and his friend the violinist Friedrich Hegar, thus recalling the net of friendships across music and art.

Upon Widmann's request, Keller encouraged the younger man; Frey called him ‘Meister Gottfried’ and the relationship was like that of Brahms and the young composers who venerated him. Widmann was also the go-between for Frey and Brahms. Brahms's copy of Frey's Gedichte contains a card stating ‘Ueberreicht von dem Verfasser’ (‘given by the author’); ‘Meine Lieder’ is unmarked but copied into Brahms's notebook. This was the result of Widmann's encouragement; he wrote to Frey on 13 July 1888:

I already did the main thing last summer, which is to show your poems to the honoured and great musician; he has them and [Conrad Ferdinand] Meyer's with him for a week in Thun. But I will draw them to his attention again as soon as he is with me in Bern and I myself am settled there.

Widmann's intervention worked, since a month later, on 14 August 1888, he reported to Frey that Brahms had made a setting and sent it to Simrock. He continued: ‘Altogether, Brahms spoke very warmly about the excellence of your poetry collection, without specifically emphasising whether the poems were settable.’ Brahms requested that Widmann send Frey a copy of the published song that autumn, spurring Frey to write more texts for musical setting. When Frey received Op. 106, he was not even sure whether it would be appropriate to write Brahms a letter of thanks.