Introduction

Summary

LOVERS OF GERMAN SONG are often told that of the four great nineteenthcentury song composers – Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Hugo Wolf – Schumann and Wolf are ‘literary’, and Schubert and Brahms are not. This view has emerged only in the last half-century – as late as 1962, Hans- Joachim Moser in his seminal study of the Lied declared Brahms a ‘connoisseur’ of texts – but it has been cemented by countless programme booklets, pre-concert talks and recording liner notes. General wisdom has it that Brahms was attracted by the broad emotional content of a poem (its Stimmung), and that the detail was relatively unimportant. Of course, this view is not shared by all, nor is it applied equally to all the poems, nor is it entirely unjustified. Nevertheless, the result is that very little is known about most of Brahms's poets; and if the clue to unlocking the song lies exclusively within the composer's genius, and the poet is obscure, then who cares?

Do we really believe, in Brahms's case, that the Lied represents ‘an equality of music and text’? Performers and scholars alike respect the names of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich Heine, Joseph von Eichendorff and Eduard Mörike; however, when confronted with Karl Lemcke, Adolf von Schack or Hans Schmidt, it is tempting to argue that Brahms's compositions are complete in their own right. The trend towards recitals themed by poets or organised around cycles makes Brahms's panoply of poets, whose work he often set just once or twice, still more daunting. And yet his musical responses include some of the bestloved songs in the repertoire. This transformation cannot be ascribed purely to Brahms's alchemical gifts; he must have glimpsed a trace of gold in each poem he set, otherwise this extremely exacting composer would not have bothered.

Spotting this trace ourselves becomes possible if we understand what Brahms's poets – and by association Brahms – believed to be ‘good poetry’, and this can be achieved by exploring what these figures meant to him and his society. The purpose and design of this volume is therefore simple: each of the forty-six poets whose verses Brahms set in solo song within a published, numbered opus (i.e. where the song was overseen by him from genesis to publication) is accorded a lexicon entry.