Johannes Brahms: Die Lieder. Ein musikalischer Werkführer. By Matthias Schmidt.

Abstract

Whereas Schumann and Wolf tended to write songs in bursts, Brahms produced lieder with some regularity throughout much of his creative life. In this recent book Matthias Schmidt suggests that the lied, viewed as Brahms’s constant companion, may provide a key to understanding the composer’s wider creativity (p. 7). Proceeding from this bold perspective, Schmidt has crafted an insightful introduction to the solo songs that also elucidates many of Brahms’s ongoing musical interests and aesthetic concerns. Though aimed at the general reader, this engaging study contributes to the scholarly understanding of Brahms as a song composer, and asserts the centrality of lieder within his oeuvre. Schmidt provides an overview of Brahms’s song output in eight short chapters, followed by an index of the solo songs and a bibliography that lists relevant academic studies in both English and German. In each chapter he intersperses commentary on individual songs with biographical vignettes and discussions of broader issues important to Brahms’s compositional activity. After an introduction devoted to the set of songs Op. 59, Schmidt works his way through Brahms’s lieder by collection. Throughout the book he is keen to stress the significance of German Romantic literature in shaping Brahms’s artistic values. Other topics explored include the dominant themes of the song texts and their potential connections to the composer’s own life, the singers and original performance contexts for the lieder, and Brahms’s engagement with folksong and historical musical styles. Biographical details are well chosen so as to shed light both on Brahms’s interests and the particularity of his historical position. At the start of chapter 5 we learn of Brahms’s wonderment at his initial encounter with a phonograph in 1889; later on Schmidt evocatively describes the composer’s apartment and collection of musical manuscripts (p. 84), and the final chapter of the book begins with an account of Brahms’s funeral, highlighting his celebrity status in late nineteenth-century Vienna.