The Origin of Brahms's in Stiller Nacht

Abstract

Johannes Brahms's two interpretations of the enigmatic In stiller Nacht are among his best known and most beloved folk-song settings, a reputation justly deserved, for in each a poem is united with music of equal simplicity and poignancy. In the choral rendition, which opens the second volume of the Deutsche Volkslieder for mixed a cappella choir (1864; WoO 34 no. 8; see ex. 1), a rhythmically straightforward homophonic texture is softly colored with neighbor-tone dissonances to reinforce the expressive undulation of the melody and delicately orchestrated by reducing the voices to three treble parts or amplifying them with divisi alto or bass. The distinctive feature of the setting for solo voice, which was published thirty years later, in 1894, and occupies a place of honor as the last of the arrangements for solo voice in the forty-nine Deutsche Volkslieder (WoO 33 no. 42; see ex. 2), is the metrical displacement of the accompaniment: for much of the the widely spaced piano part enters an eighth note in advance of the voice, creating a mood of hushed disquiet, which, over the course of the stanza, is intensified by a rise in dynamic level to forte. Metrically stable passages provide resolution within and at the end of each stanza.(1) In the poem a lament, carried gently on the wind, is heard early in the night (ex. 3); it melts the heart with its bitter pain and sorrow, and tears flow from the eyes of the listener. All nature is moved, and the moon ceases to shine, the stars stop their gleaming, the birds no longer sing joyously, and the wild beasts grieve as well. The responsiveness of nature to human suffering harkens back to the poetry of the Minnesingers, and this haunting, touching plaint of a heart stricken to death(2) has been viewed as a secular lyric. But study of the provenance of this lovely folk song reveals that the lament issues from no ordinary mortal: the quiet night is the scene of Christ's suffering on the Mount of Olives.(3) Just when and how Brahms came to know In stiller Nacht has long been a mystery. When queried by his friend and future biographer Max Kalbeck in 1894, Brahms was characteristically evasive: that the would not be found among his books is all he would say.(4) Gustav Ophuls, who compiled an anthology of Brahms's texts in 1898,(5) found a seventeenth-century sacred poem by the Jesuit poet Friedrich von Spee that opens with two lines similar to the initial verses of In stiller Nacht - Bei stiller Nacht, zur ersten Wacht / Ein Stimm sich gund zu Klagen (In the quiet night, at the first watch, / a voice utters its cry) - and closes with two quatrains (out of fifteen) that match Brahms's second stanza. The poem, which is entitled Trawer-Gesang von der Noth Christi am Oelberg in dem Garten (Mourning-Song of the Suffering of Christ on the Mount of Olives in the Garden), first appeared in the Seraphische Lustgarten, published in Cologne in 1635, and was included in Spee's Trutz Nachtigal of 1649. (Max Friedlaender gives the first three stanzas of Spee's poem in his book Brahms Lieder.(6)) [Musical Expression Omitted] [Musical Expression Omitted] The tune provided with this poem, though, was not the one subsequently used by Brahms, and Kalbeck initially concluded that Brahms had composed the melody himself. In 1915, in an appendix to the second edition of the fourth volume of his Brahms biography, Kalbeck reopened the issue.(7) It had been brought to his attention that the four-bar melody of a Miserere mei Deus (Psalm 51) published in Paderborn in 1863 bore a strong resemblance to the initial eight bars of In stiller Nacht (see ex. 4a). Moreover, a sacred about Christ's suffering on the Mount of Olives - Bei finstrer Nacht zur ersten Wacht / ertont ein banges Klagen (In the dark of night, at the first watch, / an anxious lament rang out) - had appeared in Albert Gereon Stein's Kolnisches Gesangbuch: Sammlung katholischer Kirchenlieder mit Melodien of 1852 with a similar eight-bar melody (ex. …