Brahms Johannes

The Light and Frothy Side of Johannes Brahms–His “Liebeslieder Waltzes”

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Image of Brahms at the piano accessed via https://brahmsliebesliederwaltzes52.wordpress.com/2018/04/26/the-journey-begins/

Betcha were a little surprised to see that Brahms even had such a side. Isn’t he rather . . . monumental for such a description? After all, isn’t he one of the three B’s of classical music, along with Bach and Beethoven? Bach certainly wrote lighter music–his “Coffee Cantata” contains the immortal lines “If I can’t drink my bowl of coffee three times daily, then in my torment I will shrivel up like a piece of roast goat.” You can’t quite picture Brahms, or for that matter Beethoven, writing something that silly.

But there were several aspects of Brahms’ life that lent themselves to his writing this music. First, he loved getting together socially with his circle of friends to discuss and perform chamber works. Second, he felt the need for somewhat lighter composing as a relief from his work on Symphony No. 1, an endeavor that took him 21 years. Third, he was always falling in love with unattainable women. Oh dear! First (we think) he fell in love with the wife-then-widow of Brahms’ mentor Robert Schumann and then with a succession of already-taken younger women, one of which was the Schumanns’ daughter Julie. Whew! And, last but not least, Brahms was greatly influenced by the earlier composer Franz Schubert (editing some of Schubert’s music for publication), by Robert Schumann, and by the Waltz King Johann Strauss. The first two wrote many songs, some based on folk tunes, and Strauss of course took the public by storm during his career. Those composers’ lives span from 1797 (Schubert’s birth) to 1899 (Strauss’s death). And there’s Brahms, smack in the middle, living from 1833-1897. But Brahms also kept a pretty canny eye on the musical scene, and it can be said that “these works, in a deliberately popular style, were overwhelmingly responsible for spreading Brahms’ reputation to the general music-buying public, and became the chief source of his personal wealth.”1 After the success of the original Opus 52 set of 18 pieces published in 1869 Brahms went ahead and produced another set of 15, Neue Liebeslieder Walzen, Opus 65. published in 1865.

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A Smaller Version of the Brahms “Requiem”–“Nanie”

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“Orpheus and Eurydice” by Anselm Feuerbach, accessed via Wikimedia Commons, public domain

It has been fascinating to read about the life of Johannes Brahms, and his late composition “Nänie,” written over the course of a year from 1880-1881, is a good example of how he viewed relationships. This piece comes well over a decade after his Eine Deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem) was finally completed in 1869, but both that major work and this single piece are focused on the theme of consolation for those who are mourning a death. (As I write this article in early February 2021 I’m planning to make my next project in book form to be on the Requiem. This is therefore a good warmup! If the subject of the Requiem intrigues you, be sure to check back on this website for updates. And of course the best way to be sure you do that is to subscribe to the blog. Go to the sidebar to do that.)

“Nänie” was written to honor the memory of Brahms’ friend Anselm Feuerbach, a painter who died at the tragically young age of 50. Brahms knew Feuerbach because of his own interest in art; he had a circle of friends who were painters, among them Feuerbach. In fact, the painter’s style was compared to that of Brahms: both were interested in severe classical restraints on personal emotion. Feuerbach’s paintings were focused primarily on Classical themes and subjects, so when he died Brahms’ choice of text illustrated the painter’s style as well as his own. The piece was dedicated to Feuerbach’s stepmother Henriette; more about her below.

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