A Singer’s Guide to the Great Composers: Brahms

Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg in 1833, into a musical family, and soon showed promise, particularly as a pianist, coming to the attention of the violinist Joseph Joachim. The duo studied and played together, giving the young Brahms a strong grounding in musical theory and an awareness of musical history and tradition. He was highly critical of the New German School, championed by such as Wagner and Liszt, and determined to base his own compositions on solid principles, eschewing unorthodoxy and “Liszt-like fantasies”. This set him up for a life-long struggle against the New School, which has clouded history’s view of Brahms, as a dull traditionalist who was both boring and unadventurous. 

Nothing could be further from the truth, but his legacy has been tarnished somewhat by this juxtaposition, especially with Wagner. For me, a huge admirer of Wagner, Brahms was a genius of the very highest level, and I love listening to his music and singing it. The fact that he disliked opera, and wrote none, is unimportant when measured against the German Requiem, the Alto Rhapsody and his many brilliant songs, culminating in his “Four Serious Songs”, which I shall write about in detail later. 

In 1853, aged 20, Brahms went to Düsseldorf, where he met Robert Schumann and his wife, Clara. This was the beginning of a tragic tale of madness and thwarted love, which would haunt Brahms for the rest of his life. Schumann was greatly impressed by the young man, and predicted a fine future for him, as composer and pianist, an accolade that Brahms found hard to live up to. Racked with self-doubt, he like Bruckner was forever revising or indeed destroying his work, and this lack of confidence remained a problem for the rest of his life. Schumann’s drift into madness and early death greatly affected the young man, coupled with his growing romantic feelings for Clara, which were never reciprocated. She nonetheless played a crucial part in his development as a composer, but one can imagine the emotional turmoil by which he was afflicted. 

He began to spend more and more time in Vienna, and became a great fan of Richard Wagner, who he met in 1863. Given the later public spats pitching Brahms and Wagner in opposing corners, this seems extraordinary, but it is to Brahms’ credit that he could appreciate the genius of the strange little man from Leipzig. 

In 1865 Brahms’ mother died.  He was only 31, and in his grief he decided to compose a Requiem to her memory. The death of Robert Schumann in 1856 had also had a profound influence on Brahms. Having been brought up in a Lutheran family, but having wandered in his beliefs as far as a vague agnosticism, his dilemma was such that he could not compose a traditional Catholic Requiem following the Latin liturgy, as had precious composers from the Renaissance to Mozart, but had to decide on a new concept. He chose to set sections of the bible dealing with death and comfort for the living, and wrote originally 6 movements, adding a seventh at a later date. The finished work was premiered in Leipzig by the Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1869 and has proved an enduring and deeply satisfying experience both for listener and performer. 

My first acquaintance with the Requiem was at school in my first senior year at the age of 11, when I sang treble in the choir. We performed it in English, and I remember giggling at the baritone soloist’s first line - “Lord, let me know mine end!”. It left a profound impression on me even then, especially the second movement with its slow and inexorable build up to the words, “Behold, all flesh is as the grass”.  

I sang it again, once more in the chorus, singing bass this time, with the Edinburgh Royal Choral Union in the McEwan Hall, the graduation hall of Edinburgh University, and I think I could still sing some of those amazing fugues now. This performance was in the original German, and Brahms’ setting of the biblical words of comfort in the face of death and sadness came over very strongly. As an atheist myself since adolescence, I often find biblical texts difficult to deal with, but the universal message of this work, of comfort and tenderness, of hope In darkness, expressed in some of the most beautiful music ever written, is life affirming. The fourth and fifth movements, in particular, fill me with enormous calmness and the soprano solo in the fifth, especially if really well sung, can be almost unbearably moving. Around the time of the ERCU performance, I remember going to the Usher Hall during the Edinburgh Festival to hear the young Daniel Barenboim conducting the LPO and the Festival Chorus with Edith Mathis and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as soloists, in a performance which has remained with me ever since. In actual fact, I can still experience it, as it was recorded the same week, in George Watson’s College great hall, which I sneaked into at the back, and it is a wonderful recording. The other seminal recording for me was made in 1947, after a series of performances around Europe culminating in the opening of the first ever Edinburgh International Festival, with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Hans Hotter as soloists (two of my closest mentors) and Karajan conducting. Those performances were the first to try to reconcile Europe after the end of the war and the downfall of the Nazis, and their historical importance was as crucial as their majestic artistic merit. Schwarzkopf and Fischer-Dieskau are the soloists on my final recommendation for the Requiem, the magisterial recording conducted by Otto Klemperer. 

For many years, I never put myself forward as soloist for the Brahms Requiem, because it was written for Baritone solo, and I’m a Bass, and it looked on paper too high for me, with top Fs and F Sharps. However, a conversation with my dear friend from St Andrews, Tom Duncan, persuaded me otherwise. Tom is a major baroque stalwart, and I didn’t think he had heard any music after 1800, but he surprised me by wanting to conduct the Brahms Requiem. I should have known better of course, because the Brahms is infused with baroque ideas and full of fugues! Anyway, he decided he wanted to conduct it, and insisted I sing the solos, so I put aside my prejudices about the word baritone and had a closer look. It became clear that a) it was quite high, b) it was quite short (less than 15 minutes singing) and c) it was absolutely fine for me! The tessitura (whether it sits high or only has a few loud high notes) was not impossible and the high notes themselves are so perfectly set that with luck and a good wind, I should sail through it. So it proved, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, and even some of the audience liked it! It remains a source of sadness to me that I have only very rarely sung it again (choral societies take note!), but the combination of a wonderful text and brilliant word setting is very potent. The second solo section, singing in German the same words as the recitative and aria in the Messiah of Handel (“Behold, I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last Trumpet!”), is enormous fun to sing. 

The whole work is wonderful to sing, and since I have sung both the soprano and the bass parts, I should know! Mind you, the Brahms Requiem contains two of the best sections ever written for choral tenor: the beautiful melody in the fourth movement - “Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen” is a gift for a choral tenor, and my personal favourite, which comes at the end of the last movement, occurs between bar 154 (fourth beat) and bar 159 and has the tenors shadowing the sopranos exactly one bar behind, bringing them up to join the sopranos on a top A in bar 159. The fact that Brahms had written this same phrase at the end of the first movement, on different words, makes its recurrence at the end of the whole work all the more poignant. 

In 1896, Clara Schumann, perhaps Brahms’ one great but unreachable love, suffered a stroke, and he realised that her death was imminent. Consequently, he composed his last and greatest songs, “Vier ernste Gesänge” (Four Serious Songs), which were premiered in November of that year in Vienna by two Dutch musicians in the presence of the composer. The songs were written to biblical texts and were for baritone and piano. The first three songs are taken from the Old Testament (Ecclesiastes and Sirach (an apocryphal text)), while the final song is a setting of part of St Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, the great hymn to love that starts with “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love” and ends with “and now, Faith, Hope and Love abide, these three, and the greatest of these is Love”. The first three are unbelievably gloomy, reflecting on death and the fickle transience of Life, with heart-warming phrases like “All go unto one place; all are of dust, and all turn to dust again,” and “Yet better is he, than both the living and the dead, that hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the sun,” and “O Death, how bitter is the remembrance of thee to a man that liveth at rest with his possessions!” 

So far, so suicidal, and yet, in the last song, Brahms looks on the bright side with St Paul’s wondrous words of comfort and love, expressed in fantastic, melodic music from another world with huge soaring phrases. These last pages are utterly fabulous and extremely difficult to sing! In an amazing parallel with Richard Strauss, Brahms wrote possibly his finest songs just before his death, as, in the summer of 1896, he was diagnosed with jaundice, and, around the time of the first performance of the Four Serious Songs, he was further diagnosed with cancer of the liver. He appeared in public for the last time in March 1897, when he was present at a performance of his 4th Symphony conducted by Hans Richter, with ovations after each movement. He died on 3rd April, aged 63. 

I had heard the Serious Songs sung at the Edinburgh Festival by Fischer-Dieskau around the same time he sang in the Brahms Requiem, and fell in love with them. Sadly, they are just a tone too high for me and, as I thought then, untransposable, so I metaphorically laid them aside, until I heard a record of Hans Hotter singing them a tone lower. Immediately I sought out a published score, and discovered that there was a possibility that I could sing them after all, and I have been singing them ever since. The icing on the cake came in the early 80s when I was able to go to Vienna to study those very same songs with Hans Hotter himself, and later at his home in Munich. He rarely sang in lessons, but once, he sang the last couple of pages of the last song, rising to the magnificent top F on “Liebe” and I thought the world was coming to an end, such was the tremendous grandeur of his voice. It is for moments like these that we do all the studying and the travel and hard slog involved in being a singer!  I still use that transposed score of the Brahms songs with the autograph that Hans wrote on it! 

There are lots of wonderful songs by Brahms, most of which are little known these days, and quite a number were written for low voice, which means that, when I sing them, I am singing what the composer envisaged. There is nothing wrong with transposition, but it is always fun to sing in the original key. Look out for such gems as “Auf dem Kirchhofe”, “Feldeinsamkeit” and “Alte Liebe”. As usual, if you seek out the recordings by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, you will find, in my opinion, the finest interpretations of most German Lieder. The combination of a keen intelligence, fantastic attention to words, and one of the most beautiful voices of all time, is a potent one. 

As this is a Singer’s Guide, I don’t need to write about Brahms’ instrumental music, but there is a wealth to be discovered – the symphonies, the concerti, the sonatas, the Hungarian Dances, the chamber music -  but I must add a few words about his famous Liebeslieder Waltzes. Brahms was a great admirer of the Waltz King himself, Johan Strauss, and these mixed songs with four-handed piano accompaniment are a joy to sing and listen to.  

For years, people spoke of the three Bs – Bach, Beethoven and Brahms – but perhaps Johannes Brahms has been neglected a little in recent years. I would encourage all our readers to get back in touch with their inner Brahms. You will not be disappointed!