The Cambridge Companion to the Lied (Cambridge Companions to Music) by The Cambridge Companion to the Lied (2004)

Author:The Cambridge Companion to the Lied (2004)
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2004-07-01T03:00:00+00:00

Example 9.3 Vergebliches Ständchen, mm. 52–67

Vergebliches Ständchen, like the other songs discussed in this section and elsewhere in this chapter, clearly demonstrates the importance of the bass line. In many cases the bass line is essential to a song’s motivic development and it almost always provides a strong, contrapuntal framework for the melody. Henschel, Max Graf, and the little-known composer Eduard Behm, all of whom recall that Brahms strongly emphasized the contrapuntal role of the bass when composing songs, further attest to the prominence of these lines. Graf and Behm both relate that when Brahms examined their songs he covered the middle voices so he could inspect the outer ones, and Graf also notes that in accompanying singers on the piano, Brahms brought out the bass. Further evidence of this feature is to be found in Brahms’s sketches for such songs as Vorüber, Op. 58, No. 7, which show that he began to compose with the outer voices.41 Although this emphasis on the outer voices was surely strengthened by Brahms’s study of eighteenth-century theorists and thorough bass, the prominence of the bass is already evident in some of his earliest songs, including Liebestreu.

Whether through motivic manipulations, harmonic progressions, rhythms, or melodic contour, Brahms’s Lieder reveal a composer energetically engaged in bringing a text to life by musical means. Brahms’s friends and colleagues, including Billroth and Kalbeck, repeatedly praise the emotional affect of these psychological portraits. Furthermore, their critiques reinforce Jenner’s report that the relationship between music and text draws on numerous parameters, and not primarily on correct declamation. In her 28 October 1888 discussion of Auf dem Kirchhofe, Elisabet von Herzogenberg notes the emotional impact of the harmony, melodic line, declamation, and the imagery of the opening measures of the piano. Similarly, in his discussion of Die Mainacht, Friedländer refers to the way in which the harmonies profoundly convey the changing moods of the poem, as well as the effectiveness of the pauses and the piano part.42 Although the exploration offered here of Brahms’s text-setting techniques has taken each compositional element in turn, in any one song these techniques function together, as Herzogenberg and Friedländer demonstrate. It is this multifaceted approach to text setting that makes Brahms’s Lieder so rich and his characterizations of the protagonists that populate the poems he set to music so compelling. Moreover, it is these features that justify Brahms’s inclusion with Schubert, Schumann, and Wolf as one of the true masters of the nineteenth-century Lied.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.