Brahms and Eichendorff
The significance of Brahms's engagement with the works of Joseph von Eichendorff (1788-1857) is obscured by the small number of surviving musical settings. Brahms might not have set "the whole of Eichendorff", as once suggested by his biographer Max Kalbeck, but the German Romantic writer was certainly a key figure in shaping the composer's youthful worldview. Many of Brahms's extant Eichendorff settings are based on poems that were interpolated within the writer's major works of prose fiction (Finscher 1990). These songs, together with letters, biographical anecdotes, and Brahms's notebooks of treasured quotations, suggest that the young Brahms was for several years captivated by Eichendorff's literary landscapes.
In my paper I set out to provide a comprehensive account of Brahms's engagement with Eichendorff in the 1850s and '60s. Firstly, through the close reading of passages from selected novels and novellas, I contemplate what Brahms might have found so attractive about Eichendorff's poetic imagination. Important themes outlined here include the celebration of the natural world as a site of artistic inspiration, the suggestion that the activities of travel and reading are essential to the development of an artistic nature, and the claim that life itself should be lived as a type of aesthetic enterprise. In the second part of the paper I turn my attention to a selection of Brahms's musical works with suggestive connections to Eichendorff's writings. My examples comprise both vocal and instrumental works: Brahms's settings of poetic texts that occur within Eichendorff's prose fiction, together with instrumental compositions that have affinities with these same imaginative worlds. Ultimately I suggest that an understanding of the soundscapes of Eichendorff's stories, with their alluring mixture of horn calls and folksong, may shed new light on Brahms's romantic musical enthusiasms.
The significance of Brahms's engagement with the works of Joseph von Eichendorff (1788-1857) is obscured by the small number of surviving musical settings. Brahms might not have set "the whole of Eichendorff", as once suggested by his biographer Max Kalbeck, but the German Romantic writer was certainly a key figure in shaping the composer's youthful worldview. Many of Brahms's extant Eichendorff settings are based on poems that were interpolated within the writer's major works of prose fiction (Finscher 1990). These songs, together with letters, biographical anecdotes, and Brahms's notebooks of treasured quotations, suggest that the young Brahms was for several years captivated by Eichendorff's literary landscapes.
In my paper I set out to provide a comprehensive account of Brahms's engagement with Eichendorff in the 1850s and '60s. Firstly, through the close reading of passages from selected novels and novellas, I contemplate what Brahms might have found so attractive about Eichendorff's poetic imagination. Important themes outlined here include the celebration of the natural world as a site of artistic inspiration, the suggestion that the activities of travel and reading are essential to the development of an artistic nature, and the claim that life itself should be lived as a type of aesthetic enterprise. In the second part of the paper I turn my attention to a selection of Brahms's musical works with suggestive connections to Eichendorff's writings. My examples comprise both vocal and instrumental works: Brahms's settings of poetic texts that occur within Eichendorff's prose fiction, together with instrumental compositions that have affinities with these same imaginative worlds. Ultimately I suggest that an understanding of the soundscapes of Eichendorff's stories, with their alluring mixture of horn calls and folksong, may shed new light on Brahms's romantic musical enthusiasms.