The Art of Lamenting: Resurrection of the Past in Brahms’s “Es steht ein Lind,” WoO 33, no. 41
Scholars have shown that Brahms’s transcriptions and settings of preexisting folksong melodies and his interest in their original sixteenth-century sources span his career from the 1850s through the 1890s. Studies by Virginia Hancock, George Bozarth, and Margit McCorkle of Brahms’s handwritten folksong collections, held at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, suggest that Brahms knew the provenance of folksong melodies that he set, as well as contemporary nineteenth-century settings by Friedrich Wilhelm Arnold and Wilhelm Tappert. Heather Platt’s recent analysis of multiple versions of Brahms’s folksong settings further demonstrates Brahms’s interest in recomposing accompaniments in order to highlight each melody’s tonal implications and to express meaning in the text.
This paper discusses the historical provenance and expressive tonal features of Brahms’s C-major folksong “Es steht ein Lind” (WoO 33, no. 41), published in 1894. I extend studies of Brahms’s folksongs by Hancock, McCorkle, and Platt by examining aspects of Brahms’s setting that have not been discussed. I suggest that Brahms’s song alludes to a sixteenth-century Tenorlied by Caspar Othmayr in the collection 68 deutsche, französische, lateinische mehrstimmige Lieder (published by Berg & Neuber in 1550 and digitized by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek) and to a late-nineteenth-century setting by Wilhelm Tappert published c. 1890. By comparing different versions of the text in Othmayr’s and Tappert’s settings, I will show that Brahms uses Tappert’s text, which emphasizes nostalgia for the past, but musically alludes to Othmayr—a Meistersinger—as if symbolizing his own lament for the lost art of setting German folksongs. I will also show that Brahms’s expressive treatment of the tonic pitch C within a melisma in the sixteenth-century melody depicts the linden tree, stream, and bird in Tappert’s text as animate beings. They seem to lament with the protagonist in the present for a past that Brahms’s musical homage resurrects.
Scholars have shown that Brahms’s transcriptions and settings of preexisting folksong melodies and his interest in their original sixteenth-century sources span his career from the 1850s through the 1890s. Studies by Virginia Hancock, George Bozarth, and Margit McCorkle of Brahms’s handwritten folksong collections, held at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, suggest that Brahms knew the provenance of folksong melodies that he set, as well as contemporary nineteenth-century settings by Friedrich Wilhelm Arnold and Wilhelm Tappert. Heather Platt’s recent analysis of multiple versions of Brahms’s folksong settings further demonstrates Brahms’s interest in recomposing accompaniments in order to highlight each melody’s tonal implications and to express meaning in the text.
This paper discusses the historical provenance and expressive tonal features of Brahms’s C-major folksong “Es steht ein Lind” (WoO 33, no. 41), published in 1894. I extend studies of Brahms’s folksongs by Hancock, McCorkle, and Platt by examining aspects of Brahms’s setting that have not been discussed. I suggest that Brahms’s song alludes to a sixteenth-century Tenorlied by Caspar Othmayr in the collection 68 deutsche, französische, lateinische mehrstimmige Lieder (published by Berg & Neuber in 1550 and digitized by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek) and to a late-nineteenth-century setting by Wilhelm Tappert published c. 1890. By comparing different versions of the text in Othmayr’s and Tappert’s settings, I will show that Brahms uses Tappert’s text, which emphasizes nostalgia for the past, but musically alludes to Othmayr—a Meistersinger—as if symbolizing his own lament for the lost art of setting German folksongs. I will also show that Brahms’s expressive treatment of the tonic pitch C within a melisma in the sixteenth-century melody depicts the linden tree, stream, and bird in Tappert’s text as animate beings. They seem to lament with the protagonist in the present for a past that Brahms’s musical homage resurrects.