Nänie ("Lament"), for chorus and orchestra

Johannes Brahms was born in the Free City of Hamburg on May 7, 1833, and died in Vienna on April 3, 1897. He was drawn to Friedrich Schiller’s Nänie in 1875, but deferred setting it then out of consideration for Hermann Goetz, who had set this text the year before. The death in January 1880 of the painter Anselm Feuerbach moved Brahms to return to the poem and, oddly, so perhaps did the experience of hearing Goetz’s version in Vienna a month later. Brahms made sketches that summer at Bad Ischl but did his concentrated work on the composition at Pressbaum near Vienna in summer 1881, completing it by August 22. He dedicated the score to Henriette Feuerbach in memory of her son. Brahms conducted the first performance at a special concert of the Zürich Tonhalle Orchestra on December 6, 1881.

Nänie is scored for four-part mixed chorus with an orchestra of 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 3 trombones, timpani, harp, and strings. Brahms marks the harp part “ad libitum” and indicates alternative violin parts in the event of the harp’s absence; at the same time, he asks for the harp part to be doubled if possible.

Johannes Brahms was a reader of sharp discernment and huge appetite who gathered a library including the complete available works of Boccaccio, Byron, Cervantes, Goethe, Keller, Lessing, Lichtenberg, Schiller, Shakespeare, and Tieck (the non-Germans in translation), as well as many anthologies of poetry and folk song. In his choral works, which he regarded as “large statements” as distinct from the genre paintings and lyric contemplations of his Lieder and part-songs, he turned to the books he cherished most and knew best—in the first place the Bible, then Goethe, and also Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) and Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843).

Friedrich von Schiller’s Nänie (c.1800) gained immediacy for Brahms through the death of his friend Anselm Feuerbach, the artist whom, together with Max Klinger, he admired most among his contemporaries. Brahms’s inspired flow of lyric music suggests a gathering of mourning friends, and so intimate is the expression that Brahms’s surgeon friend, Theodor Billroth, in more than one letter questioned its suitability for public performance: “When I think of the average audience in a Viennese concert hall I get quite upset. Of what importance to them is the tragedy of the death of the beautiful and perfect? … What’s Hecuba to them? Even when beauty is buried they must have a grand funeral!”

Schiller’s theme is divine indifference: “That which subdues men and gods does not move the steely heart of Stygian Zeus.”. In what Brahms’s biographer Hans Gál calls a characteristic “hypertrophy of mythological allusions,” the poet evokes the deaths of Eurydice, brought back from the dead, but with that gift of second life sternly recalled at the last moment; of Adonis, killed by a boar; and of Achilles, slain by Paris at the gates of Troy.

Schiller’s fluidly alternating pentameters and hexameters draw from Brahms a similarly flexible and flowing music. The gentle Andante begins with one of the great oboe solos, twenty-five measures of sweetly elegiac song. It is embedded in wind sonorities, strings offering only the most reticent punctuation and commentary. Brahms saves a real string presence for the entrance of the chorus, but characteristically, he modulates from one sound to the other by having bassoons and horns do a gentle fadeout during the first three measures of singing.

The choral style in Nänie is predominantly polyphonic, and the four voices enter one at a time, almost as though in a fugue. The setting is rhythmically elastic. Schiller’s first line, for example, is given eighteen measures of music, but the second is sung in just four, and the constantly varied texture covers a range from a cappella to richly elaborate orchestral scoring.

The vision of Achilles’ mother, Thetis, and the other daughters of the sea god Nereus rising from the water to mourn the slain hero—“Aber sie steigt aus dem Meer” (“But she rises from the sea”)—inspired one of Brahms’s most radiant melodies. Having all the voices begin it in unison is a canny touch, and the orchestration—a rich impasto of woodwinds, harps, and pseudo-harps (pizzicato strings)—is gorgeous. The four measures that precede this great moment have the lone fortissimo in Nänie (what a master economizer Brahms always was!), and the great melody itself is “only” an effortless rich forte. The Thetis melody marks the first of just two major points of articulation in the work, Brahms, moving with powerful stride, changing meter (from 6/4 to 4/4) and key (from D major to F-sharp major).

For the beginning of the second-to-last line, “Auch ein Klaglied zu sein” (“Even to be a lament”), Brahms returns to 6/4, to D major, to the oboe melody, and gives us a compressed version of the first choral entrance. Here he takes a liberty with the text, as we also hear him do in Schicksalslied and Gesang der Parzen. Schiller’s closing distich brings light, “Auch ein Klaglied zu sein im Mund der Geliebten ist herrlich” (“Even to be a lament in the mouth of the loved one is glorious”) followed by dark, “Denn das Gemeine geht klanglos zum Orkus hinab” (“For what is common sinks in silence to the Kingdom of the Dead”). Brahms softens Schiller’s close by following this contrasting couplet with a repetition of “Auch ein Klaglied,” with its promise of consolation. As the strings ascend into the empyrean, Nänie closes with softly musing repetitions of the word “herrlich” (“glorious”).

Michael Steinberg

Michael Steinberg was program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1976 to 1979, and after that of the San Francisco Symphony and New York Philharmonic. Oxford University Press has published three compilations of his program notes, devoted to symphonies, concertos, and the great works for chorus and orchestra.

The first American performance of Nänie was given in Milwaukee on April 27, 1883, under the direction of Eugene Luening (father of the eminent composer Otto Luening).

The Boston Symphony Orchestra has performed Nänie under Erich Leinsdorf (with the Tanglewood Choir and Berkshire Chorus, Charles Wilson, director, John Oliver, assistant director), Christian Arming (Tanglewood Festival Chorus, John Oliver, conductor), Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos including the most recent subscription performances, in February 2005 (TFC), and the most recent Tanglewood performances—with the BSO in August 2005 and with the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra in August 2011 (both with the TFC, John Oliver, conductor).