The death of Clara Schumann, also in May 1896, a heartbreaking loss, is undoubtedly part of the genesis of this dark and powerful work for the end of an era, the end of Clara’s life, and premonitions of the end of the composer’s.īrahms was an atheist, sometimes inclined to borderline agnosticism, but his knowledge of the highways and byways of the Bible was unparalleled among song composers. Eric Sams observes that even this joke was partly serious, that the composer was ‘contemplating his own lifetime’s harvest of accomplishment’. Brahms was sixty-three on 7 May and he claimed that he regarded the songs as a birthday present to himself with deliberate irony he called them ‘Schnaderhüpfl’, a genre of popular harvest ditty from Bavaria or Austria. When writing this music (completed in May 1896) the composer was already suffering from liver cancer-it was a painful illness that would eventually kill him eleven months later. This set of songs, Brahms’s last, is seldom heard in recital as anything other than a complete opus, although the third song, by far the most famous, is sometimes performed separately.
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