Brahms's Song Collections (review)

Researching song cycles is a problem: scholars have not been able to formulate a uniform definition of the genre because so many works of varying characteristics have been labeled as cycles. It is well known that Brahms referred to his published groupings of songs as bouquets rather than cycles, but no one has offered a systematic investigation of what this means. As a result, most discussions of Brahms's song cycles focus on the two opuses that are the most clearly identified as such, the op. 33 Romanzen aus L. Tiecks Magelone and the op. 121 Vier ernste Gesänge. In specialized literature on Brahms's lieder, mention is also occasionally made of the possible cyclic properties of op. 32 (Lieder und Gesänge von Aug.v. Platen und G. F. Daumer) and op. 57 (Lieder und Gesänge von G. F. Daumer), in part because their titles point to the poets as unifying threads. In her new book, Brahms's Song Collections, Inge Van Rij offers a provocative argument that Brahms's other groups of lieder are also cycles, which rely on the "Witz" of the reader to appreciate their coherence.

Van Rij begins with a succinct overview of the concept of the lieder cycle in the nineteenth century, which considers cycles by Beethoven and Schumann, dictionary definitions, and poetic cycles. She emphasizes lyric cycles that Brahms knew and in particular suggests that Klaus Groth's concept of a cycle, as demonstrated by his Klänge, could have provided a model for the composer. (Brahms was friendly with Groth and set a number of his poems.) In the nineteenth century, Friedrich Schlegel defined "Witz" as "the power that allows us to posit connections between markedly contrasting entities" (p. 20), and more recently John Daverio applied this term to Schumann's fragmentary piano pieces and lieder. Van Rij is the first to invoke "Witz" as an aid in understanding Brahms's lieder groupings, and it is extremely useful because it explains how groups that include a strongly contrasting song might nevertheless still be seen as unified.

Brahms usually assembled his lieder collections only after completing the individual pieces. George Bozarth, among others, has documented Brahms's practice, but Van Rij draws on sources, including the composer's handwritten plan to order the op. 113 canons, to reinforce the idea that Brahms formulated these groupings with great care. Despite this selection process, Brahms referred to these collections as "bouquets," not cycles. Although many publications seem to treat this as an oddity, Van Rij demonstrates that "bouquet" was quite a common image. The Schumann-Brahms circle frequently used floral images in relation to songs, and nineteenth-century poets used similar flowery terms, including bouquet, when referring to poems and lyric cycles. Ultimately Van Rij offers the clearest explanation of the term, noting that a song collection is like a bouquet in that the songs are not necessarily composed together and they may be contrasting. Moreover it is possible for the pieces to be separated and rearranged.

Chapter 3 is the heart of the book, and it proposes various ways in which most of Brahms's opus groupings can be viewed as cycles. There is little in-depth musical analysis; rather Van Rij relies on the songs' texts to make her arguments. Her interpretative strategies are derived from her study of Romantic lyric cycles, which demonstrated that groups of poems can be unified by a consistent story line or narrative voice, as well as by more subtle elements such as recurring images, self-reflexivity and "Witz." Like the texts for his Requiem, several of Brahms's collections follow a sorrow to comfort plot archetype, including opp. 7, 32, 49, 57, and 121. By contrast opp. 48 and 106 are characterized by the reverse plot, and move from optimism and security to despair.

After exploring the problematic nature of the narrative in op. 33, and briefly...