Recycling Uhland: Brahms and the Wanderlieder

In the 1850s, Ludwig Uhland's Wanderlieder poems were regarded as a coherent cycle, prompting some poetry anthologists and composers to use them to provide a narrative context for new cyclic collections. In keeping with this practice, Brahms placed "Heimkehr," the last Wanderlieder poem, in which Uhland's Wanderer rushes back to his abandoned Beloved, at the conclusion of his opus 7, following five songs focusing on abandoned, isolated, and vulnerable women. The resonance of this narrative outline with Clara Schumann's plight after her husband's 1854 suicide attempt enriches our reception of opus 7.

The second and third Wanderlieder poems, "Scheiden und Meiden" and "In der Ferne," are placed second and third as a musically connected song-pair in Brahms's opus 19 collection, which largely stems from his 1858 courtship of Agathe von Siebold. In an October 1858 manuscript, these two songs are found in E minor rather than the published key of D minor, suggesting that Brahms transposed them down a step to align them tonally with the B-flat-major songs that precede and follow them in opus 19. Brahms may have used the original E-minor song-pair to send a private message to Agathe, as both begin with the pitch motive E-H-E, spelling out the German for "marriage." Opus 19 emerges as a "recycling" of the Wanderlieder in which Brahms accesses the narrative associations of Uhland's famous cycle to create a new one replete with autobiographical associations.