© The Author (2007). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
‘The Artist in Love’ in Brahms’s Life and in his ‘German Folksongs’
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Abstract |
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‘The artist in love’ developed as a motif in German Romanticism in cross-fertilization with the lives of artists, and there are striking parallels between the motif as it appears in the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann and the experience of Brahms. His Deutsche Volkslieder of 1894, though neither the locus of literary allusions nor autobiography, echoes both the cultural motif and aspects of his experience, including his relationships with Robert and Clara Schumann, and with Agathe von Siebold. The set has been treated to date as a mere compilation, and was not intended for continuous performance, but the emerging overall narrative points towards a characteristically elusive coherence, reinforced through the selection and ordering of melodies and keys. The approach to structure and coherence, the personal overtones, and the evocation of cultural traditions that cross art forms all suggest comparison with the 1893 Brahmsfantasie of Max Klinger.
Brahms’s own richly allusive words elucidate the importance he attached to the set, not only as a means to demonstrate the power of folksong and give it a place in bourgeois homes, but also as a work of art and a vehicle of personal communication with those to whom he was or had been closest. Many of its features, including perhaps a renewed engagement with Schumann, illuminate characteristic concerns of Brahms’s later years.