Songs of Love, Loss & Connection

 Love Songs and Heartbreak: The Complicated Romantic Life of Johannes Brahms

Johannes Brahms—“darling of the muses,” handsome, and only 33 years old—had already known a lifetime of love, loss, and connection when he wrote his first set of Liebeslieder [Love Songs] Waltzes in1868–69. One of the towering figures of the Romantic Age, Brahms suffered many romantic setbacks in his personal life.

Love. Biographers have speculated that the teenaged Johannes’s time as a pianist in Hamburg’s brothels, where he played to support his family, may have warped the young man’s romantic sensibilities, and complicated his emotional development and relationships with women. We will never know the full story, but unlike Mozart, whose marriage to Constanze Weber was by all accounts a happy union (their marriage spurred the composition of the Grand Mass in C Minor, which was performed by City Choir on January 28), Brahms was unlucky in love and remained a bachelor.

Brahms maintained a lifelong (probably platonic) love affair with Clara Schumann, the talented composer, pianist, and wife of Brahms’s mentor Robert Schumann. Their love and connection grew deeper during Robert’s time as an asylum inmate (Brahms was allowed to visit; Clara was not) and subsequent death. One letter from Brahms reads, "Clara, dear Clara… I feel ever more happy and peaceful in my love for you. Every time I miss you more but I long for you almost with joy. That is how it is. And I knew the feeling already but never quite so warm as it is now.” Clara’s missives to him are no less affectionate. As she wrote to him in 1858, “I am waiting for another letter, my Johannes. If only I could find longing as sweet as you do. It only gives me pain and fills my heart with unspeakable woe. Farewell! Think kindly of Your Clara.” Yet by all accounts they kept the relationship platonic.

On an 1858 vacation to Göttingen with Clara and her children, Brahms met the soprano Agate von Siebold. They were soon engaged, but almost as quickly broke off the engagement. In 1859, Brahms wrote to her: “I love you! I must see you again, but I am incapable of bearing fetters. Please write me ... whether ... I may come again to clasp you in my arms, to kiss you, and tell you that I love you."

Ten years later, Brahms found himself in love with Robert and Clara Schumann’s daughter Julie, though he kept his feelings private and Julie married another man shortly thereafter. At age 57, Brahms frequented the company of the Italian mezzo-soprano Alice Barbi. Although the relationship attracted gossip and Brahms confided in a friend that Barbi was the only woman he would consider marrying in middle-age, the relationship apparently never developed beyond a warm friendship.

Loss.  Brahms’s first great loss was the death of his mentor, Robert Schumann, in 1856. 20-year-old Johannes was introduced to the Schumanns in 1853 by the violinist Joseph Joachim, and Robert Schumann immediately took Brahms under his wing, calling him “the darling of the Muses” and singing his praise far and wide. Brahms lived with the Schumanns for a number of months, and grew close to both Robert and Clara. Schumann suffered from mental illness and after a failed suicide attempt, committed himself to an asylum. Brahms rushed to Clara’s side; he was allowed to visit Robert while Clara was not, and he became an important conduit between the two, while his feelings for Clara deepened. When Schumann died, both Brahms and Clara were devastated, and while they were now free to develop their romance, they failed to do so. Brahms’s engagement to Agathe von Siebold, another loss, ended in 1859.

Brahms’s mother died in 1865. It is commonly believed that the composer wrote his great Requiem in response to this loss. 1868 brought the marriage of Julie Schumann—a kind of a loss, given Brahms’s tendre for her, but also seems to have unleashed some of his most passionate, heart-rending, and beautiful writing on the themes of love and loss: the German Requiem, Op. 45 (1866/69), the Liebeslieder Waltzer, Op. 52 (1868/69), and Alto Rhapsody, Op. 53 (1868).

Connections. The Liebeslieder and Neue Liebeslieder (Op. 65, composed between 1869 and 1874) Waltzes, selections from which will be performed by the City Choir of Washington on March 17, exemplify some of the most important personal and musical connections in Brahms’s life. The songs are by turn flirtatious, blissful, passionate, angry, and elegiac. They provide windows into every emotion experienced in love. Listeners will hear echoes of Schubert and Schumann lieder (Brahms explicitly paid homage to Schubert in these songs), as well as to Brahms’s own German Requiem, with its comforting acceptance of all of humanity’s foibles and virtues.

The Neue Liebeslieder cycle—and the City Choir’s set—ends with an Envoi (Zum Schluß) with text by Goethe. This song is the most reminiscent of Brahms’s Requiem, and begins, “Enough, now, ye Muses!” perhaps a response to Robert Schumann’s praise of the young Brahms as the “darling of the Muses.” Jan Swofford, Brahms’s preeminent biographer, considers it “self-evident that Zum Schluß, whose text and music are in stark contrast to all of the other waltzes in both Op. 52 and Op. 65, is a personal statement by Brahms, who throughout the troubled relationships in his life (sich Jammer und Glück wechseln in liebender Brust [how joy and sorrow alternate in loving hearts]) found solace in music (Linderung kommt einzig, ihr [Musen], von euch [assuagement comes from the Muses alone]).”

Don’t miss the City Choir of Washington’s performance of Brahms’s Liebeslieder Waltzes (selections) on March 17, 2024! Get your tickets now: