On German Romantics: Brahms's Schicksalslied, Mahler's Ich bin der Welt, Mendelssohn's Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, Beethoven's Violin Romance, and Brahms Liebeslieder Waltzes

During the first two years of our journey together, Princeton Pro Musica and I explored the work of several musical periods and places, but the music of the great German Romantic masters like Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Mahler was notably absent. I wanted the singers to find their footing with me at the helm before we sailed into those particular waters, so stormy with musical highs and lows, so salty with musical expression.

For me, the music of these masters provided the first tastes of emotionally charged, passionate music making, on both a small and large scale. These scores, tattooed with expressive markings, remind players that music comes alive only when we move beyond simple execution to the thrilling but vulnerable world of interpretation. As a young teen, playing Beethoven’s sonatas, Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words, and the works of Chopin, I relished solitary evening practice in a dark living room, when I’d put aside the technique exercises, let my foot creep onto the pedal, stretch the bounds of rubato, and experiment with markings like dolce espressivo and con fuoco. My first full-scale choral-orchestral ventures as a young singer were with Beethoven 9, Mahler 2, and the Brahms Requiem. Anyone who has sung or heard these monuments knows how these composers get under our skin and get the blood moving, unlock the heart and let its contents spill forth in sound. It’s nearly impossible to sing or listen to these works without giving over something of yourself, without divulging a bit of your soul. Risk and reward hang together in an enticing balance.

Beethoven’s Romance for Violin in G Major, written at the dawn of the nineteenth century, opens this concert as Beethoven’s early works opened the Romantic musical era. Its gracefulness evokes the composure and balance of a Classical melody by Mozart, but there’s something more to it. The lyricism cages an underlying intensity. This duality confronts our ears in the first notes of the violin solo, where the beautiful melody of the upper voice is energized by just a hint of the effort inherent in the player’s having to navigate tricky double stops. Each subsequent variation strives to reach a little further than the last. Beethoven composed the Romance in 1802, the same year he wrote his Symphony No. 2, the second and last of his symphonies in a more Classical, Haydnesque mode—but also the same year in which he wrote his Heiligenstadt Testament, an outpouring of despair over his increasing deafness.

The musical productivity unleashed by that despair had legendary reverberations in the music of many European composers throughout the nineteenth century. Increasingly bold, turbulent works from Beethoven and his successors, in the ears of an increasingly subjective audience, seemed to grapple with life’s biggest questions. Devoid of the explicit assurances of the Christian tradition (which underlie so many other choral works), the pieces we perform today confront the frustrations of fate, juggle serenity and storminess, and examine our relationship to an ever-changing world.

Lest today’s program mire itself too deeply in these big questions, I included movements from Brahms’ Liebeslieder Walzer. The waltzes give us the other side of the Romantic musical coin: the flowering of chamber music, and the lighthearted intimacy and joy of friends gathered around a piano, enjoying song and poetry. Brahms intended the waltzes to be genuine Hausmusik and chose as texts Eastern European folk poems. Brahms called the waltzes “trifles,” but in his skillful hands, poetry and music combine to delineate a delightful series of moods and short scenes that belie the compositional sophistication beneath their surface.

The two early Romantic pieces by Felix Mendelssohn (1803–1849) and Beethoven bear the same title—Meeresstille und Glückliche Fahrt (“calm sea and prosperous voyage”)—because they share the same inspiration: a pair of poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Both Mendelssohn and Beethoven had met and revered the great writer. Beethoven even dedicated his Meeresstille to Goethe. For his part, Mendelssohn’s choice of key (D major) pays homage to the Beethoven setting, which was premiered on Christmas Day 1815; Mendelssohn’s debuted on December 1, 1832. I have chosen to program them adjacently, as a round trip rather than one-way journey, in the hopes that the proximity better illuminates the imaginations of these two remarkable composers.

Goethe’s poems draw delightful effects from Mendelssohn and Beethoven. In both pieces stunning evocations of the “Calm Sea” give way to reflections of the varied events of a maritime journey: stirring breezes, unfurling sails; captains rousing sleepy sailors; ships briskly gliding over glistening water; roiling storm swells, followed abruptly by stretches of calm waters; and sailors sighing with relief and shouting with joy at the sight of land. The central image of the sea itself contains the profundity of the poems. The Romantics revered beauty, observable with their senses, and marveled at the sublime, an unknowable quality that could exalt them or destroy them. Nature marries beauty and the sublime in one, and no image of nature captures this paradoxical essence more perfectly than the sea. Calm waters and a windless sky were frightful portents for the sailor, foretelling financial ruin or even death. And while stormy seas were dangerous, a good strong wind was required to embark on any journey. Mendelssohn’s and Beethoven’s music reminds us that life’s journey necessarily alternates between tranquility and tempest.

Several decades later, Johannes Brahms found similar inspiration. While visiting a North Sea port he discovered a book of poetry by Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) and was particularly taken with the “Schicksalslied.” Later that day Brahms’ companions found him on the shore sketching a musical composition, which would become his Schicksalslied. Like Goethe’s pair of poems, Hölderlin’s “Song of Destiny” presents a contrast, not between calm and stormy seas but between two worlds: that of the “blessed geniuses” who “wander up there” amidst “radiant divine breezes,” untouched by fate, sleeping like infants in “silent eternal clarity;” and that of “us,” who have no place to rest, and are dashed like water from cliff to cliff. Brahms’ music brings these images to life in two large contrasting sections. And yet, as Mendelssohn suggested roiling depths lurking far below the silvery surface of his Meeresstille, Brahms’ musical details hint that those two worlds may not be entirely separate. From the first notes of the introduction, marked “slow and yearningly,” the celestial color of muted strings playing espressivo is tempered by the ever-present premonitory throb of the timpani.

It is hard to imagine that the composer of works as colossal as Mahler’s symphonies also wrote a song as meditative and intimate as “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.” But as soon as it begins, it lures the listener as only a Mahler song can. The openness and radiance of the low harp surrounding the lone voice of the English horn is sparse yet somehow plush. An array of timbres and colors unfolds, but without a single superfluous pitch or part. It is entirely essence, potent and heart-rending. Based on a poem by Friedrich Rückert, the song was inspired, Mahler said, “by the feeling that fills one and rises to the tip of one’s tongue but goes no further.” In the first half of the song, the English horn and the singer’s voice reach upward, striving to build a melody. Each of the three sections of the piece takes up some version of this melody but concludes on the descending side of its arc. In the middle section, the poet claims to have overcome the very worldly tumult that overwhelmed the second part of Brahms’ Schicksalslied. When he continues, “I live alone, in my heaven, my love, my song,” the delivery of each notion steps down from the heights he has tried to ascend. The orchestral postlude ends as low and as spare as it began. As he does in his symphonies, Mahler has given us an entire world, but this orchestral song presents an intimate portrait of an individual struggling to find his place in it. Of Rückert’s poem, Mahler said: “It is I myself.”

In all three of the extended pieces by Mendelssohn, Beethoven, and Brahms, the composers begin with music of complete serenity and then transition, via an anguished chord, to more tempestuous music. At the very end of Mendelssohn’s overture, after fanfares herald the arrival of the ship, the strings play three quiet chords, shifting the focus back to the calm sea that stretches behind the sailors. In both the Brahms and the Mahler, the orchestra—the world the speaker inhabits—exists before and after the first and final utterances. Whether “I” or “us,” worldly existence is ephemeral. In his poem, Rückert reassures us that, dead to the world, he lives in his loving and his song—or is he resigned to such living death? Brahms makes no such proclamation; the last words the choir sings are “Ungewisse hinab” (the “unknown below”). The orchestra attempts to make the ending a happy one by returning to the opening music in a brighter key. But even then the blissful and serene C major is blistered by moments of intense dissonance. How exquisite a reminder that the sweetness of life’s apparent triumphs is more keenly felt in relief against fate’s blows. Dulcius ex asperis (sweeter after difficulties), as the motto goes. How engaging, how frustrating—and how Romantic—to write music that leaves us not embracing answers but facing our questions.