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The anthology
Stimmen der Völker in ihren Liedern
(Voices of the
peoples in their songs) compiled by the poet and philosopher Herder,
friend of Goethe, disciple of Kant and passionate admirer of Rousseau,
had a powerful and lasting influence on the young Brahms. Having
drunk from this new source, his sensibility produced a work that is very
much sui generis: the Ballades (op.10, 1854), whose four pieces are as
indissociable as the movements of a sonata.
Geoffroy Couteau sees them as his ‘privileged entry point into the
imaginative realm of Brahms’s piano music, with their harmonic and
contrapuntal texture which are also to be found in the variations and that
vein of nostalgia which irrigates all his compositions’. Inspired by a Scots
ballad translated by Herder – a dialogue between a mother and her son over
which the shadow of patricide looms – they present a poetic illustration of
the text without ever being descriptive or narrative in any way. Quite aside
from the power of the ambience of northern legend and the sentiment of
communion with nature that they express (both elements that colour all
his future output), they constitute above all the kernel of his conception of
music as poetry, his choice of ‘pure’ music as opposed to programme music
in particular, and to everything that theNewGerman School (led by Liszt and
Wagner) advocated for the fusion of the arts in general. Schumann, whose
precarious state of health still allowed him moments of lucidity, wrote to
Clara from his sanatorium:
And the Ballades – the first, wonderful, wholly new . . .
The end is beautiful, very individual. And how different the second is, how varied,
how stimulating for the imagination; there are enchanting sounds there! . . . The
final F sharp in the bass seems to introduce the third Ballade. What will I call it?
Demoniacal – quite splendid, and becoming more and more mysterious . . . In the
fourth, how marvellous it is that the strange first note of the melody hesitates
betweenmajor and minor, then stays wistfully in the major. And now on to overtures
and symphonies!
48 BRAHMS_COMPLETE SOLO PIANOWORKS