‘Der Frühling’ Op. 6 no. 2 (comp. April 1852, publ. Dec. 1853)

IT IS NOT CLEAR where Brahms first read ‘Der Frühling’, and given that he was just short of his nineteenth birthday when he wrote the song, documentary evidence is scarce. Along with Bodenstedt's ‘Lied aus Ivan’, Kalbeck dismissed the poem as ‘weak and unpolished’, arguing that Brahms was not as discriminating in his early song opuses as he would later become. None of Brahms's friends’ reactions to the song was documented, and its first identified performance was nearly thirty years later, in 1881. Still, Rousseau was not completely obscure; his Gedichte first appeared in 1823, and subsequently in three editions, the last as late as 1866. ‘Der Frühling’ first appeared in Rousseau's 1826 collection of poetry and prose, titled Spiele der lyrischen und dramatischen Muse (Plays of the Lyrical and Dramatic Muses). It was reprinted in the second, 1829 edition, and then collected in the 1832 edition of Rousseau's Gedichte. It was also set by the popular composer Karl Gottlieb Reissiger (1798–1859), as his Op. 104 no. 4 in 1835. Any of these may have been Brahms's source, or indeed a separate anthology; Rousseau was based in the Rhineland, but Brahms had not yet travelled there when he wrote this early song.

Further Context

In Brahms's day, Rousseau was remembered for his efforts to inspire a literary renaissance in the Rhineland; his grandfather was the more famous Jean-Jacques Rousseau's nephew. He was born into a relatively poor Catholic family (his father was an interior decorator in Bonn), and was educated through the patronage of a wealthy uncle. He experienced one tumultuous year of higher education at the newly created Bonn University, where he matriculated in May 1820 to study philosophy, philology and history. Heine had joined the university the previous year, and the two young men were very close; Simrock had joined the year before that.

Like Hoffmann, Rousseau fell foul of the authorities at a time when the government was especially suspicious of student gatherings. While still at the Bonn Gymnasium, Rousseau had written a set of verses for the university gymnastics club. He gave these Lieder fur die Bonner Turngemeinde (Songs for the Bonn Gymnastic Society) to the Cologne publisher, M. Spitz.