Introduction

There has been extensive discussion of declamation in the songs of Johannes Brahms, much of it critical in tone. Even Brahms's best friends occasionally questioned his text underlay: Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, for instance, asked him for permission to move syllables around in the duet “Walpurgisnacht.” As Heather Platt points out, severe criticisms originated with proponents of the Wagnerian aesthetic (notably Hugo Wolf, Wilhelm Kienzl, and Ernest Newman). A considerable number of recent writings about Brahms's songs have reiterated and elaborated on these early criticisms, accusing Brahms of bypassing or ignoring the text.

There is substantial evidence to counter the claims that Brahms was inattentive to his poetic texts in general, and to declamation specifically. For example, (1) he advised young composers to read poems that they wished to set to music aloud many times, paying close attention to the declamation, and to lay the poem out across a grid of measures in accordance with the stresses; (2) samples of his own scansions of song texts exist in his notebooks; and (3) there are instances of multiple settings of the same text, which show Brahms wrestling with the appropriate metrical alignment of the syllables.

Some early critics realized that the prevalent opinion of Brahms's declamation was inaccurate. Wilhelm Kienzl, though he quibbled with specific aspects of Brahms's text-setting, admitted that “Brahms is, on the whole, a good declaimer; that is, he makes no glaring errors.” Hugo Riemann also defended Brahms against the accusation by “less penetrating listeners, readers and singers” that he “often commits errors in declamation,” and argued that many of Brahms's apparent infractions of accentuation stem from a metrical flexibility akin to that of early seventeenth-century music. Several recent authors have similarly offered defenses and justifications of Brahms's manner of declamation. George Bozarth, analyzing “Beim Abschied,” op. 95, no. 3 (for which Brahms's scansion is preserved), shows that the composer responded in a logical manner to the poetic stresses via accents other than metrical downbeats. Deborah Rohr finds that many studies have erred by inspecting Brahms's declamation in isolation, and that it makes sense if viewed in conjunction with other factors.