A bouquet of love songs - Johannes Brahms "Liebeslieder"

‘I will concede that I am a fool if our love songs do not bring joy to a few people’, predicted Johannes Brahms in 1869 while looking over the freshly-printed edition of his first cycle of waltzes for voices and piano four hands – and he was certainly right. ‘I played very happily, the audience was in a state of veritable enthusiasm’, wrote Clara Schumann, recalling the premiere at the completely packed Redoutensaal in Vienna. ‘The love songs – Johannes played them four hands with me – went delightfully and were very well received.’

So well, in fact, that even the normally cool-headed art critic Eduard Hanslick enthused about a music ‘truly of the sweetest kind’ and had not a single negative word to say about Brahms’ foray into a folk-like, typically Viennese style.

Small wonder, then, that the supposedly heavy-hearted Hamburger treated himself to the leisure trip of a second, no less successful collection five years later. Here too, one can easily hear his pleasure in probing the different peculiarities of human affections and aversions. With great charm and delicacy, as well as occasional moments of irony, the composer reveals the emotional confusion in the poems by Daumer and Goethe, which resemble folk songs – often filled with longing, usually luxuriant in tone, but also animated and sometimes even thrillingly irreverent.