Lieder und Gesänge: The Beating Heart of Johannes Brahms

Lieder und Gesänge: The Beating Heart of Johannes Brahms

Vincent P. de Luise M.D.

Brahms' output of vocal music was greater than that of the instrumental music he composed. He wrote numerous Lieder (German Art Songs) and Gesänge (Songs) throughout his life, from early gems at age 19, to the succinct and powerful Four Serious Songs (Vier ernste Gesänge) a few months before he died, at the age of 64 in 1897.

A third of Brahms' songs were in simple strophic form (each verse the same), a third were through-composed (each verse set differently), and a third were in what could be called "variable strophic" form, a style which Brahms perfected, taking the genre farther than Schubert had done. The through-composed pieces Brahms tended to label as Gesänge, indicating compositions of a larger scale than those he called Lieder.

A number of these musical jewels burst from Brahms' beating heart, as much as his fertile mind, passionate outbursts of love, wondrous songs, songs to commemorate his deep and abiding love for his brilliant friend and intimate confidant, the pianist Clara Schumann, but also, at different moments in his life, his infatuation with Hermine Spies, his passion (almost to marry) Agathe von Siebold, his ardor for Rosa Girzick, and his yearning, his Sehnsucht, for the magnificent Elisabeth von Herzogenberg.

It has been said that one need only listen to Brahms' vocal chamber music to fully understand his complex genius in his symphonic and concerto masterpieces.

After listening to the peerless soprano Lucia Popp with the estimable Geoffrey Parsons, piano, in a sublime set of Brahms Lieder und Gesange, I would agree.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUW2BirkICQ

Duccio and His Masterpiece of Humanism

One of the great masterpieces of western Art and, at the time of its purchase, quietly through Christie’s in London in November, 2004, the most expensive work of Art ever purchased by the Met (circa 50 million USD), this small, intimate painting by Duccio is a marvel.

The modernity of this work, astonishing for a painting crafted in the year 1300 C.E, even as it retains its Byzantine iconography in the rendering of the Madonna's head and herelongated fingers, is stunning. 

The Madonna's beautiful, ovalic face and almond-shaped eyes, the delicacy of Her veil, the way the infant Jesus, here already almost adult-like, touches it, his right hand hidden behind its folds, the Madonna's fingers folding the bottom of His robe, Her realistic gaze towards Him, the ineffable modeling of their visages, create an immediacy, a vitality, to a work of Art that is over 700 hundred years old.

In one bold move, Duccio takes us from devotion and veneration, Byzantine and Gothic 
artistic motifs, squarely into the Dantesque realm of Humanism, into the psychological dimension between Madonna and Christ, between mother and child, between love and human touch.

The last three times that I stood in front of this masterpiece, in one of the early Renaissance rooms at the top of the stairs on the left, I was the only person in the room (everyone else must have been looking at the van Goghs and the Monets). 
It was just me, Duccio and eternity.