(pub. 1874)

Because of tonal continuity and textural similarity, these songs seem to form a cycle, although unlike the other cycles clearly intended as such, Brahms here supplies titles for each of the songs, implying independent performance. In spite of using three different poets, Brahms creates a sequence for the texts that portrays a protagonist who mourns the loss of his youth and his first love. At this point this has become a recurring theme for Brahms, here given explicit expression. The songs also are grouped by poet, with the more resigned first four songs (Schenkendorf) and last three songs (Groth), which focus on present loss, flanking the more romantic and retrospective two Junge Lieder (Songs of Youth) by Robert Schumann's son Felix.

1. Frühlingstrost (Spring Consolation). A dialogue between the protagonist and the breeze as it seeks his lover is the subject of this complex and virtuosic setting in rondo form (A B A C A). Both the movement of the breeze and the young man's anxiety are portrayed by the swirling accompaniment.

2. Erinnerung (Memories). Here the protagonist returns to places he once frequented with his lost love. The pain and longing these invoke are beautifully portrayed in subtle rhythmic and harmonic nuances in this waltz-like song.

3. An ein Bild (To a Portrait). This rather simple song with a contrasting middle section has the protagonist mesmerized by a portrait of his former lover. The passionate text is greatly understated by the almost prosaic setting.

4. An die Tauben (To the Doves). The last of the Schenkendorf songs in this set rounds off these first four songs on a virtuosic and exuberant note. A rapidly flowing accompaniment depicts the fight of doves to carry a desperate message of yearning to the beloved.

5. Junge Lieder I, Meine Liebe ist grün (My Love is Green) is a flashback to youth, when the young man rejoices in the freshness of his love. In spite of the agitated and rhythmically complex accompaniment, the song is in a simple strophic form.

6. Junge Lieder II, Wenn um den Holunder (Around the Elderberry Bush). Another simple strophic setting, this lovely and ingenuous little song is another flashback to an evening of joy spent between two lovers. Heimweh (Homesickness). The last three songs are subsumed under the heading "Homesickness," and return to the present.

7. I, in G major. This strophic song recalls the lost beauty of childhood and the bitter regret of having left home. The setting is simple and unpretentious.

8. II, in E major. This is more complex, with a beautifully yearning, chromatic melody heard only in the accompaniment to the slower and rhythmically repetitive vocal line. These represent, respectively, the emptiness of a deserted beach as a metaphor for the search for happiness and the bitter realization that there can be no return to the lost joy of childhood.

9. III, in A major. The set concludes with another return to childhood, as the protagonist searches for a lost wreath, which as a metaphor for his youth can never be found. The relative simplicity of the strophic setting over a harmonically and rhythmically complex accompaniment is analogous to the simplicity of youth lost forever in adulthood.



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5.Junge Lieder 1: Meine Liebe ist grün wie der Fliederbusch

Although typical of Brahms' ability to make even the slightest poem a song of pristine loveliness, "Meine Liebe ist grün" does hold one surprise for the listener: the verse is from the pen of Felix Schumann, Brahms' godson and the youngest child of Robert and Clara Schumann. The young man was destined for an early death, succumbing to tuberculosis at the age of 25. Six years before his unfortunate end, however, Clara had sent Brahms several of his poems. Two of them found their way into the composer's Op. 63, identified as Junge Liebe I and II. Felix Schumann, denied a career as a musician by his uncertain health, turned to poetry. Here, he has the narrator (a love-besotted young swain) exclaim that his love is as green as the lilac bush and as fair as the sun that shines upon that bush, filling it with fragrance and delight. His own soul has the wings of a nightingale and sways in the blooming lilac, rejoicing in the enchanting fragrance and singing countless love-drunk songs. Within a minute and a half of performance time, Brahms cradled this unpretentious verse in music of great charm and seeming inevitability. Keeping to the same pattern for both strophes, Brahms avoided overweighting his music, beginning with a quotation from Robert Schumann's Schöne Fremde to acknowledge, perhaps, the sun-dappled radiance of Italy where Felix had ventured to improve his health. When Clara received the song as a Christmas Eve gift, she was pleased and grateful, as was Felix, who entered the music room and became quite pale upon realization that the text was his. Clara was especially impressed by Brahms' use of a G sharp octave in the bass clef to finish off the increasingly expectant interlude and prepare the beginning of the second stanza, an economical device that worked perfectly in this context. Brahms, in his Christmas Eve letter to Clara, acknowledged the rapidity with which the verses "fell into" his hands and mind once he recalled her husband's Schöne Fremde. In the same sunny key of F sharp major, Brahms' song took wing, only slightly altering the note values and retaining the A sharp/D sharp/A sharp arch of the remembered melody.

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