Two Songs for Alto, Viola, and Piano, Opus 91
JOHANNES BRAHMS

"In due course I shall send you a wonderful old Catholic song for singing at home; you will never discover a more beautiful lullaby," wrote Brahms to violinist Joseph Joachim in 1863. The two men had been good friends for a decade, and now Brahms was promising a gift for a special occasion: Joachim had married the singer Amalie Weiss, and the couple was expecting their first child. It was a very personal gift, for this song for the new baby was scored for the three friends to perform together "at home"-contralto (Amalie), viola (Joachim), and piano (Brahms)-and the three of them did perform the song frequently when it was completed the following year. So personal an expression was this song that Brahms did not publish it, but kept it as a private possession.

And then-twenty years later-things fell apart. In 1884, Joachim suspected Amalie of infidelity and filed for divorce. Brahms believed Joachim's suspicions without merit and wrote Amalie a letter declaring his confidence in her; to his surprise, she produced this letter in court and used it to block the divorce. Joachim felt betrayed, and a thirty-year friendship came to a quick end. Stunned by this sudden turn of events-and genuinely wishing the couple to reconcile-Brahms wrote a companion song to the lullaby of two decades earlier in the hopes that Joachim and Amalie would perform the song together and that it might be a vehicle of reconciliation between them all. In this he had no success. Amalie did sing these songs, but not with Joachim, and the two men remained estranged for years (it was another Brahms work-the Double Concerto for Violin and Cello-that would become the vehicle for their eventual reconciliation, but the old closeness between the two would never return).

Brahms' dealing with the Joachims-so happy and so painful-produced two of his finest songs. The Two Songs for Alto, Viola, and Piano are Brahms' only songs for an extra instrument (they have been called his only "chamber-music songs"), and for this Brahms chose one of his favorite instruments. The viola closely matches the range of the alto voice, and those two share duties evenly in these songs, which truly are a partnership of all three performers. When Brahms published these two songs in 1884, he reversed the order of their composition, placing the newer song first. Gestillte Sehnsucht sets a text by the German poem Friedrich Rückert, whose poetry would later be set so frequently by Mahler. Rückert's daughter had been pained that Brahms had never set one of her father's poems, and in 1891 Brahms asked his publisher to send a copy of this song on to her (he later set several more Rückert texts). Gestillte Wiegenlied is a statement of disquiet and longing in the midst of natural beauty, all of it tinged with the old romantic fascination with death. Brahms assigns the viola a central role here: it announces the main theme at the beginning, and at three points in the song (always on the words "lispeln die Wind") Brahms has it softly imitate the sound of the wind in the forest at sunset. The more agitated middle section moves to the tonic minor-D minor-before the return of the opening mood and the quiet close.

The "wonderful old Catholic song" that Brahms spoke of is the fourteenth-century carol Resonet in laudibus, known in its German folksong version as Joseph, lieber Joseph mein. In this song, Mary looks down on the sleeping baby Jesus as the winds blow in the palms overhead, and she asks them to hush so that her baby might sleep. Again the viola leads, and Brahms has it "sing" the carol at the beginning: he writes the words into the violist's part to suggest how the meaning of the text should shape the player's phrasing. This truly is a lullaby, and it rocks along gently on its flowing 6/8 meter; Brahms' ideas about how this song should be performed are made abundantly clear by the fact that he marks the violist's part some form of dolce espressivo at ten different points! The "beautiful lullaby" forms the backbone of this song as Mary hovers over the sleeping baby. She is aware that there is pain ahead for him, and this song too moves into the tonic minor-in this case F minor-for this darker meditation. But the viola's soothing song always returns, and at the end it leads this lullaby to its peaceful close.