Brahms' Lullaby: A Song History

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The tune known around the world as Brahms' Lullaby is the "Wiegenlied," Op. 49 No. 4, which Johannes Brahms wrote in 1868 for his friend Bertha Faber.[1] As Bertha Porubsky she had sung in the women's chorus Brahms led in Hamburg some years earlier, and she had since married the industrialist Artur Faber.[1][2] The song was a present for the birth of the couple's second son.[3] The Brahms-Institut Lübeck catalogue dates the first edition of the five songs of Op. 49, from Simrock in Berlin, to November 1868.[4] In its first form the song had a single stanza, drawn from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the celebrated anthology of German folk verse; a second stanza, adapted from an 1849 poem by Georg Scherer, was added later.[3][5]

Early nineteenth-century American mahogany rocking cradle with a hooded canopy on a turned post

Cradle, American, 1815–20, mahogany, rosewood, brass and white pine. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain (CC0). Shown for the lullaby's subject; it has no connection to Brahms.

The lullaby carries a private message. A catalogue record at the Morgan Library & Museum notes that Brahms adapted the melody of "S'is anderscht" for his piano accompaniment; it is the opening song in the second book of Alexander Baumann's Gebirgs-Bleameln, a series of Austrian dialect songs first published by Diabelli in 1843–44.[6] The musicologist Karen Bottge, who dates Baumann's duet to 1842, gives it a close reading as the inspiration for Brahms's song.[7] Classic FM and the writer Georg Predota both say Bertha had sung such a tune to Brahms in his Hamburg years; Classic FM notes the letter accompanying the gift hinted at a love song, and Predota reads the hidden melody as that love song.[3][2] The first documented performance took place in Vienna on 22 December 1869, when Luise Dustmann sang it with Clara Schumann at the piano.[3][4][5]

The song soon escaped its intimate origins. BBC Music Magazine relates that arrangements multiplied quickly enough to draw a reported grumble from Brahms to his publisher, and the melody has long since turned up in countless music boxes and baby toys.[1] Percy Grainger made it the second of his piano Free Settings of Favourite Melodies, written out in 1922.[8] Bottge argues that the song's apparent simplicity has kept its rocking harmonies and syncopations from receiving the attention they deserve.[7]

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Sources

  1. BBC Music Magazine (classical-music.com): "Best lullabies: 8 of the most famous".
  2. Interlude (Georg Predota): "Muses and Musings" (Johannes Brahms and Bertha Porubsky).
  3. Classic FM: "What are the lyrics to Brahms' famous 'Lullaby', and what's the story behind it?".
  4. Brahms-Institut an der Musikhochschule Lübeck: "Opus 49, Fünf Lieder für eine Singstimme und Klavier" (Werkekatalog).
  5. Interlude (Maureen Buja): "Rocking Your Love to Sleep: Brahms' Lullaby".
  6. The Morgan Library & Museum: "Gebirgs-Bleameln, Heft 2" (Alexander Baumann), catalogue record.
  7. University of Kentucky Scholars (Karen Bottge, 19th-Century Music, 2005): "Brahms's Wiegenlied and the Maternal Voice".
  8. Hyperion Records (notes by Barry Peter Ould): "Grainger: Rambles and Reflections".