Dear viewers and users of Brahms Listening Guides:
With the posting of the final solo song group, Op. 94, I was
prompted to address something that has been pressing on me for
some time, and that is the desire to make the guides for the
solo songs more useful. The recordings I used throughout
the construction of the guides going back to 2004 were
partially removed from Spotify and other digital services in
the summer of 2018. Those with Jessye Norman and Daniel
Barenboim remained available, but those with Dietrich
Fischer-Dieskau and Barenboim did not. For the past 5½
years I have been in intermittent contact with people at
Deutsche Grammophon, both in Germany and the United States,
with answers given to me that the Fischer-Dieskau/Barenboim
recordings would return, but my last communication was in
2021. They have not returned, and I must assume that
they will not in the near future. The Law of Murphy
dictates that they probably will now come back in a month or
so, but it really was time to make a change.
Back in the mid-oughts, before the age of music streaming on
demand, this recording set was the only way to obtain the
complete Brahms Lieder. When I first made the Spotify
playlist, the entire DG Brahms Complete Edition was
available. I obviously wished to get it available again
after 2018, and made every effort to do so, as this was
preferable to restructuring the timings of all the song guides
for a different recording. As it turns out, being
finally driven to that option, it was not as onerous a task as
it seemed.
In short, I have changed all the recordings to the CPO Brahms
Lieder: Complete Edition with Juliane Banse, Andreas Schmidt,
and pianist Helmut Deutsch, with occasional contributions from
Iris Vermillion. This is the best option for the
complete songs that is available digitally, and it was not
complete until 2013. In making this change, I have
adjusted all the timings in 31 song set guides. This
also entailed changing the internal timing references to
previous strophes, etc. I have gone over these changes a
couple of times and believe I have corrected everything.
The CPO recordings tend to be either slower or faster in tempo
than the older DG recordings, sometimes noticeably so.
Why did I not keep the Norman recordings, since they were
available? Because I wanted each set to be from a
uniform source.
I did keep Norman’s legendary rendition of the songs with viola, Op. 91, which were
not included in the CPO set, and her solo recording of the Op. 84
quasi-duets, for which I had already used the CPO set as a
duet recording. For the solo versions of eight pieces
from the Zigeunerlieder, Op. 103 (arrangements that I often
wish Brahms had never made), I did change to Vermillion’s CPO recordings.
The Spotify playlist will be updated accordingly with the CPO
recordings, and it will finally be complete and available for
the first time since 2018. Of course, availability on
Spotify is always subject to change, but this was a large
portion of the complete works that was unavailable on the
playlist for a long time.
This brings me to another aspect of the song recordings and
guides that has troubled me for years: the issue of
keys. There is no single recording of all the songs in
the original keys, most of which are for higher voice.
The most prominent singer who embarked on quasi-complete
recordings of composers’ Lieder was in fact Fischer-Dieskau, and he was
a baritone. Other fully complete sets tend to combine
male and female singers. Fischer-Dieskau refused to
record songs that he felt were more suited for a woman, and in
the DG set, those were taken by Norman, who was billed as a
soprano but was really more of a mezzo-soprano. In the
CPO set, the low baritone Schmidt is balanced by the high
soprano Banse. One other positive aspect of the CPO set
is the somewhat (but not very much) more equitable
distribution of songs between the singers. Schmidt does
sing significantly more than half of the songs, but Banse
takes more of them than Norman did (and not always the same
ones that she did).
So back to the key problem. Baritones like
Fischer-Dieskau and Schmidt will of course sing in lower
keys. I made the decision early in the process of
building the listening guides that I had to do analysis in the
original keys. There was simply no other option.
But I have made an effort (including doing many scans myself)
to get all of the Peters low and middle key editions available
on IMSLP (much of that was done 10-15 years ago) and link
these scores in the guides. The problem is that even
with all the available scores in different keys, the
recordings do not always match any of them. This was
true of the DG set, where Norman frequently sang in “middle”
keys that are not available in the Peters edition on
IMSLP. In the CPO set, Banse always sings in the
published high (usually original) key, and Schmidt often sings
in the published low or middle key, but Schmidt is a very low
baritone, and to my chagrin, I found that in 31 songs, he
sings in a key a whole step lower than the lowest published
Peters edition and in 5 others, he sings a half-step
lower. Amazingly, he even transposes down the Four
Serious Songs (Op. 121), which were actually
written for bass voice! I do not know of and have not
been able to find any source for these lower keys. My
assumption is that they must come from early publications,
possibly first editions from Simrock or other original
publishers that are generally unavailable today. Or
perhaps Schmidt and Deutsch did their own transpositions.
In any case, despite all of this, I made the decision to
indicate in the guides which key was used for the
recordings. In cases where it was either the original
key or a key available on IMSLP from Peters, I did this by
placing the key in the song heading in boldface. In the
instances where Schmidt sings in a lower key, I indicated this
as well, but without any boldface. I hope this may prove
useful. Again, it was impossible to do the actual
analysis with reference to anything other than the original
keys. The Op.
84 quasi-duets were interesting. Only in No. 4 are
the Norman solo version and the CPO duet version in the same
key, and it is the original key. In Nos. 1-2, the solo
and duet versions are in different, but “available”
keys. In No. 3, the Norman solo version is in an
unpublished “middle” key, and in No. 5, both versions are in different
unpublished “middle” keys! For the solo versions from
the Op. 103Zigeunerlieder, one reason I changed to the Vermillion
CPO recordings was that she sings consistently in the
“available” low keys (which on IMSLP are present in the first
edition from the Brahms-Institut Lübeck), but Norman curiously
sang them all a half-step below the original key, which is a
half-step above the more recently published “middle” key
edition from Peters (and therefore not readily available
anywhere).
The songs in which Schmidt sings lower than the lowest
published Peters edition are listed below. Those marked
with an asterisk are a half step lower rather than a whole
step.
Although not the most difficult to construct, the guides for
the solo Lieder have caused me the most anxiety and uneasiness
since the beginning of the project, and I have done much work
over the years to help make them useful. The deletion of
the recordings I used from Spotify in 2018 was frustrating,
and made them less useful. 5½ years was probably too
long, but I held out hope for their return. In the end,
perhaps this is better, even if the DG recordings become
available again tomorrow. I did make a very few minor
edits to the actual content in some of the older guides.
I am under no illusion that the song guides are the most
commonly used--in fact they may be the least used. But
there is no complete picture of Brahms the composer without
this important portion of his output.