Autograph Musical Manuscript of Brahms’ “Verzweiflung” (“Despair”), Last Auctioned in 1938

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BRAHMS, JOHANNES. (1833-1897). German composer of symphonies, concerti, vocal, and chamber works, many of which have become mainstays of the standard repertoire. AMusMsS. (“J. Brahms”). 4pp. (1 bifolium of nine-stave paper). Oblong Folio. N.p., N.d. An autograph manuscript of Verzweiflung, (Despair) the tenth of fifteen songs from his Romanzen aus L. Tieck’s Magelone für eine Singstimme mit Pianoforte, Op. 33, composed between 1862 and 1869. Penned in dark brown ink on unwatermarked paper with staves printed in medium-light brown ink. On the center of the bottom brace of the second leaf is a blotting from another music manuscript. As the manuscript lacks any engraver’s markings, it is likely that it was not used for the lost printer’s Stichvorlage. The music and lyrics, entirely in Brahms’ hand, include some minor corrections in ink and pencil. This is likely Brahms’ working copy created after the song was complete but before it had been committed to a publisher. It is not a later copy, but rather an “original” manuscript that was crucial to the work’s creation before printing. The musical text differs in minor details from the first printed edition, suggesting it preserves an earlier version of the song performed among friends and revised during or after rehearsals.

Autograph Musical Manuscript of Brahms’ “Verzweiflung” (“Despair”), Last Auctioned in 1938

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In 1797, German Romantic poet Ludwig Tieck published his narrative poem Liebesgeschichte der schönen Magelone und des Grafen Peter von Provence (Love-Story of the Beautiful Magelone and Count Peter of Provence) based on a popular tale from the Middle Ages about the love between a young medieval knight from Provence and a beautiful princess from Naples. The story survives in many chapbooks and adaptations that were printed and reprinted well into the nineteenth century. “The romance is constructed from the familiar elements of medieval fiction – chivalry, religion and love – and has been translated at various dates into almost every European language, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Norse, etc.,” (The Life of Johannes Brahms, May). In a series of vignettes, each ending in a song sung by one of the story’s characters, Tieck tells how the knight left home to seek fame and adventure. He falls in love with the princess Magelone, and the two elope with the plan to return to his home and live there in marital bliss. Separated on their journey, they lament their fate in songs, and at the end of the novella (and of Brahms’ song cycle) are reunited to live happily ever after. Tieck later published a slightly shorter version and it was reprinted numerous times between the 1830s and 1860s. Concurrently, other versions of the tale were circulating including one in Gotthard Oswald Marbach’s popular chapbook Deutsche Volksbücher, published by Karl Simrock, the uncle of Brahms’ future publisher Fritz Simrock.

When Brahms was 14, he spent a summer giving piano lessons and enjoying a quiet holiday in the small village of Winsen a few miles south of his native Hamburg. He was the guest of a family friend whose daughter Lieschen, a year younger than Brahms, was his pupil. “Besides her pleasure in music, Lieschen shared Johannes’s passion for books. They roamed the heath looking for flowers, sat in the shade reading. A local boy they befriended, Aaron Löwenherz [a very uncommon surname, but no relation to the owner of Lion Heart Autographs, David Lowenherz!], was willing for a small fee to sneak books for them from his mother’s lending library… [including] the medieval romance The Beautiful Magelone and the Knight Peter with the Silver Keys. Johannes and Lieschen sat in the fields reading aloud that tale of a knight inspired by a minstrel to go adventuring, who finds and loses and regains an eternal love,” (Johannes Brahms: A Biography, Swafford).

Years later “probably in Clara Schumann’s Düsseldorf home, Brahms read Tieck’s Die schöne Magelone and was clearly delighted, since he entered his favorite passages into the ‘Schatzkästlein’ (treasure-box), where he recorded everything he read that particularly took his fancy. It was also in 1861 that Brahms’ friendship with the singer Julius Stockhausen blossomed,” (Die schöne Magelone, program notes by Dotdotdotmusic, Stokes). Together Brahms and Stockhausen gave several recitals, performing Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin, and Schumann’s Dichterliebe, which undoubtedly influenced the structure of Brahms’ composition. “It was during this period of collaboration that Brahms resolved to compose the Magelone cycle, [which he dedicated to Stockhausen when they were published in 1865] penned the first four songs in July 1861; numbers five and six followed in May 1862, after Stockhausen had performed the first song from manuscript in April of that year,” (ibid.). Brahms scored the 15 songs for a single voice with piano accompaniment.

Song No. 10, Verzweiflung (Despair), dramatizes the moment of the couple’s separation, when Peter becomes lost at sea on a fool’s errand. He rages at the storm, crying out that if he cannot be reunited with his beloved he might as well be cast upon the rocks. Brahms’ musical treatment, preserved in this autograph working copy, is set in C minor, his preferred key for expressions of fate-marked tragedies. The piano part is filled with running sixteenth notes and arpeggios that give the texture a wild, roiling quality and evokes the waves and wind of the storm. The vocal part covers a relatively wide range with frequent leaps into the high register. Especially when paired with the loud, busy accompaniment, this vocal line requires a confident, well-trained singer and does not accommodate the musical amateurs who were the main audience for published songs in the mid-nineteenth century. These features point to Brahms’ expansion of the song idiom in his early compositions and the increasing professionalization of singing in his lifetime. Stockhausen was one of the first professional singers to give song recitals, which moved a genre initially designed for recreation in private, domestic settings into the public sphere. The second half of the first phrase (measures 15-22 and the varied repetition of this material in measures 27-36) shows Brahms’ characteristic use of rhythm to create added drama and forward drive – up to this point, the song had used duple groupings of eighth and sixteenth notes, but here he introduces triplets in the piano and voice to give the passage a galloping, hunt-like style. The text “May misfortune bay loudly about me,” suggests Fate harrowing the speaker, and this rhythmic gesture combined with the major key triads in the piano (typical of Brahms’ style in these years) gives that passage a heroic, defiant quality.

Several of the corrections and revisions in this working manuscript copy seem to have been made to ease the technical difficulty somewhat, especially for the singer. Slurs in the piano part soften a potentially too loud, too heavily accented passage; a change to the dynamics makes the entry of the voice at the beginning of a text line easier to hear and to navigate for the singer, etc. Some expressive markings from the final printed edition are missing here, which is typical of Brahms’ working method, as he often added articulation and dynamic markings only during the printing process – either within the engraver’s proof or on a preliminary printing of the first edition. Additionally, the manuscript contains readings that Brahms later consciously altered – as well as others that may have been distorted in the first edition due to copyist or engraver errors. Thus, the manuscript provides insight into the composition’s genesis and would also be substantially helpful for a future edition such as the Brahms Complete Edition (Gesamtausgabe).

Brahms would also have been sensitive to the tension between his artistic aims and the marketability of this work, given that his first choice of publisher, Breitkopf und Härtel, declined to print the Magelone Romanzen in 1864 partly because they were too difficult. The eventual publisher, Rieter-Biedermann, issued the first two books of songs in 1865 and books 3 (which contains Verzweiflung), 4, and 5 in 1869. Though they are few, the markings in this copy provide rare insights into the late stages of Brahms’ compositional process. Because Brahms destroyed most of his sketches and manuscripts as well as much of his correspondence to preserve his privacy after his death, scholars and musicians have little evidence of this creative process. This manuscript therefore offers an unusual glimpse of the pianist-composer at work.

Although he composed over 190 solo songs, or Lieder, in his career, Romanzen aus L. Tieck’s Magelone is Brahms’ only true song cycle (i.e., a collection of songs designed to express a narrative arc from beginning to end, usually based on the poems of a single author). Thus, these 15 songs occupy a unique position in his oeuvre. They demonstrate his interest in musical drama and in the innovative Romantic forms of his immediate predecessors (Schubert, Schumann) while also clearly showing the emergence of his distinctive compositional voice. This manuscript offers evidence of the young Brahms refining his compositional technique and developing the characteristics of style and voice that would make him a household name among music lovers beginning in the late 1860s and continuing up to the present day.

Provenance: The conductor and composer Hermann Levi (1839-1900), Brahms close friend, owned an autograph manuscript of Verzweiflung (likely our copy) as early as December 1866, when he wrote to his and Brahms’ mutual friend Clara Schumann about playing through the work often and enjoying it. It was listed (No. 158) in the exhibition catalogue of the Meiningen Brahms-Ausstellung that ran from October 7-11, 1899. Verzweiflung is also documented in Margit L. McCorkle’s Brahms Catalogue Raisonné, Munich 1984, p. 116. According to Albrecht’s Autograph Music Manuscripts of European Composers in American Libraries, (No. 412) our manuscript’s provenance first begins with Gustav Oberländer (1867-1936), a German immigrant who built textile mills in the United States. In 1938, Parke Bernet sold Oberländer’s estate where the manuscript was catalogued as, “14. BRAHMS, JOHANNES. Autograph music score signed ‘J. Brahms’ entitled Verzweiflung. [Despair] 2 [crossed out in red ink to correct the number of pages] 4pp., small folio.” George R. Siedenburg (1889-1941), a German-born American broker who lived on Park Avenue purchased the Verzweiflung manuscript at the auction. After his death, his widow, Florence Ellsworth Wilson, bequeathed it to her friend Ludwig Loewenstein, a prominent New York dermatologist, noted in the Albrecht listing as the current owner. Subsequently, the manuscript passed to John L. Brovaco of East Orange, New Jersey, a school administrator in Newark and Loewenstein’s executor, who gave it to a friend, whose widow was the most recent owner.

A review of the census of the remaining 14 songs from the Magelone Lieder, Opus 33 describes their status: Five are “lost;” six are owned by the U.S. Library of Congress; two are in European institutions and one reportedly in a private Swiss collection.

“Verzweiflung”

So tönet denn, schäumende Wellen,

Und windet euch rund um mich her!

Mag Unglück doch laut um mich bellen,

Erbost sein das grausame Meer!

Ich lache den stürmenden Wettern,

Verachte den Zorngrimm der Flut;

O, mögen mich Felsen zerschmettern!

Denn nimmer wird es gut.

Nicht klag’ ich, und mag ich nun scheitern,

Im wäßrigen Tiefen vergehn!

Mein Blick wird sich nie mehr erheitern,

Den Stern meiner Liebe zu sehn.

So wälzt euch bergab mit Gewittern,

Und raset, ihr Stürme, mich an,

Daß Felsen an Felsen zersplittern!

Ich bin ein verlorener Mann.

“Despair”

Resound, then, foaming waves

And twine around me!

May misfortune bay loudly about me,

The cruel sea let loose its fury!

I laugh at the stormy weather,

I scorn the wrath of the tide;

O, may the rocks dash me to pieces!

For never will it turn out well.

I will not lament, even if I founder,

And perish in the watery deeps!

My gaze will never more be cheered

By the sight of my darling’s star.

So send hurtling down your thunder,

And tear at me, o Storm,

Until rock shatters upon rock!

I am a lost man.

Our thanks and gratitude to the late George Bozarth, one of the world’s leading Brahms scholars; Dr. Marie Sumner Lott, Associate Professor of Music History, Georgia State University; and Dr. Jakob Hauschildt, Forschungszentrum Brahms Gesamtausgabe am Musikwissenschaftlichen Institut der Christian-Albrechts-Universität, Kiel, Germany. The manuscript is in fine condition.