The Birthday Boy!

This post is in honour of the birthday of Johannes Brahms, who would have been 179 years old today if he had just hung around a bit longer!

I grew up on a steady diet of Brahms, who was one of my Dad's favourite composers.  No surprise, he's always been a favourite of mine too.  But even a great composer like Brahms has some little-known surprises lurking in the background, and I want to share one of my favourites with you now.

Like a number of composers of the 18th and 19th centuries, Brahms found himself arranging old folk songs for contemporary performance.  In many cases this amounted to arranging an accompaniment for piano, since genuine folk singing is often either unaccompanied, or else accompanied by whatever instruments are available at hand.

Brahms' 49 settings of German folksongs certainly are no great masterworks.  But they are, for me, utterly charming and delightful.  Much of this is owed to the great interpreters of the only set of these songs that I have ever heard, a 2-disc LP box (later available on CD) for EMI in the 1960s.  The songs were sung by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and accompanied by Gerald Moore. 

The joy of folksongs always lies in the tunes, and these melodies are infectious!  Many songs make you want to sing along, which is precisely the point with folk music!

Half the fun of this set is the potential for duets, because some of the songs are very clearly dialogues between male and female characters.  Others are just as clearly sung by a man or a woman.  The songs are arranged in an order that gives great variety, and every single number sparkles with life in all its fullness.

It's been said that only a great performer can pull off something like this with the necessary simplicity, and I totally agree.  These three "great ones" have created something to cherish and love out of work so slight that Brahms didn't even credit it with an opus number.  If you can find this recording -- somewhere on the internet, in an odd corner of a record shop, buried in your closets somewhere -- pull it out and join in the fun.