Making Love in 3/4 Time

Don't worry, this blog isn't going X-rated!  I used the term "making love" in the old 19th-century sense where it covered everything from writing love letters to whispering sweet nothings in your beloved's ear.  And I doubt if 3/4 time would have been considered appropriate for love music anywhere except Vienna, where people dance through life to the beguiling rhythm of the Viennese waltz.

As did Johannes Brahms.  By now, some of you may know where I'm headed, but it's surprising and indeed distressing to see just how many music lovers aren't acquainted with the musically seductive beauties of the master's Liebeslieder-Walzer ("Love Song Waltes").  The waltzes of the first set were written shortly after Brahms moved to Vienna, a kind of musical tribute of affection for the city which he adopted as his own and made his home for the rest of his life.  The music has a special kind of springtime freshness, young love with a spring in its step.  The second set, triggered by the success of the first, came some years later and are a little darker and more introspective, but still very lovely.

Poetry by Friedrich Daumer may not be all the rage in literary circles, but study the texts of these songs carefully and you will soon see that Brahms, as ever, set the words with an acute ear for the meaning and innate emotional temperature of Daumer's verses.

While the waltzes are often performed by small choruses, and have been recorded that way, the ideal is to hear them as Brahms wrote them: for a quartet of voices and a piano played 4-hands.  And the recording I'm listening to now ideally fulfills those conditions.  It's old, but I've never heard another that captured the innate qualities of this beautiful music any better.  The soloists are from the front rank of EMI's best-known oratorio singers of the late 1950s.  Canadian baritone Donald Bell is still young and in fine form, before his voice was swamped by the tremolo.  For the rest, Elsie Morison as soprano has a girlish quality that suits this music of young love, Marjorie Thomas is a dependable alto with a smooth vocal quality, and Richard Lewis uses his lightest, most persuasive tones to shape every phrase of his music.

In the Liebeslieder-Walzer, the duo pianists are every bit as important as the singers -- no mere accompaniment, this.  And this recording has the services of the wonderful duo of Vitya Vronsky and Victor Babin, who did so much after the Second World War to revive interest in piano playing for 4 hands at one piano.  Indeed, the LP cover featured their names and photograph rather than those of the singers, and rightly so, for it is their wonderfully varied and sensitive playing that anchors the entire performance, as it must.

The net result is that the obstinately memorable melodies linger long after hearing in your mind -- and in your heart.  After all, this is love music!