Brahms's view of song

Brahms wrote songs throughout his life. They provide a constant backcloth to his larger instrumental works, to which they often relate quite tangibly. A solid core has remained in the repertory since Brahms's time, and they are well represented in the current recording catalogue, as prominent as those of his predecessors Schubert and Schumann, whom he so admired. Yet there has always been a discernible tendency among critics to exclude Brahms from an ultimate canon of great German Lieder composers comprising Schubert, Schumann and Wolf; indeed Brahms is even sometimes included in a list with much lesser figures of the genre such as Mendelssohn, Franz and Cornelius. There are obvious reasons for this. First of all, the fact that Brahms did not set the greatest poems, rather preferring the work of minor figures, whose verse he might more easily transform: from this it is assumed that he lacked the knowledge of or the discernment of the composers who did. Since by this reckoning, great songs are seen as critiques of great poetry, responding to the challenge presented by a poem which is independently known, Brahms's songs are excluded since they offer no such comparisons. To this conclusion is harnessed the fact that Brahms is sometimes seen as displaying awkwardness in the musical rendering of verbal accentuation, a consequence of his emphasis on rounded melody. One might further add in such an assessment that Brahms avoids the lengthy groups or cycles that show a capacity for reflecting psychological development. In short, that he is an instrumentally rather than verbally driven composer.