ExclusiveBrahms: 3 Intermezzo, Op. 117 No. 2

【Classical music and nature 古典音樂小站】Johannes Brahms: 3 Intermezzo, Op. 117 no. 2. This beautiful piece was preserved by European Archive. It has Creative Commons license (Public Domain Mark 1.0 Universal) and is provided through www.musopen.org.

In the late piano music of Johannes Brahms there is a tendency towards the small format. The Intermezzi op. 117, written in the summer of 1892 in Bad Ischl, are considered the epitome of his late piano style - in their concision to laconic gestures, in their almost impressionistic aura of sound, and in their melancholy character. Brahms called them 'three lullabies of my sorrows'. They bear witness to the loneliness of the ageing composer, who once again, as in his youth, drew on poems from Herder's 'Voices of the Peoples'. Clara Schumann commented on their performance: 'The pieces are not difficult in terms of dexterity, but the intellectual technique they contain requires a fine understanding, and one must be very familiar with Brahms in order to play them as he intended.
Lullaby of an Unhappy Mother' is the title of the Scottish folk song translated by Herder, the lines of which Brahms added to the first piece as a motto: 'Sleep well, my child, sleep well, I am very sorry to see you cry'. The story behind it is the tragic tale of Anne Bothwell, daughter of the Bishop of Orkney, who fell in love with her own cousin and now sings of men's unfaithfulness to her child - in Brahms's version a lullaby of wistful parting pain.

The second Intermezzo in E-flat Major floats and swings in filigree arabesques in triple time, as if in a prelude, until the theme in D-flat Major is re-created and further developed in the Viennese style - a metamorphosis that only Brahms, who had become a Viennese, could have produced. (Source: kammermusikfuehrer.de

The video was filmed in Switzerland either by Christian or Simone Schlegel and edited by Wenjing Ma.





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