A composer’s sources of inspiration are generally many and varied. For vocal works, one frequently need not look farther than the text itself. However, a deeper understanding of the music invariably springs from an inspection of the historical events surrounding the composer at the time in question. In this way, one can determine not only why the composer set a text in a given manner, but also why the composer initially chose that text. Johannes Brahms was, of course, no exception to such a generalization. His 1881 work for chorus and orchestra, Nänie, is a striking example of the multifold manners in which this great composer received inspiration, including through historical event, textual nuance, and musical precedent.

In retrospect, Nänie was perhaps inevitable given the events that befell Brahms in 1880. The year began immediately with the death of the painter Anselm Feuerbach (1829–80). Brahms had first met Feuerbach on vacation at Baden in 1865, barely months after the death of the composer’s mother. Already Brahms knew and respected Feuerbach’s somber neo-Classical art, much in line with his own musical aesthetic, and they quickly established a strong friendship. In 1873, having already lived in Germany, France, and Rome, the ambitious painter decided to conquer Vienna. Unfortunately, the Austrian capital was enthralled with the more dynamic art of Hans Makart. Feuerbach left for Venice three years later, broken by defeat. Such an apparently ignominious end became regrettably definitive upon his death in January 1880, at age 51.

The month following Feuerbach’s decease, Vienna saw the performance of a choral work by Hermann Goetz (1840–76). This work employed the same text that Brahms would later adopt: a lesser poem by Schiller entitled Nänie. Brahms may not have attended the concert, and he did not own a score of the work, but it is highly likely that he knew Goetz’s Nänie all the same. The two composers were not particularly close, but shared a mutual appreciation and familiarity with each other’s work; Brahms received the dedication of the younger man’s 1867 piano quartet. They were both Romantics of the Mendelssohn/Schumann mold, and indeed Goetz was more musically conservative even than Brahms. Prussian-born Goetz was the organist at Winterthur, Switzerland, where Brahms met him in the 1860s. Goetz had suffered from tuberculosis since childhood, and, like Feuerbach, died prematurely: just four days before his thirty-sixth birthday, on 3 December 1876. Assuming that Brahms had attended the February performance, or at the very least that he had known of it, Feuerbach’s recent death no doubt recalled Goetz’s similarly unfortunate demise barely three years prior.

In June 1880, Brahms’s friend, the surgeon Theodor Billroth, supplied perhaps the most direct impetus: Billroth requested an original composition appropriate for his own (hopefully distant) funeral. This began Brahms’s search for texts heathenish enough to fit the agnostic mentalities of both surgeon and composer. After a fruitless search by Elisabet von Herzogenberg, Brahms settled on the same text previously set by his friend Goetz: Schiller’s Nänie. Eventually, the work’s principle impetus changed — as evidenced by the work’s dedication not to Billroth, but to Henriette Feuerbach, the painter’s stepmother — from a commissioned work to commemorate an eventual death, to a personal utterance honoring a friend already departed.

The great Classical poet Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) served Brahms as more than just the author of his text. Indeed, the playwright perfectly mirrors the young dead that Brahms mourns. Just as Feuerbach had settled in various European locales throughout his life, Schiller was transient not just in geography but also in profession. A love of drama and poetry encompassed Schiller’s heart since his youth in Würtemberg, but he was forced into a military education and forbidden from drama. Schiller fled the army to Mannheim, where he worked under an assumed name as playwright and stage manager. His works failed to succeed outside Mannheim, and the hopeful dramatist converted into a practical historian. Only upon establishing a rapport with Goethe in 1794 did Schiller return to writing drama. Five years later, he joined Goethe at Weimar, where their professional partnership quickly created one of the most remarkable theaters in Germany. Unfortunately, the celebrated friendship of these two greatest of German Classical dramatists was cut short by Schiller’s premature death from tuberculosis in 1805, at age 46. When we add the poet, Brahms’s inspirational death toll includes not only personal friends, but also an artistic hero who mirrors one such friend and inspires the other.

Nänie’s connection with young death extends beyond the lives of poet, painter, and preceding composer. Schiller’s poem is most obviously a meditation on the death of all things, particularly the beautiful — "Auch das Schöne muß sterben." The title derives from the ancient Latin term noenia, a funeral dirge traditionally sung by the surviving parents of the deceased. The lamented dead are therefore not only beautiful, but, most likely, relatively young. This title also goes to explain Brahms’s dedication, not to the memory of the late Feuerbach, but to his surviving stepmother.

This extension of interpretation continues through textual detail as well: the poem Nänie includes references to the deaths of three mythological characters, each both beautiful and young. First, lines 3–4 refer to Eurydice, whose life Hades reclaimed after her conditional release went unfulfilled by her musician-husband Orpheus. Lines 5–6 tell of Aphrodite’s lament over the death of her beautiful beloved, Adonis, gored by a wounded boar. The immortal mother ("die unsterbliche Mutter") of line 7 is Thetis, who had foretold her son Achilles’ death during the Trojan War. The three mythological beauties are not simply beautiful, but also young. (What’s more, none of the deceased youths are mentioned by name in the poem itself. Perhaps this is yet another reason why the dedication is to Feuerbach’s mother, and not to the respectfully unnamed dead.)

Eurydice, Adonis and Achilles also share another remarkable characteristic, undoubtedly known to Brahms and therefore possibly relevant to his personal attachment to the text. All three died unnecessarily: Eurydice because of Orpheus’s premature gaze before passing beyond the threshold of the underworld; Adonis because Aphrodite did not follow him on a hunting trip, as was her custom; Achilles because Thetis could have taken more drastic measures to keep her son from the war. Each of the three survivors — Orpheus, Aphrodite and Thetis — felt great guilt for their passive role in these deaths. It is known that Brahms had attempted to dissuade Feuerbach from coming to Vienna, knowing that the Austrians were not typically responsive to his subdued visual art. Perhaps Brahms, too, felt a mild pang of guilty responsibility that Vienna had rejected the painter so forcefully.

Of course, history alone did not dictate the nature of Brahms’s Nänie. The text, too, plays a crucial role in understanding Brahms’s reaction to the deaths of his young associates. Just as Schiller’s very first line ("Auch das Schöne muß sterben" — "Even the beautiful must die") sets the emotional theme for the rest of the poem, Brahms’s first two measures similarly indicate the issue at hand. The work begins with a simple, beautiful oboe melody, which proceeds F#–E–D, leading to the tonic pitch of the work as a whole. This motive seems remarkably conclusive, symbolizing the inevitable death of all things beautiful. However, Brahms simultaneously counters with inconclusive harmonies: in D major, I-V-vi. By ending the progression deceptively, Brahms implies harmonic continuation notwithstanding melodic finality. He thereby peremptorily reveals that the work has two overriding philosophical themes: it is true that beauty must die, but the remembrance of such beauty is redeemingly splendid.

The orchestral introduction continues with the same beautiful oboe melody, until m.22, at the first entrance of the trombones — so commonly associated with funeral music. The first choral entrance follows quickly. The trombones are not the only indication of eventual demise. Horns and cellos support the choir for five measures with a low D pedal. Whereas pedal points generally signify the approaching end of a musical composition, here Brahms uses the pedal early on, to further emphasize that, no matter how beautiful the choral subject may be, this is a work about ends. The choral fugue itself foretells an early end: after the sopranos, altos and tenors all enter in a traditional fugue framework, the basses intone their answer immediately after the tenors’ subject (m.33). The sopranos and altos promptly adopt a stretto, but the beautiful fugue ends before long.

The increasingly chromatic six-bar phrase that follows (mm.41–46) is quite remarkable in its stark difference from the fugue subject that precedes it. Essentially a cappella — the horns’ harmonic support is intermittent and brief — the chorus also adopts near-homophony: the women are consistently homophonic with each other, as are the men. The text has also changed: we no longer discuss beauty directly, but rather emphasize the inability of such beauty to move the heart of Hades, god of the underworld beyond the river Styx ("des stygischen Zeus"). Hades’ severity is unaffected by previous melodiousness. As we shall see throughout Nänie, this type of a cappella homophony continues to symbolize a darker, less hopeful element of death.

Schiller leads directly into a recollection of our first beautiful, dead youth: Eurydice. The basses, who earlier signaled a premature demise, here begin a variant on the original fugue subject as they tell that love only once softened the "shadow-ruler" Hades ("Schattenbeherrscher"). In the canon that follows, an upward octave leap denotes the harshness of the Schattenbeherrscher, while the tenors (m.56) emphasize the love ("die Liebe") that softened him with a brief, flowing line. Of course, just as the god’s justice forced Eurydice’s death, Brahms’s austere, chromatic a cappella homophony returns to cap the section.

The mood changes abruptly in m.65, as Schiller brings us the next example. In the myth, Adonis is wounded fatally, and only upon hearing his distant cries, does Aphrodite come to his aid. Similarly, Brahms begins with the men’s voices, while the women follow in canon. However, the men end promptly on octave C-naturals, with mention of Adonis’s wounds ("die Wunde"), while the women continue, ending on a tonally distant E-major triad (with the tonic E in the violins, flutes and clarinets). Recalling that Aphrodite was borne out of the sea-foam, Brahms directly depicts the goddess in another manner as well. The unique harp figuration, with strings pizzicati, (mm.67–74) is used later (mm.85–95) as Thetis and the Nereids rise out of the sea to sing their lament. Severe homophony and a disjunct hemiola recall the boar’s tusks that caused the boy’s wounds.

Once again, a dramatic mood shift ensues, and takes us to the Scaean gates at the city of Troy, where the godly hero Achilles ("den göttlichen Held") has fallen in battle. Here Brahms’s touch of subtlety is particularly evident. The most obvious method to depict this text would be a falling figure at the word "fallend," but Brahms does not oblige. The orchestra (first violins, first flute, and harp) subtly anticipates a descending line at mm.77–79. However, Brahms reserves the true text-painting for m.82, thereby drawing focus to Thetis’s prophesy that her son would be killed if he fought in the Trojan War. To Brahms, it is less important that Achilles dies, and more important that the hero fulfills his foretold destiny ("sein Schicksal erfüllt"). Only on that text do the entire chorus and orchestra indulge in a strong, descending hemiola.

A metrical shift from 6/4 to common time, combined with a striking key change to F-sharp major, heralds an introduction to Brahms’s philosophical crux at m.85. Schiller tells that Thetis and her sisters, the sea-nymph Nereids, climb ("steigt") from the sea to raise ("hebt") a lament to their lost son and nephew. Indeed, the unison choral line, joined by the orchestra, also rises continually higher: beginning on middle C-sharp, proceeding higher to A-sharp, D-sharp, F-sharp, and finally G-sharp. The highest pitch, G-sharp, intones the text’s first direct lament ("Klage") of remembrance. The harp figuration with pizzicati strings recalls the sea-music earlier associated with Aphrodite, all the clearer as Schiller takes us directly to the sea itself.

The development and recapitulation that follow include similar examples of inspired text painting. A thorough, word-by-word, measure-by-measure analysis is unnecessary, as it suffices to bring out a few major points. The weeping gods ("da weinen die Götter") is mildly chromatic, but the goddesses weep even more chromatically. The strings weep too, in alternating, descending figurations (mm.97–106). Brahms takes an interpretative turn when, at mm.119–123, he musically identifies the weeping goddesses as the Nereids, complete with the chorus’s same rising line and sea-music in the harp and strings. This section also includes the strict a cappella homophony, exemplified as perfection dies ("daß das Vollkommene stirbt") in mm.137–140.

Brahms then abbreviates the opening musical material, but does not return to the same text. Instead, he applies the final two lines, which epitomize Brahms’s purpose in Nänie: to compose an elegy to prematurely deceased beauty. The fugue subject that originally proclaimed "even beauty must die" ("Auch das Schöne muß sterben") now teaches that "even to be a lament in the mouth of a loved one is splendid" ("Auch ein Klaglied zu sein im Mund der Geliebten ist herrlich"). A strikingly and unique section (mm.159–161) recalls briefly the fate of the "common" ("das Gemeine"). We have the same a cappella homophony as in the past reference to Hades, ruler of the dead. However, since this time the dead proceed to Orcus, Death himself, the texture is lower and the descending line more gradual and chromatic than before. To conclude, Brahms allows beauty to reign in an augmented, echoed rendition of the opening choral fugue subject over a truly conclusive tonic pedal. Not even a cappella homophony can unseat beauty so firmly entrenched. A final recollection of the opening oboe tune yield intriguing harmonic comparison: in the first two measures, the harmony (I-V-vi) implied continuation, whereas now an impending conclusion is clear (I-V-I in mm.176–177). Brahms emphasizes "herrlich": to be remembered and lamented by loved ones is splendid indeed.

The events of Brahms’s life certainly influenced the selection of Schiller’s verse. Equally certain is Brahms’s mastery of text painting to show why the poem’s philosophy, as well as certain key lines, invoked in him such a masterful work. But Brahms was also fully aware of historical precedent, and most probably turned to Hermann Goetz’s setting, if not for ideas, then for inspiration.

On the surface, the Goetz Nänie is quite different. Revealing his extensive experience as conductor and composer of opera, Goetz takes a lyrical, dramatic approach, which contrasts strongly with Brahms’s introversion. For example, some of the most unique moments in Brahms — the stories of the three mythological youths Eurydice, Adonis and Achilles — are, in Goetz, straightforward choral recitative. Goetz’s operatic mentality goes so far as to extend roles to choral sections: the tenors are a composite Orpheus as they lament Eurydice, the sopranos represent Aphrodite, and the sopranos and altos combine to form the united "daughters of Nereus" ("allen Töchtern des Nereus"). Brahms, however, finds symbolic reference in these stanzas and gives them more extended treatment, as discussed above.

There are structural differences, too, but they are countered by subtle similarities in treatment of text. Brahms’s ABA form contrasts with Goetz’s clear through-composed configuration. Both begin with an orchestral introduction, which is serene in Brahms but harsh, even furious, in Goetz. The latter interprets the text as a narrative egress from angry grief to lofty lamentation, again unveiling his story-telling operatic background. The texts that Goetz gives extensive repetitions, Brahms similarly accentuates. Certain moments of Brahms seem directly inspired by his friend. Note, for example, Goetz’s solemn, descending line as Achilles fulfills his destiny ("sein Schicksal erfüllt"), which is particularly comparable to Brahms. Goetz is strongly bleak, even desolate, as the common descend to Orcus ("klanglos zum Orkus hinab"); Brahms doesn’t go quite so far, but the inspiration is identical in both composers.

One similarity between these two settings of Nänie is particularly striking. Goetz confronts a difficulty that Brahms would later face as well: the final line of text is not comforting at all, but rather tells the gloomy, undistinguishing end of the "common" ("das Gemeine"). If the work is to end peaceful and reassured, then modification to Schiller’s textual organization is necessary. Goetz chooses to restate the penultimate line, "even to be a lament in the mouth of a loved one is splendid" ("Auch ein Klaglied zu sein im Mund der Geliebten ist herrlich"), and reiterates the final word "herrlich." Brahms uses exactly the same repetition of text, a parallel remarkably precise to be coincidental.

The theme of young death continues through Nänie as it did through Brahms’s own life. Hermann Goetz was but one of Brahms’s many friends who died before their time. Perhaps the list should begin with yet another composer: Robert Schumann, whose insanity, attempted suicide, and eventual death at age 46 affected Brahms early on. It is not surprising that Anselm Feuerbach’s demise should then invoke a composition dedicated so wholly to premature death. Brahms even adopted a text of Friedrich Schiller, another man with that unfortunate distinction. The composer allowed that verse to inspire his remarkable abilities of text painting, in a manner that emphasized the poem’s underlying philosophy. Brahms’s probable familiarity with Goetz’s earlier setting of the same text helped him to focus that conviction. The death of a friend can be a powerful impetus to create, and in Nänie, Brahms committed to immortality his own personal and artistic philosophy: that beauty need not be lost forever, if it resides in the hearts of the living.