Laura Smolik- Botschaft

MM Recital
Jeanette MacDonald Recital Hall USC
March 2016
Robert Blake, piano

Botschaft
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Georg Friedrich Daumer (1800-1875)

Composed in 1868

Throughout his illustrious career, Johannes Brahms composed more than 200 solo songs with piano accompaniment, as well as numerous vocal duets, quartets and folksong arrangements. In all of these compositions, Brahms’ desire to seek unity of text and music through the emotional ideas of love and death are at the forefront, and the poetry of Georg Friedrich Daumer provides the perfect vehicle for Brahms’s Romantic style. Brahms felt a song should have something to say that cannot be expressed in words alone. He preferred poems that were rich in allusion and open to interpretation through music. His favorite subject was unquestionably love and all of the longing, loss, resignation, and retrospection that accompany it.

Botschaft is set on the poem from philosopher Georg Daumer’s reworked and translated poetry of Hafiz, a 13th-century Persian poet made popular in 19th-century Germany by his exotic and mystical descriptions of love, pleasure, and nature.