The Transmission and Reception of Courtly Love Poetry in Late Folksong Settings by Johannes Brahms, Friedrich Wilhelm Arnold, and Wilhelm Tappert

Abstract This chapter analyzes Brahms’s folksong settings “Ach Gott, wie weh thut Scheiden” and “Mir ist ein schöns brauns Maidelein” (WoO 33, Nos. 17 and 24), and sheds light on Brahms’s comparison of a range of sixteenth- through nineteenth-century sources for their texts and melodies. In contrast with collections by F. M. Böhme (published in 1877 and 1893−1894) that obscured the transmission of these poems and melodies, Brahms carefully untangled their provenance and reacted to other nineteenth-century arrangements, as suggested by his annotations in personal copies of Forster’s Frische teutsche Liedlein (1539−1556), Arnold’s Deutsche Volkslieder aus alter und neuer Zeit (ca. 1860−1870), Tappert’s 12 alte deutsche Lieder (1867), and the Deutsche Lieder mit ihren Original-Weisen by Kretzschmer and Zuccalmaglio (1838−1840). After this thorough research, Brahms combined modern melodic variants with courtly love poetry in WoO 33, creating new musical arrangements that express longing, separation, and fidelity in the text.