Composed (1892); 16 minutes 

In 1892, after an absence from solo piano composition lasting the best part of three decades, Brahms returned to the instrument of his youth. During the summers of 1892-93, he composed more than two dozen short piano pieces, twenty of which were gathered into four collections of generally intimate miniatures. The Opp. 116-119 sets contain some of Brahms’s loveliest, gentlest, and most enduring music. It speaks the language of the end of an era rather than its beginning. The discipline is rigorous, the construction shaped by a lifetime of study and practical immersion in the full available literature of Western classical music.

Brahms gives each piece in Op. 117 the title ‘Intermezzo’, suggesting works that are slower, reflective, often inward. Privately, he called the triptych “cradle songs of my sorrows,” a phrase that invites more questions than it answers. The first Intermezzo is a tender lullaby, headed by a quotation from the Scottish lullaby Lady Anne Bothwell’s Lament: “Balou my boy, ly still and sleep. It grieves me sore to hear you weep.” (Ancient & Modern Scottish Songs, David Herd, 1769). The melancholy melody that threads between the hands in this E-flat Intermezzo fits the words of Herd’s transcription with uncanny precision.

Some have argued that the first two Intermezzos correspond to lines 1-3 and 4-7 of the poem, while Intermezzo No. 3 continues with the subsequent poem in Herd’s collection, “Oh woe! Oh woe! deep in the valley.” Certainly, the two later Intermezzos are no less lullabies than the first, and together the three form a unified meditation. The second, cast in miniature sonata form, carries greater urgency yet remains poised and tender. The third—among the most elusive of the late piano pieces—had a special significance for Brahms, who referred to it as ‘the lullaby of all my griefs.”