Anastasia hand drawing, 10 years old, Israel, 28 September 2011. Lullaby or Cradle Song by Johannes Brahms (Wiegenlied: Guten Abend, gute Nacht, Op. 49, No. 4). Virtually digitally performed by Violin and Celeste at Abbey Road Studio One 1 on September 8, 2011. Video starring Anastasia is a true life bed time scene recording, footage taken 22 January 2011 at 22:09PM at the Holy Land of Israel
Note: Abbey Road Studios were not truly attended, the sound recoding was modelled by a computer program to simulate the acoustics of the Studio, and then manipulated to add Church ambience. To listen to Brahms' Lullaby different mix please view another video at our sister channel:
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Composer:
Johannes Brahms
7 May 1833 -- 3 April 1897
Johannes Brahms was a German composer and pianist, and one of the leading musicians of the Romantic period. Born in Hamburg, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna, Austria, where he was a leader of the musical scene. In his lifetime, Brahms' popularity and influence were considerable; following a comment by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow, he is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the Three Bs.
Brahms composed for piano, chamber ensembles, symphony orchestra, and for voice and chorus. A virtuoso pianist, he premiered many of his own works... Brahms strongly preferred writing absolute music that does not refer to an explicit scene or narrative, and he never wrote an opera or a symphonic poem.
Despite his reputation as a serious composer of large, complex musical structures, some of Brahms's most widely known and most commercially successful compositions during his life were small-scale works of popular intent aimed at the thriving contemporary market for domestic music-making... Among the most cherished of these lighter works by Brahms ...the last was written (to a folk text) to celebrate the birth of a son to Brahms's friend Bertha Faber and is universally known as Brahms's Lullaby.
Brahms's Lullaby:
Brahms's Lullaby or Cradle Song is the common name for a number of children's lullabies with similar lyrics and the same melody, the original of which was Johannes Brahms' Wiegenlied: Guten Abend, gute Nacht ("Good evening, good night"), Op. 49, No. 4 (published in 1868). The first verse is taken from a collection of German folk poems called Des Knaben Wunderhorn; the second stanza was written by Georg Scherer (1824--1909) in 1849. The lullaby's melody is one of the most famous and recognizable in the world, used by countless parents to sing their babies to sleep.
Lullaby as a musical form:
A lullaby is a soothing song, usually sung to young children before they go to sleep, with the intention of speeding that process. As a result they are often simple and repetitive. Lullabies can be found in every human culture and seem to have been used at least from the ancient period.
Lullabies written by established classical composers are often given the form-name berceuse, which is French for lullaby, or cradle song. The most famous berceuse of all is Johannes Brahms' lied Wiegenlied (cradle song), called Brahms' Lullaby in English. Brahms wrote his "Wiegenlied" for a Bertha Faber, on the occasion of the birth of her second son. The English lyrics are similar to the original German.
Typically a berceuse is in triple metre, or in a compound metre like 6/8. Tonally most berceuses are simple, often merely alternating tonic and dominant harmonies: Because the intended effect is to put someone to sleep, wild chromaticism would be somewhat out of character. Another characteristic of the berceuse—for no reason other than convention—is a tendency to stay on the "flat side". For example, the berceuses by Chopin, Liszt and Balakirev are all in D♭.
Frédéric Chopin's Opus 57 is a berceuse for solo piano. Other famous examples of the genre include Maurice Ravel's Berceuse sur le nom de Gabriel Fauré for violin and piano; the Berceuse élégiaque by Ferruccio Busoni; the Berceuse from the opera Jocelyn by Benjamin Godard; the Berceuse by Igor Stravinsky which is featured in the Firebird ballet, and Lullaby for String Quartet by George Gershwin. The English composer Nicholas Maw's orchestral nocturne The World in the Evening is subtitled 'lullaby for large orchestra'. American composer Michael Glenn Williams Berceuse for solo piano uses an ostinato similar to Chopin's but in a 21st century harmonic context.
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Brahms
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahms%27s_Lullaby
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