Brahms was ready for another journey to Italy in the spring, but Widmann was unable to accompany him, and he passed his sixty-third birthday anniversary in Vienna. When it dawned, the work that was for a short time generally accepted as his swan-song had been completed. Deiters writes that the immediate occasion of the composition of the 'Four Serious Songs' was the death of the artist Max Klinger's father, which occurred earlier in the year. The not unnatural assumption that has sometimes seen in these solemn utterances of the great composer a presentiment of his own fast-approaching end may or may not represent a fact. It has not been accepted by those of his friends amongst whom he passed the last few months of his life, and certainly nothing that is known of his individuality lends likelihood to the notion of his going out, as it were, to meet the thought of his death. On the other hand, his repeated assertion that the songs had been composed for his own birthday points to the possibility that his mind may have been under the influence of forebodings of which he was, perhaps, but vaguely conscious. 'Yes, Grüber, we are in the front line now,' he said to his landlord on hearing of the death of some of the old people in the course of one of his last summers at Ischl.
The 'Four Serious Songs' were published in the summer of 1896 with a dedication to Max Klinger, his personal friend, of whose work, including that inspired by his own compositions, he became a warm admirer, though he at first disliked the painter's 'Brahms Fantasie.'
Three of the songs deal grimly with the thought of death (Eccles. iii. 19-22, iv. 1-3; Ecclus. xli. 1, 2); the fourth has for its text St. Paul's beautiful glorification of love (1 Cor. xiii. 1-3, 12, 13):
'For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; as the one dieth, so dieth the other, for all is vanity....
'Though I spake with the tongues of men and of angels, and had not love, I should be as sounding brass or a tinkling bell....
'We see now through a glass, in a dark word, but then face to face. Now I know it partly, but then I shall know it as I am known.
'Now remain faith, hope, love; but the greatest is love.'
It is certain that Brahms speaks to us in the songs from the depth of his convictions. Herr Geheimrath Dr. Engelmann arrived one evening in the course of the summer on a day's visit to Ischl. Brahms called at his hotel at six o'clock the next morning, and after breakfast brought his friend back to his rooms, where they spent several hours together. The composer was in delight over some lately-arrived volumes of the complete edition of Schubert's works, then in progress, and could not sufficiently express his joy in their contents. 'See here,' he said, with his energetic enthusiasm, as he pointed to one place after another with beaming face and lightening eyes—'see here, what a splendid fellow he was! People talk of him as a mere melodist, but look what material he had even in his early works; look what the melodies are, how they grow.' By-and-by, taking up a copy of the 'Four Serious Songs,' he said: 'Have you seen my protest? I wrote these for my birthday.'
The explanation of these words is that the master viewed with mistrust, or even dislike, modern efforts to revivify and popularize the services of the Evangelical Church by the introduction of sacred musical works composed for the purpose, of which those of Heinrich von Herzogenberg may be taken as the type. Brahms, who subscribed to no church dogmas, regarded this tendency as artificial, and therefore as weak and unhealthy, and much as he admired Herzogenberg's powers, he regretted that they were dominated during the last ten years of his creative activity by his strong ecclesiastical bias.[86] Brahms' love of the Bible and his preference for Scriptural texts was, as we know, not that of what is conventionally called a 'pietist.' He spoke in the language of the people's book as a realist who was at the same time an idealist. He has so arranged the texts of his German Requiem that it would be difficult to construe the work as the embodiment of a definite belief, and he expressly refused to enlarge it into an account of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Christ; and yet, as we have endeavoured to show, it contains the presentiment, the inspiration, of something positive. From Brahms' standpoint the attempt to go behind the mysteries of life and death, to construct the unspeakable, the unthinkable, into verbal formulæ, is not only predoomed to failure, but is almost irreverent. Yet, as we may remember, 'he had his faith,' and if anything may be judged of it from the story of his life, the spirit of his works, this faith lay in acceptance of the immutability of truth, the sacredness of life, and the sovereignty of love.
Brahms had been settled in his rooms at Ischl scarcely a fortnight, when he was profoundly shaken by the tidings of Frau Schumann's death. She passed away peacefully at her home in Frankfurt on May 20, in the seventy-seventh year of her age, and was laid to rest by her husband's side at Bonn on Whit Sunday, May 24. The story of her life, triply crowned by fame, love, and sorrow, remains amongst the ideal possessions of the world.