This double album for the first time combines two possible views of the song cycle with Romances from L. Tieck’s ‘Magelone’ op. 33 by Johannes Brahms. On the one hand, the first album offers the opportunity to listen to the song cycle without the prose text, and the second album presents a version, in which before each of the songs a sensitive abridgement of Tieck’s text by Hans-Jürgen Schatz can be heard. The unabridged text by Ludwig Tieck  would result in an overweight of the text, and the music would clearly move into the background. This was probably also a thought that Johannes Brahms had, and for this reason he may have preferred a performance without the prose text, especially as the story by Tieck was well-known in the 19th century. 

With the 15 romances, Brahms reaches a new level in compositional terms. The songs seem to be uninfluenced by contemporary works, and merely Schubert’s songs might have been models in many passages. Here, the declamation close to the text must be mentioned in particular. Otherwise, Brahms moves completely independently of external influences, creating a new, almost symphonic style that is particularly seen in the preludes and postludes. Sometimes, people even speak freely about ‘Brahms’ sole opera’.