It is prefaced in the score by two lines from an anonymous Scottish ballad, "Lady Anne Bothwell's Lament", translated to German by Johann Gottfried Herder: Schlaf sanft mein Kind, schlaf sanft und schön!
Original: Baloo, my babe, lie still and sleep; It grieves me sore to see thee weep.
[2] In June of that year he asked his friend, the musicologist Eusebius Mandyczewski, to send him manuscript paper so that Brahms could "properly sketch" the three pieces.
[3] In September 1892 Clara Schumann learned of the existence of the pieces from her student Ilona Eibenschütz and wrote to Brahms requesting he send them to her.
[1] To Niemann, the middle section of the second intermezzo seems to portray a "man as he stands with the bleak, gusty autumn wind eddying round him".