Symphonies in Chamber Form Music for Piano and Strings by Johannes Brahms
Gavin Plumley
The “True” Brahms Today, Brahms, one of “the Great Bs,” is a totemic presence in what might, tentatively, still be called the canon. But the composer would have laughed at any such legacy. Rather than for a place in the pantheon, Brahms would have expected to be known as an inveterate reviser, even a procrastinator. Two of his three piano quartets provide cases in point: the first took 18 months of hard graft between 1860 and 1861, with Brahms constantly checking his work against the exacting standards of his violinist friend Joseph Joachim; while the third, conceived around the same time, only saw the light of day 15 years later. Like his First Piano Concerto, First Symphony, and First String Quartet, these works were incredibly hard won. Only the Second Piano Quartet seems to have been completed with any sense of pace, probably in just a few weeks in the fall of 1861. It is a remarkable achievement, given the scale of the work, lasting some 50 minutes in performance. The Quartet, however, often remains the least loved of the triptych, echoing the thoughts of Eduard Hanslick, normally Brahms’s greatest advocate, who found it somewhat arid. Joachim, however, was impressed, which, given his more equivocal responses to the First Piano Quartet and the F-minor Piano Quintet, was no small matter. When taken together, as in this series, these works do not, however, reveal a young composer frightened of adding to an august tradition or kowtowing to well-meaning if somewhat domineering friends, including Clara Schumann. Instead, the works show Brahms as the innovative figure he truly was. His art so often conceals the struggle or, rather, the struggle itself becomes the art, finding voice in an engaging combat of strings and keyboard. Forms are likewise newly minted and there is thematic abundance at every turn, which is then subject to ingenious rounds of develop15
