Streichquartett der Staatskapelle Berlin & Elisabeth Leonskaja

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 developing variation, even in the earliest of the quartets. Just as with Brahms’s four symphonies, then, these symphonies in chamber form offer enthrallingly different approaches and goals.

The Piano Quartets

Brahms completed his First and Second Piano Quartets at more or less the same time (1860–61). Tackling what was, for him, a new form, albeit one in which he had the late Robert Schumann’s example close to hand, Brahms was keen for help, not least from Schumann’s widow, Clara. But neither she nor her (and Brahms’s) close friend Joseph Joachim could be relied upon for praise, and the composer’s musical innovations in these works (and others) often befuddled his friends. That was particularly the case with the hybrid sonata-form movement, blurring the boundaries of exposition, development, and recapitulation, with which he opened the G-minor Quartet. As a result, so Clara thought, he had pulled the form out of shape and she struggled to find the recapitulation at all, perceiving this to be Brahms’s failure rather than her own. And when the first movement was sent to Joachim, he too found it abstruse.

But it was not just the form that was perplexing; the first movement is also dense in its material and, when broken down into constituent parts, rather terse. In short, it has a kind of Beethovenian sensibility, essentially motivic rather than melodic, thereby giving it a sense of propulsion. And yet Brahms’s lyrical quality is never in doubt, coming joyously to the fore in the third movement, which builds to an emotional peak and reminds us that the early 1860s were likewise a period of prolific song composition in Brahms’s life.

Between these two movements comes an Intermezzo— so called after Clara’s suggestion that “scherzo” was not entirely accurate. After the complex first movement, this is a much simpler affair, though the contrasting character, here furtive-kinetic (without piano), there searching-lyrical (with piano)—followed by a similarly bipartite trio section— shows no dearth of imagination.

The movement that encountered the least criticism— and, arguably, the least ambitious of the four—was the finale. This is an unashamed showstopper in style hongrois. “In the last movement,” Joachim exclaimed breathlessly, “you have beaten me on my own turf,” referring to his “Hungarian” Violin Concerto, written in 1857 and premiered shortly before Brahms began work on his Quartet. But there is also an echo of one of Brahms’s own concertos, his First Piano Concerto in D minor, completed in 1858. And, similarly, in the Quartet, such a barnstorming last movement provides exuberant balance to the complexity and struggle of its anti pode, the opening Allegro.

If Joachim was not entirely convinced by the First Piano Quartet, he was suitably wowed by its successor. Having experienced marked criticism before, Brahms clearly could not take the praise at face value, writing that “your letter is much too kind and I shook my head. Let me have some of your observations.” Joachim duly went into detail, though he proved no less praiseworthy: “I have got to like the A-major Quartet more and more. The tone of tenderness is well contrasted with its sparkling vigor. Many of its harmonic peculiarities would not have disturbed me if I had the chance to hear the work played, rather than merely reading the score! The second subject is not important in itself, but becomes more effective as the music proceeds. The Adagio, however, is magnificent. At first, I thought the move into E major rather unhappy, but when I played it on the piano in my usual clumsy fashion, I got more and more enthusiastic. … Let me hear it all soon.”

Unlike Joachim, however, later commentators have seen this Quartet as being more foursquare than its predecessor, yet there is no shortage of interest for the listener, with the first movement developing three separate themes; the first turning ardent; the second more discursive, passionate; and the third (like a string trio) with a bouncing melody.

The second movement, so admired by Joachim, is a hushed but radiant Adagio, with lilting strings and a balmy E major together forming the work’s tender heart. And yet there is tension too, introduced by the unsettling pianistic flurries. Indeed, throughout Brahms’s chamber music, not least the Piano Quintet that was to follow, there is a sense of confrontation between the piano and the strings. Here, it is only after an emotional plea from all four players and a gorgeously hushed passage from the strings alone that the piano’s disquieting mood (perhaps taking its lead from one of Schubert’s Heine settings, Die Stadt in Schwanengesang) is more or less calmed.

The music of Schubert also seems to have had some sway over the scherzo and trio, though this is, similarly, the late, somewhat unpredictable Schubert, being never quite what he seems. At first, the scherzo provides a sense of relief, but then the piano and strings are, again, more like adversaries than kindred spirits. And little respite is offered by the trio either, with its two sections being further divided—again blurring lines in an otherwise clear-cut form. After these contrasts comes the “sparkling vigor” Joachim noted and the well-deserved joy of the finale, with its predecessor’s “alla Zingarese” color sublimated into the whole.

Before even a note of these works had been written, Brahms had made sketches for another Piano Quartet: his C minor (originally set in the neighboring, though very differently tinted, C-sharp minor). The eventual key of C minor was very much in the water when Brahms returned to the sketches in 1875, when he was signing off the First Symphony, in the same tonality, after a similarly long gestation. Here, however, rather than the nobility of that work’s final movement, Brahms turns introspective.

That might come as no surprise given the grave opening to the Quartet, with its tolling piano octaves (not unlike the timpani at the beginning of the First Symphony). The violin enters, mournfully, low in the instrument’s range, before a daring outburst leads us into the movement proper, with its determinedly unhappy music. The second subject, in the relative major, proves warmer, before, as is now de rigueur in Brahms’s Quartets, a third thematic area unfolds. But these delineations belie the music’s fluidity, with one idea emerging from the other, just as the development stems directly from the exposition. The recapitulation is likewise characterized by a sense of progress, having little truck with either the first or second subjects, as it moves towards a fervent but severe conclusion.

There follows a sonata-form scherzo, with a theme in ragged meter. As in the first movement, this unstable opening paves the way to a more heartfelt if introspective second theme, which forms the basis of the development. In the slow movement, however, peevishness turns to melancholy. The cello dominates, with the violin tying countermelodic ribbons around its theme. Although there are brief, surprising hints of the original, stormy C minor in this E-major song without words, the movement comes to a peaceful close. Or is it imparting a sense of distance and otherworldliness, as in the initially detached finale? That is certainly the mood that emerges in its development section, marked “tranquillo e sempre pianissimo,” as melodies are broken into shards. Spent, the recapitulation peters out to a whisper.

The Piano Quintet

The challenge of reconciling string and keyboard textures, apparent in all three of Brahms’s piano quartets, was particularly puzzling when it came to the Piano Quintet in F minor. Indeed, the work began life without the keyboard element, having been written as a string quintet in 1862. This was just before Brahms’s first trip to Vienna. And without either Joachim’s or Clara’s endorsement of the work, even if they thought it was of “deepest significance,” Brahms left for the Habsburg capital disconsolate.

His time in Vienna nonetheless provided a fillip, but on returning home and hearing Joachim’s quartet give the belated premiere of the work, Brahms realized his friend had been right all along. And so he began a major reworking, turning the quintet into a sonata for two pianos over the next ten months. As such, it was performed with Carl Tausig in Vienna in April 1864, but Clara now entered the fray, deeming it merely an arrangement of something else, rather than a piece in its own right. Brahms was, again, crestfallen, but his respect for Clara won through and he returned to the score one last time in the summer of 1864, when he decided to combine the two previous iterations and create his Piano Quintet Op. 34. Sadly, neither Joachim nor Clara was convinced by the final version, causing Brahms to delay sending the score to his publishers until the summer of 1865.

Like the G-minor Piano Quartet, this F-minor work is full of tension. The unison introduction, finding its way to the dominant, confesses little, though it provides a springboard to a much more passionate discourse. The second thematic area proves more regretful, marked “dolce espressivo,” though, as in the opening theme, counterpoint instils a sense of restlessness, as it does in the third thematic area. Throughout, development perpetuates underlying feelings of agitation, right up to the final cadence.

The A-flat major Andante pours balm on these proceedings. Stuttering into life, its theme slowly emerges in the piano and moves somewhat timidly from the tonic to E major. This new tonal center, common to three of these four works, provides the basis for a much franker discussion, though the piano’s dominant pedal shows resistance and no tonality is given primacy. That is equally the case in the scherzo, which rocks violently between rigid blocks of sound and sighed confessions. Here, the piano and the strings fight for supremacy, becoming particularly forthright in an exciting fugato. And, even in the trio, Brahms cannot let tension abate.

As a result, the finale begins exhaustedly. Can there really be more to contest? Gradually, entries build to a passionate chromatic outburst, once more a springboard to the Allegro, here caged, there aggressive, that will follow. But there is none of the earlier piano quartets’ sense of elation and, after a harmonic slump, Brahms ends his Quintet with a ferocious assault, as if the combat could continue indefinitely.