Brahms and the Long 19th Century

Brahms and the Long 19th Century

String Quartets from Vienna and Beyond

Harry Haskell

In music as in other fields, the 19th century was an age of awakening historical consciousness. Thanks to legions of scholars and musical archaeologists, Romantic composers were keenly aware of their place in the annals of music, however cavalierly, and at times condescendingly, they may have treated the work of their predecessors. None was more historically aware than Brahms, who transcribed, collected, edited, and performed music by a wide range of Renaissance and Baroque masters, as well as near-contemporaries like Schumann and Chopin. One of his prize possessions was the manuscript of Mozart’s great Symphony No. 40 in G minor. In the early 20th century, Schoenberg presented his own music and theoretical writings as the culmination of a Germanic tradition that stretched to Bach and beyond; he famously proclaimed that his discovery of twelve-tone composition would ensure the supremacy of German music for the next 100 years. “When I think of music, the only type that comes to my mind—whether I want it to or not—is German music,” Schoenberg wrote, predicting that “its wordless power will create and fill stately mansions of the spirit into all eternity.”

In this pair of concerts, the String Quartet of the Staatskapelle Berlin explore the historical lineage leading both to and from the three string quartets that Brahms composed in the 1860s and 1870s. The two programs shed light on what historians call the long 19th century, in this case extending from 1772, when the 16-year-old Mozart wrote his three genial Divertimenti for strings, K. 136–138, in Salzburg, to 1909, the date of Webern’s pathbreaking Five Movements for String Quartet. To say that a common thread runs through all seven works is to affirm the obvious—their shared cultural inheritance. Schoenberg, the apostle of modernism, declared that Mozart and Brahms “were my foremost models during the greatest part of my existence as a musician,” a statement that Webern implicitly endorsed. Yet lineage in this sense has less to do with direct, measurable influence than with of a way of thinking about music and its place in history, coupled with a feeling of belonging to a tradition that was at once broad-minded and parochial, nationalistic and universal.

A Quartet for a King

In the spring of 1789, Mozart, a virtuoso pianist, embarked on a concert tour to Leipzig, Berlin, and Dresden in hopes of replenishing his depleted bank account. It was on this trip that he undertook to compose the last of his 27 string quartets—the three so-called “Prussian” Quartets— for King Friedrich Wilhelm II, an enthusiastic and apparently accomplished amateur cellist. The Quartet in D major K. 575 was written in Vienna that June, a few weeks after the composer had left Potsdam—he never got to meet the king and received no compensation for his work. A year later, Mozart dispatched the scores of the three works to his publisher, grumbling to a friend that he had been “forced to give away my quartets … for a song, simply in order to have cash in hand.”

In a nod to his royal patron, Mozart awarded the cellist unusual prominence in the D-major Quartet. Much of the cello writing is virtuosic and highly exposed; indeed, the central trio section of the minuet movement—here placed in third position instead of second, as in Mozart’s earlier quartets—is virtually a cello solo, with the other instruments relegated to supporting roles. By spotlighting the cello’s upper register, Mozart further accentuates the music’s soloistic character, and the absence of a strong bass foundation gives the trio a light, ethereal quality that contrasts with the more robust and vigorous tone of the minuet. The Quartet’s two outer movements, both in cut time and marked Allegretto, feature kindred melodies that trace ascending D-major triads and incorporate crisp “snap” rhythms. There is much engaging repartee between the first violin and cello, with first one and then the other taking the lead in presenting thematic material. Their dialogue intensifies in the A-major Andante: the two instruments respond to and comment on each other’s music, and for four sublime measures in the middle of the movement their voices intertwine in a rapturous duet. The movement’s serenely lyrical theme bears a slight resemblance to Mozart’s song Das Veilchen, hence the Quartet’s nickname, “The Violet.”

Schoenberg in D Major

Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, the triumvirate who comprised the so-called First Viennese School, found their anointed successors in the Second Viennese School of the early 20th century. As the latter’s acknowledged leader, Schoenberg stood at the vanguard of the post-Romantic movement to loosen and ultimately dissolve the bonds of traditional tonality and musical structure. “I feel the air of another planet,” the soprano sings in the finale of his Second String Quartet of 1907–08, the work that marked his definitive break with tonal precedent. To many contemporary critics and concertgoers, the music of Schoenberg and his protégés Webern and Berg was both alien and alienating: performances of their works routinely provoked vitriolic attacks in the musical press and riotous protests in concert halls. Yet the Second Viennese School endured and became a seminal force in musical modernism.

Schoenberg had just set out on his pioneering journey when he composed his early, unnumbered Quartet in D major in 1897. “At age 21 I still had had no theoretical training,” he recalled in later years, “but I was successful enough as an autodidact that after a year of composing under Alexander von Zemlinsky’s tutelage I was able to get a public performance of a string quartet.” Schoenberg described his first quartet as “strongly under the influence of Brahms and Dvořák,” and indeed their fingerprints are easy to spot in this melodious, unabashedly tonal score. The amiable, nimbly leaping unison theme of the opening Allegro molto is offset by a smoother, more cantabile tune in a movement characterized by bouncy rhythms and transparent yet multilayered textures. It is followed by a delicate, mincing-stepped Intermezzo in F-sharp minor, marked Andantino grazioso, and a vigorously Brahmsian theme-and-variations in B-flat minor. After these remote harmonic excursions, Schoenberg returns to the home key for a rollicking, Dvořákian finale. Although the D-major Quartet remained unpublished in Schoenberg’s lifetime, he proudly noted that the work’s 1897 premiere took place in Vienna’s hallowed Tonkünstler Verein only a few months after Brahms, the society’s honorary president, had died.

Classicist and Romantic

In his famous article New Paths, published in 1853, Robert Schumann lauded the 20-year-old Brahms, whom he had just met, as a genius seemingly sprung forth “like Minerva fully armed from the head of Jove.” As Brahms auditioned his works at the piano, the older composer found himself “drawn into ever deeper circles of enchantment… There were sonatas, rather veiled symphonies— songs, whose poetry one could understand without knowing the words … single pianoforte pieces, partly demoniacal, of the most graceful form—then sonatas for violin and piano—quartets for strings—and every one so different from the rest that each seemed to flow from a separate source.” We may never know anything about the string quartets that worked their spell on Schumann, for Brahms destroyed every one of them. In fact, by the time he began work on his two Op. 51 Quartets in the mid-1860s, he had by his own count written and discarded no fewer than 20 quartets, none of which measured up to his exacting standards. As in contemplating his first symphony, Brahms was paralyzed by the thought of following in Beethoven’s footsteps, especially at a time when the string quartet had fallen out of favor with his fellow “progressive” composers.

Friends were continually asking when his first quartet would be ready, and Brahms persistently put them off. “It took Mozart a lot of trouble to compose six early quartets,” he reminded his publisher, Fritz Simrock, in 1869, “so I will try my hardest to turn out a couple fairly well done. They should not fail you, but if I were a publisher I should not be in such a hurry.” Simrock was the soul of patience; he was still waiting for Brahms to deliver in 1873 when he received a letter containing further discouraging news: “I give myself the greatest trouble and keep on hoping that something really great and difficult will occur to me, and they turn out mean and paltry!” A few weeks later Brahms finally admitted that he would never be satisfied and shipped the two Op. 51 Quartets off to Simrock. His diffidence notwithstanding, the Quartet in A minor is at once “really great” and in some respects “difficult” to categorize and apprehend. This stems in part from Brahms’s lifelong struggle to reconcile the Classical and Romantic strains in his musical language. The Classicist is very much to the fore in the opening Allegro non troppo, with its well-proportioned themes and clearly delineated form. The shy, halting melody of the Andante moderato carries us into more personal, introspective territory, while in the third movement, marked “Quasi Minuetto,” Brahms adopts an unconventional multipart structure reminiscent of the late Beethoven quartets. The bravura Finale is a highly rhythmicized romp with a distinctly “Hungarian” flavor. At the end, a quiet echo of the first movement’s principal theme sets up a mad dash to the final cadence.

A Proto–String Quartet

The string quartet was in its infancy when Mozart wrote his three Divertimenti K. 136–138, probably in early 1772. Although the teenaged composer already had one bona fide string quartet to his credit—K. 80 in G major— the notion of dispensing with the traditional continuo foundation and giving each of the four players an independent voice was still a novelty, embraced only by Haydn and a handful of other innovators. It should not surprise us, then, that Mozart did not make it altogether clear whether these beguiling miniatures were meant to be played as quartets, with one player on a part, or as chamber symphonies. In genre terms, the three pieces—sometimes referred to as the “Salzburg symphonies”—mediate between the string symphony of the earlier 18th century and the nascent string quartet of the early Classical period. The six quartets that Mozart wrote in late 1772 and early 1773 (K. 155–160) exhibit many of the same transitional traits.

Accustomed as we are to orchestral performances of the Divertimenti, certain features—for example, the violins’ fast, florid passagework—argue for a soloistic interpretation. Such technical challenges were child’s play to Mozart, whose pianistic prowess was matched by his precocious mastery of the violin. His father, the author of a famous textbook on violin playing, was a violinist in the court orchestra of Archbishop Colloredo of Salzburg. By age 13, Wolfgang was playing alongside Leopold in the orchestra, and three years later he was promoted to concertmaster. His interest in the violin was further whetted by the vogue for the instrument in Italy, where he traveled with his father on their Grand Tour of Europe in the early 1770s. He once boasted, with only mild hyperbole, that he was equal to “the finest fiddler in all Europe.”

Mozart was frequently called upon to supply divertimenti, serenades, and similar lightweight musical garnishes for the lavish entertainments that graced the palaces and pleasure gardens of the Austrian nobility. Such works were typically scored for combinations of winds and strings, the better to be heard out of doors, and contained as many as nine movements. Although divertimento composers tended to favor the uncomplicated, light-textured galant style that was in vogue in the late 1700s, Mozart’s contributions to the genre include more substantial works such as Eine kleine Nachtmusik and the great String Trio K. 563 (which he labeled a divertimento). The three movements of K. 138 are neatly balanced tonally—moving from F major to C major and back again— as well as thematically, the brisk, extroverted outer movements contrasting with the more expansive lyricism of the central Andante. Although the first violin often steals the spotlight, silhouetted against the old-fashioned harmonic bass line, the inner voices provide much more than mere harmonic filler.

Brahms’s “Sunlit Meadow-Path”

Brahms began work on his third and last quartet, Op. 67, in the summer of 1875. Not yet settled permanently in Vienna, the 42-year-old composer was lodging with a painter friend outside Heidelberg. The countrified setting was so idyllic that Brahms declined a tempting invitation to conduct his Deutsches Requiem in Munich. Besides, he was in no mood just yet to tackle the big symphonic work that he had been wrestling with, on and off, for more than a decade. As he told a correspondent, “I stay sitting here, and from time to time write largely useless pieces in order not to have to look into the stern face of a symphony.” Among the “useless pieces” he produced that summer was the Quartet in B-flat major, the gayest and most accessible of the three, and Brahms’s personal favorite. A contemporary critic compared it favorably to the two knotty Op. 51 Quartets, observing that Brahms “this time seems to have decided to take the sunlit meadow-path.”

Whether consciously or otherwise, Brahms evokes the

cheery mood and B-flat tonality of Mozart’s “Hunt” Quartet in the Vivace’s opening 6/8 theme (which, despite its jagged syncopations, one can easily imagine being played by horns), the profusion of cascading 16th notes, and the dancelike second subject in 2/4 time. Here, as elsewhere in the Op. 67 Quartet, Brahms mixes meters, often setting two beats in one part against three in another. The two middle movements are a study in contrasts: tempo (Andante versus Agitato), key (F major versus D minor), and character (warm and spacious versus driven and somewhat skittish). The third movement’s delicate coda comes to rest on a major chord that sets the stage for the finale, a delightful set of theme and variations in the home key, in which Brahms ingeniously brings back the two themes from the first movement. The violinist Joseph Joachim registered his unqualified approval of the B flat–major Quartet: “You have probably never written such beautiful chamber music as in the D-minor movement [the Agitato] and the finale, the first full of magical romanticism, the last full of intimacy and grace within a fully artistic framework.”

Webern’s Radical Brevity

Webern’s Five Movements for String Quartet (he later transcribed them for string orchestra) date from the spring of 1909, when the composer, aged 25, was just beginning to make a name for himself. Webern’s laconic description of the work in a letter to his teacher, Schoenberg, offered no hint of its radically unconventional nature. “I have already written an entire string quartet,” he proudly reported. “It has five movements: the first fast, the second very slow, the third very fast, the fourth slower, the fifth a slow 6/8 meter. The movements are all short.” This was an egregious understatement; Webern could be as economical with words as he was with notes. Yet perhaps his thumbnail outline is all that needs to be said—all that usefully can be said without recourse to analytical jargon—about this hauntingly ethereal set of miniatures.

His Op. 5 was a milestone on Webern’s escape route from what he saw as the cul-de-sac of late-Romantic bombast and long-windedness. (Classical concision was more to his liking; after conducting a performance of one of Mozart’s later divertimenti, he described it to Schoenberg as “a marvelous thing.”) The Five Movements are radical not only in their extreme brevity—together, they last only a little longer than a single movement of a standard string quartet—but also in their implicit rejection of the laws that had governed Western art music for centuries. By 1909, both Webern and Schoenberg found themselves cast adrift from traditional tonal harmony and plunged into the murky waters of atonality. For them and their committed followers in what would eventually become the twelve-tone school, there could be no looking back. To characterize Webern’s Five Movements as a revolutionary manifesto, however, risks obscuring their high value as art. As busy as the score looks on the printed page, this is music of transcendent quietude; one of Webern’s dynamic markings reads “scarcely audible.” The panoply of special instrumental effects creates a restlessly shifting kaleidoscope of colors, textures, and shapes, as silky filaments of sound dissolve into spiky outbursts. The piece had its premiere in Vienna in 1910; 12 years later the Five Movements incited a famous riot when they were performed at a contemporary music festival in Salzburg. Time has not diminished the music’s power to shock, arrest, and captivate.

Brahms the Progressive

In their final form, Brahms’s Quartets in C minor and A minor date from the fall of 1873, two decades after his propitious encounter with Schumann had launched his career. As we’ve seen, Brahms was a merciless self-critic. Yet whatever misgivings he may have felt about the quality of his work, ingratiating himself with the public clearly was not uppermost in his mind. The C-minor Quartet is among his most severe and uncompromising pieces of chamber music. The urgently rising motif that opens the first movement, like a tightly coiled spring, generates a tension that doesn’t unwind until a few bars before the final C-major cadence. (The same motif recurs at the beginning of the fourth movement, illustrating Brahms’s growing concern with large-scale thematic unity.) The two inner movements provide an interlude of bittersweet introspection, but the dark, intense drama of the opening Allegro reemerges in the finale, a sustained burst of energy characterized by restless cross-rhythms and intricate part writing.

Brahms dedicated the Op. 51 Quartets to his surgeon friend Theodor Billroth, a sophisticated connoisseur and accomplished amateur violist. Billroth knew better than to take the composer’s habitual self-deprecation at face value. “These dedications will keep our names known longer than our best work,” he sagely predicted to a fellow dedicatee. Schoenberg, in an often-cited essay titled Brahms the Progressive, singled the two quartets out as illustrations of Brahms’s innovations in harmony and thematic development, innovations that had enabled composers like himself to fashion an “unrestricted musical language” free of Classical and Romantic conventions. “It is important to realize,” Schoenberg wrote, “that at a time when all believed in ‘expression,’ Brahms, without renouncing beauty and emotion, proved to be a progressive in a field which had not been cultivated for half a century. He would have been a pioneer if he had simply returned to Mozart. But he did not live on inherited fortune; he made one of his own.”