Brahms Exploration III

Notes on the Program

By Harry Haskell

JOHANNES BRAHMS Born in Hamburg, May 7, 1833 Died in Vienna, April 3, 1897 RHAPSODIES, OP. 79 Composed in 1879; 15 minutes

Brahms lavished as much care and craftsmanship on his short piano pieces as on his sonatas and concertos. Dating from 1879, the two Op. 79 Rhapsodies are dedicated to his close friend Elisabet von Herzogenberg, a gifted amateur pianist on whom he had long relied for sympathetic criticism. They joined a long line of Brahms intermezzos, capriccios, ballades and other so-called character pieces, a quintessentially Romantic genre in which composers could distill their mastery of mood, craft and piano technique to its essence. The Rhapsodies were destined to become among Brahms’s most popular and frequently performed works, not least by the composer himself.

The B-Minor Rhapsody’s muscular, agitated opening theme is characterized by a slashing triplet figure that recurs throughout the piece, accentuating what Herzogenberg called the music’s “powerful, prickly beauty.” Brahms strikes a mellower note in the contrasting midsection, with its smoothly arching melody, transmuted from minor to major mode, suspended in the inner voice atop a bed of undulating eighth notes. The equally tempestuous G-Minor Rhapsody contains many of the same elements: the contrast between “masculine” and “feminine” themes, the stentorian octaves in the bass, the chords staggered between the two hands. But a persistent undercurrent of oscillating triplets gives the second Rhapsody a darker, more obsessive character than the first.

FANTASIES, OP. 116 Completed in 1893; 15 minutes

In December 1890, Brahms presented his publisher with the manuscript of his second string quintet, along with a terse message: “With this slip, bid farewell to notes of mine.” As it turned out, the composer’s valedictory was premature; he soon got a fresh wind and went on to pen some of his most beguiling works, including the Clarinet Trio and Clarinet Quintet, the Four Serious Songs and four sets of short piano pieces, beginning with the seven fantasylike miniatures that comprise Op. 116.

The mixture of lively, outgoing capriccios with slower, more introspective intermezzos gives the set a deeply satisfying sense of balance. The muscularity of the opening Capriccio in D Minor is tempered by lilting rhythmic displacements. The A-Minor Intermezzo’s wistful, insistently lapping theme contrasts with the plunging cascades and gentling undulating triplets of the G-Minor Capriccio. In contrast to the rounded ABA form of the other six pieces, the central Intermezzo plies a waywardly rhapsodic path that accentuates the music’s ruminative, improvisatory character. Brahms unites it and the two ensuing Intermezzi––the first halting and hesitant, the second marching tenderly but confidently–– through the closely related keys of E major and E minor. An agitated Capriccio brings the Op. 116 Fantasies to a close in the same mood and key as they began.

VARIATIONS ON A THEME OF PAGANINI, OP. 35 (BOOK II) Completed in 1863; 12 minutes

The two books of Paganini Variations––or “studies,” as Brahms preferred to call them––date from the early 1860s. The ambitious young man had recently moved to Vienna from his native Hamburg and was determined to prove his mettle as both pianist and composer.

Whether he wrote the Paganini Variations for himself or for the eminent Polish virtuoso Carl Tausig, with whom he had struck up a close friendship, is uncertain. In any event, Tausig reveled in their finger-twisting pyrotechnical display. “Everybody considers them unplayable,” he told Brahms, “yet secretly they nibble at them, and are furious that the fruits hang so high.” Clara Schumann considered the 28 variations so fiendishly difficult that she dubbed them “witches’ variations.”

With its catchy tune and regular phrase structure, the bouncy A-minor theme from one of Paganini’s caprices for solo violin gave Brahms (and later Rachmaninoff) ample opportunity to “rummage around” without straying too far from his original source. In several of the 14 variations from Book II the melody is indeed “barely recognizable,” either buried beneath an avalanche of “black” notes (as in the first variation) or completely transformed in shape, meter and character (as in Variation 12). Although virtuosity is very much the point of the exercise, Brahms doesn’t stint on poetry: The gently swaying waltz of Variation 4 is one of his loveliest lyrical creations.

SONATA NO. 3 IN F MINOR, OP. 5 Composed in 1853; 37 minutes

Robert Schumann introduced Brahms to the musical world in a famous article published in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik on October 28, 1853. The 20-year-old composer-pianist had been the Schumanns’ house guest since his arrival in Düsseldorf four weeks earlier, and their initial estimate of his character and ability had been amply confirmed. “You and I understand each other,” Schumann exclaimed after hearing Brahms play his first two piano sonatas. The younger composer may also have taken that opportunity to audition two movements from his sonata-in-progress. In any event, the other three movements of the FMinor Sonata were speedily drafted during the month Brahms spent under the Schumanns’ roof, and on November 2 he played the entire work for his captivated hosts.

From the thunderous opening of the Allegro maestoso, with its massive symphonic textures, to the rolled major-key chords that bring the Sonata to a majestic close, Brahms’ Op. 5 is a work of breathtaking confidence and maturity. As Schumann observed, it was as if the young and still unknown composer had sprung forth “like Minerva fully armed from the head of Jove.” The F-Minor Sonata is conceived on a grand scale, and although much of the writing is tailored for Brahms’s exceptionally large hands, many passages call for great delicacy and tenderness. The two slow movements, in particular, show him at his most poetic. (The Andante bears an epigraph from the German Romantic poet Christian Sternau that begins, “Dusk is falling and the moonlight shines …”) In the Finale, Brahms further endeared himself to his host by incorporating the musical motto f-a-e, standing for “Frei aber einsam” (“Free but lonely”), the cri de coeur embraced by Schumann and his circle.