Garrick Ohlsson: Program Notes (3/19)

Garrick Ohlsson Brahms Exploration II (April 28, 2019) 92nd Street Y Notes by Harry Haskell JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897) Six Pieces for Piano, Op. 118 Intermezzo in A Minor Intermezzo in A Major Ballade in G Minor Intermezzo in F Minor Romanze in F Major Intermezzo in E-flat Minor Sonata in F-sharp Minor, Op. 2 Allegro non troppo ma energico Andante con espressione Scherzo: Allegro Finale: Introduzione -- Allegro non troppo e rubato Intermezzi, Op. 117 No. 1 in E-flat Major No. 2 in B-flat Minor No. 3 in C-sharp Minor Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, Op. 24 Johannes Brahms Born in Hamburg, May 7, 1833; died in Vienna, April 3, 1897 Six Pieces for Piano, Op. 118 Composed by 1893; 23 minutes In December 1890, Johannes Brahms presented his publisher with the manuscript of his second String Quintet, Op. 111, accompanied by a terse message: “With this slip, bid farewell to notes of mine.” As it turned out, the fifty-seven-year-old composer’s announcement of his retirement was premature; he soon got a fresh wind and went on to pen some of his most beguiling music, including the Four Serious Songs and a series of enchanting chamber works for clarinet, the fruit of his late-life friendship with clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld. Nor did Brahms neglect his own instrument. Although he didn’t feel up to writing another major solo work for the piano at that stage of his life, he demonstrated his unflagging creative vitality by turning out four sets of piano miniatures, Opp. 116-119, in quick succession.

The six Klavierstücke (Piano Pieces), Op. 118, were composed in the summer of 1893 in the Austrian spa resort of Bad Ischl, Brahms’s beloved warm-weather get-away from the hustle and bustle of Vienna. His interest in the character piece, a favorite Romantic genre closely associated with his revered Robert Schumann, was hardly new, as

his earlier Ballades, Op. 10, Klavierstücke, Op. 76, and Rhapsodies, Op. 79, attest. But his intense concentration on short keyboard pieces was unprecedented, and it suggests that Brahms was not merely turning away from the long-form works that had occupied him in the past, but embracing a genre that enabled him to distill his mastery of mood, craft, and piano technique to its essence.

The opening Intermezzo in A Minor, the shortest and most compressed of the six pieces, is based on a single theme, its surging phrases and rippling passagework ultimately dissolving in an A-major mist. The other five pieces exhibit the symmetrical ABA form that Brahms favored, with a contrasting interlude at the center. The tenderly nostalgic mood of the second Intermezzo, in A major, is dispelled by the energetic, galloping rhythms of the G-Minor Ballade, with its quiet midsection harmonized in sweet-sounding thirds. In the F-Minor Intermezzo, Brahms plays with metrical ambiguity by blurring the line between upbeats and downbeats. The last two pieces are even more unsettling, as the nobly striding melody and fantasy-like midsection of the F-Major Romanze give way to the darkly mysterious and impassioned Intermezzo in E-flat Minor.

Sonata in F-sharp Minor, Op. 2 Composed in 1852; 26 minutes When Schumann introduced Brahms to the world in a laudatory article published in Europe’s leading music journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, on October 28, 1853, the twenty-year-old composer and pianist had been the Schumanns’ house guest in Düsseldorf for a month. The older man’s positive first impressions of his visitor had been amply confirmed. “You and I understand each other,” Schumann remarked after hearing Brahms play a selection of his early piano music, including the freshly minted Sonata in F-sharp Minor. Brahms responded in kind: in sending Schumann a batch of his published scores at the end of the year, he referred to his works as “your first foster children (who owe to you their citizenship of the world).”

Schumann may have been Brahms’s musical stepfather, but it was his wife Clara, a renowned concert pianist and composer in her own right, who would be the younger man’s lifelong muse, confidante, and most trusted critic. It was to Clara that Brahms dedicated the Op. 2 Sonata (having first tactfully sought Robert’s consent); she was the “dear lady friend” for whom he wrote the Handel Variations after Robert’s tragic death in 1856; and it was to her that he turned for approval many years later in composing his valedictory Klavierstücke, Op. 119. Despite Clara’s unwavering devotion to her husband’s memory, she was no less steadfast in her affection for Brahms. “I have never loved a friend as I love him,” she told her children; “it is the most beautiful mutual understanding of two souls.”

The three piano sonatas that Brahms wrote between 1852 and 1854 were a kind of rite of passage. It was as if he felt the need to establish his credentials in a genre that was still closely associated with Beethoven before moving on to other things. (For the same reason he hesitated for many years before writing his first string quartet and symphony.)

That the piano sonata had fallen out of fashion in the mid-1800s was due in no small measure to Schumann, who had had popularized and perfected the genre of the short character piece. Clara described Brahms’s early sonatas and other piano works as “rich in fantasy, depth of feeling, and mastery of form”--in other words, a blend of Classical discipline and Romantic freedom. Echoing Robert’s comparison of the sonatas to “veiled

symphonies,” she predicted that Brahms would find “the true medium for his imagination” in writing for the orchestra.

Symphonic textures and rhapsodic fluidity are defining features of the F-sharpMinor Sonata. The stentorian octaves that open the Allegro non troppo soon melt away in a gauzy harmonic haze pierced by rippling arpeggios, and the rest of the movement plays on the contrast between these two ideas. The Andante is a set of variations on a melancholy tune fitted to the text of a medieval German lyric that Brahms copied down in one of his notebooks. Its distinctive profile--three notes rising stepwise, followed by a downward leap--recurs in the elfin theme of the Scherzo, which is attached to the Andante so seamlessly that they might almost be a single movement. A series of trills serves as a bridge to the Finale, a bold, majestic canvas framed by a ruminative introduction and a coda.

Intermezzi, Op. 117 Composed in 1892; 16 minutes The three Op. 117 Intermezzi are the second of the four sets of character pieces that occupied Brahms in his twilight years. Clara Schumann, who had long been his most trusted confidante, enthused about the Intermezzi in her diary, describing them as “a veritable fountain of pleasure,” awash in “poetry, passion, rapture, heartfelt emotion,” and “the most wonderful tonal effects.” Brahms himself referred to these intimate, highly personal, fantasy-like miniatures as “monologues,” suggesting that he considered them more at home in the salon than in the concert hall. His close friend Philipp Spitta, a distinguished music historian, advised Brahms that none of his late piano music was suited for public performance; rather, it was “meant to be absorbed slowly, in peace and solitude.”

Laid out in symmetrical ABA form, all three Op. 117 pieces are built on contrasts of mood, texture, and tonality. The First Intermezzo is based on a Scottish lullaby, whose wistful strains sing out in an inner voice beneath a peal of chiming E-flats. The characteristic rocking rhythm is interrupted in the dark, hauntingly ethereal middle section, characterized by billowing arpeggios in the bass. The Second Intermezzo plays on the alternation of two basic textures, one linear—a chain of melodic notes embedded in smoothly interlocking figurations--the other chordal. In the Third Intermezzo, Brahms uses a turbulent, rhythmically unstable interlude as a foil for the dogged, dirge-like tread of the outer sections.

Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, Op. 24 Composed in 1861; 26 minutes Composed in 1861, the Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel was an early fruit of Brahms's lifelong cultivation of variation form. An avid student of music history, he relished the challenge of erecting new structures on old foundations. It mattered little whether the base he built upon was a popular folksong, one of his own melodies, or a theme by Handel, Paganini, or Schumann. The important thing, he told the violinist Joseph Joachim, was that variation form “must be kept stricter, purer.” The old masters, Brahms observed, were rigorous in their use of ground bass and other variation techniques, whereas he and his contemporaries tended to “rummage around the theme.

We keep anxiously to the melody, but we do not treat it freely, do not actually create anything new from it, but only load it down. Thus the melody is barely recognizable.”

The melody with which Brahms’s Op. 24 opens--a gaily tripping “aria” in B-flat major taken from one of Handel’s harpsichord suites--is followed by twenty-five miniature variations ranging in length from half a minute to a minute and a half, and culminating in a long fugue of Bachian intricacy and splendor. The work constitutes an impressive catalogue of variation techniques and musical styles, from simple dances to finger-twisting etudes and wistful romances. But even more noteworthy, in light of the importance Brahms attached to the harmonic foundation of the theme, is the dazzling array of bass patterns he creates--crisply marching basses, smoothly descending chromatic lines, strummed chords, billowing arpeggios and scales, drumbeat-style repeating figures, and even drones (in the tinkly “music-box” variation, no. 22). Small wonder that when Brahms played the Handel Variations for Richard Wagner in 1864, the prophet of the “Artwork of the Future” remarked admiringly, “One sees what may still be done in the old forms when someone comes along who knows how to use them.”