VI. Intermezzo. Andante con moto

To emphasise that we cannot reduce Brahms to a single defi nition, it is enough to bear in mind that on three occasions (Opp. 39, 52 and 65) he devoted himself to a genre as light as the waltz, almost as if he wanted to invade the space reserved for the Strauss family in a smiling manner; with absolutely delightful results. So Herr Professor had a vein of irony, of sweetness, of sensuality that he most often kept hidden in the face of a public image marked by deep seriousness. Perhaps this invasion of the fi eld had commercial implications that he did not consider unworthy, mindful as he was of his bank account: nothing wrong with that, considering the highly refi ned musical achievements. Slightly less happy were the Hungarian Dances, to which he brought so much success. The comparison with Liszt mortifi es them, because in them, as in other Brahmsian moments of Hungarian inspiration, the trespassing towards the Magyar tradition does not seem to arise from a need of the heart, but rather from an intellectual solicitation. If we return to the polemics between the party that made (unoffi cial) reference to Brahms and that of Liszt-Wagner, it is not diffi cult to affi rm that while father-in-law and son-in-law looked indefectibly to the future, Brahms, perhaps because of the inevitable consequences of the polemics, felt invested with the task of preserving the German tradition, as can be plastically deduced from the theme of the last movement of the Symphony No. 1 or from the incipit of the Sonata, Op. 1. The fi gure of Beethoven could be read as the pinnacle of Classicism or as a giant open door to the future: Brahms considered the Beethovenian phenomenon the most solid reference in the history of German music, while Wagner and Liszt were attracted to his late experiments as starting points for overcoming Classicism. Behind Brahms’s relationship with the Bonn genius, made up of ambition rather than affi nity (Beethoven’s Joy is an unthinkable goal for him) and full of consequences not only musical, appear the faces of two other protagonists: Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann. From both of them Brahms assimilates what is closest to his temperament and most characteristic of his music, especially chamber music: the motivic development spread in more undulating ways than in the Viennese tradition, with the consequent