WHAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO HEAR

Brahms (1833–1897)

Violin Sonata No 2 in A Major, Op 100 (1886)

Allegro amabile

Andante tranquillo — Vivace

Allegretto grazioso, quasi Andante

Piano Trio No 1 in B Major, Op 8 (1889)

Allegro con brio

Scherzo. Allegro molto

Adagio

Finale. Allegro

Piano Quintet in F minor, Op 34 (1864-5)

Allegro non troppo

Andante, un poco Adagio

Scherzo. Allegro

Finale. Poco sostenuto — Presto non troppo

The most significant event in the young Johannes Brahms’ career took place in October 1853. Fellow composer Robert Schumann – also editor of Europe’s most influental musical publication, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik – hailed him in an article he entitled ‘New Paths’ as a genius, and the worthy successor to Beethoven. It was enormously flattering, and provided a huge boost to the younger composer’s burgeoning career.

But Schumann’s article also raised skyhigh expectations of the kind of music that Brahms would go on to compose. And it only added to the almost crippling sense that Brahms already had about his place in the great, centuries-old tradition of German and Austrian music, which stretched from Schütz and Bach to Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven – and maybe even himself.

It’s thought that Brahms destroyed around three quarters of the chamber music he composed, considering it simply not up to scratch, and not worthy of his name. The chamber pieces he allowed to survive, however, and even to be published, contain some of his most powerful and personal music – as the three pieces in today’s programme demonstrate.

By the time Brahms came to write his Violin Sonata No 2 – in 1886, as a 53-year-old – he had symphonies, concertos, several other chamber works and a wealth of piano music under his belt. With his reputation well established, he was more relaxed about releasing music into the public realm.

And, possibly, slightly more relaxed about what that music was like. The Second Violin

Sonata is one of Brahms’ most enduringly carefree, sunny pieces, relaxed and contented almost from start to finish. That unusually (for Brahms, at least) optimistic, cheerful mood may well have had quite a bit to do with the circumstances of the Sonata’s creation.

Brahms was spending the summer of 1886 in the idyllic Swiss village of Hofstetten, on the shores of Lake Thun, where he rented a charming chalet adorned with flowers at every window. There, he received a succession of admiring visitors, including Swiss pastor and poet Joseph Viktor Widmann, and fellow poet Klaus Groth (several of whose works Brahms would set to music). Most inspiring of all, however, were the visits he received from the rising German contralto Hermine Spies, who was somewhat in awe of the composer, and to whom the composer felt fondness and attraction in return. Brahms would write several of his late songs for Spies, and some of those songs’ melodies found their way –often in adapted form – into the textures of his Second Violin Sonata. According to his early biographer Max Kalbeck, it was anticipation of Spies’s visits that specifically inspired the Sonata’s creation.

Perhaps appropriately, there’s a distinctive yearning quality to the Sonata’s song-like opening theme, first heard on piano, with the violin merely supplying brief comments before taking over the theme completely. Similarly, the piano introduces the first movement’s second main theme, over a rippling accompaniment, before the violin takes it on. The whole movement has a generally laid-back character, with the only passing shade coming from a more serious melody with a distinctive insistent repeated note, which comes to dominate the central part of the movement.

Brahms almost gives us four movements for the price of three: he combines thoughtful slow movement and playful scherzo in his second movement. It contrasts gentle, pensive music in which the two players wind together elegant, slow-moving melodies with quick, more mercurial, dance-like passages, the two elements cunningly combined so that one always seems the answer to the other.

Brahms rounds his Sonata off with a surprisingly mellow finale based around a particularly rich violin theme, often played entirely on the instrument’s lowest string, giving it a distinctively burnished, grainy sound.

With Brahms’ Piano Trio No 1, we return very much to the beginning: it was the first chamber work by the composer to be published. He completed it in January 1854, at the age of 20, just a few months after Schumann’s career-defining article. But almost as soon as he’d sent it off to his publisher, Brahms confessed to his friend Joseph Joachim that he wasn’t entirely happy with the piece.

Despite subsequent publication and performances of the Trio, those niggles clearly remained in Brahms’ mind. A remarkable 35 years later, the now 56-yearold composer turned his attention back to the Trio in 1889, and set about revising it. As he explained to his close friend and confidante Clara Schumann (widow of Robert, who had died in 1856), this was to make the piece ‘not as dreary as before’. He continued: ‘I didn’t provide it with a new wig, just combed and arranged its hair a little.’ the third movement remained untouched, and he shortened the work by around a third. What he ended up with was so different, in fact, that he republished the work as his Op 108, while allowing his original version (as his Op 8) to continue its own separate life. It’s almost always Brahms’ revised and shortened version of 1889 that’s performed today.

The Piano Trio’s first movement opens with an arching theme on the cello, but Brahms makes us wait a surprisingly long time before introducing the violin. Together, however, his three instruments build to a sonorous climax before moving on to a quieter, more restrained second theme – which itself builds to increasingly gruff, impassioned music. A scampering, hushed theme is tossed between all three instruments in Brahms’ playful scherzo of a second movement, with a contrasting slower, more lyrical central section, which nonetheless retains the opening music’s distinctive rhythm in the piano’s bassline.

Brahms’ slow third movement seems to hover, almost motionless, with piano and strings initially separated as if pondering their own distinct sonic identities. Unusually, the composer shifts from brighter B major to darker B minor for his finale, making his First Piano Trio one of the few classical pieces to make that major-to-minor move (Mendelssohn’s ‘Italian’ Symphony is another). That said, Brahms keeps us guessing as to which key we’re really in until almost the very end of the movement, in music that remains restless and unstable, perpetually groping its way towards resolution.

Brahms was underselling things. His changes to the Trio were substantial – only

The Piano Quintet had a far stormier, more turbulent genesis. It began life in 1862 as a string quintet, which the composer sent

(unfinished) to Clara Schumann. She adored it. ‘I can’t tell you how moved I am by it,’ she wrote to him, ‘and how powerfully gripped.’ That other influential figure in Brahms’ life, violinist Joseph Joachim, was equally impressed, calling it ‘a piece of the greatest significance, full of masculine strength and sweeping design’.

That was at first, however. Once Joachim had examined the music in more detail, and played it through a few times, he began to have his doubts. Was a quintet of stringed instruments really the right setting for Brahms’ thrusting, powerful, muscular music?

Brahms thanked Joachim for his feedback, destroyed his quintet version, and recast the music as a Sonata for Two Pianos. Surely the attack, the power and the mighty resonances of the pair of keyboard instruments would be able to convey his music more effectively? He even went as far as performing his new version in public, joined by fellow pianist Carl Tausig, early in 1864. Now, however, it was Clara Schumann’s turn to be shocked. Her concerns were that the work’s intricate, interweaving lines would be lost amid the very similar sonorities of the two pianos. In any case, she had bigger ideas for the piece: ‘It is not a sonata, rather a work whose ideas you could – and should – distribute among the whole orchestra, as though out of a horn of plenty!’

Brahms wasn’t so sure he’d go that far. Nonetheless, he bowed again to what he considered the greater insights of his friends, and created a third version of the piece. This time, however, he came up with an amalgamation of his two earlier ideas, retaining the power and resonance of one of his earlier pianos, but also reintroducing his string players – now four of them, rather than five.

Brahmssaveshismostchallengingmusic,however,for thedissonant,sombreopeningofhisfinale,inwhichall fiveinstrumentsseemtobegropingtowardssomesense ofstabilityorevenpurpose.

In many ways, it’s understandable that there were so many questions over an appropriate instrumentation for what’s undeniably one of Brahms’ most turbulent, smouldering and consistently dark works. Despite its calm unison opening, the first movement’s main theme quickly surges across all five players, growing increasingly tormented. It later gives rise to a succession of subsidiary themes, almost as if the five instruments are attempting to work through the implications of the stormy music they’ve unleashed.

After the restless agitation of the first movement, there’s a sense of genuine calm, even consolation, to the slow second movement, with an almost vocal feeling to the unusual, speech-like rhythm of the piano’s opening melody, as though the instrument might actually be talking to us. The drama – though now more restrained – returns in the dark scherzo of the third movement, whose scuttling, sinister introduction over an insistent cello heartbeat quickly erupts into the movement’s grandiose main theme.

Brahms saves his most challenging music, however, for the dissonant, sombre opening of his finale, in which all five instruments seem to be groping towards some sense of stability or even purpose. The cello brings things firmly into focus, however, when it introduces the movement’s main recurring theme, and the other instruments take enormous pleasure in flipping the melody upside down, breaking it into pieces, and tossing it back and forth between each other, driving the Quintet to an increasingly urgent, sonorous conclusion.

© David Kettle