The second movement (Andante moderato, E major, 6-8), with its unearthly melody announced in the Phrygian mode by the horns, to be taken up immediately by oboes, bassoons, and flutes,
has been called the most hauntingly beautiful page in all of Brahms. Of this section Elisabeth von Herzogenberg wrote to the composer: “The Andante has the freshness and distinction of character with which only you could endow it, and even you have had recourse for the first time to certain locked chambers of your soul.”
Kalbeck, who finds that the whole symphony pictures the tragedy of human life, compares the Andante to a waste and ruined field, like the Campagna (as it then was) near Rome. But in the ensuing scherzo (Allegro giocoso, C major, 4-4) he sees the Carnival at Milan. The finale reminds him of a passage in the “Oedipus Coloneus” of Sophocles: “Not to have been born at all is superior to every other view of the question.” Yet there are those who deny the pessimistic interpretation; who find a rugged, full-blooded vigor in the finale as well as in the scherzo, and who attribute the more specifically thoughtful portions of the work to the reactions inevitable to any sensitive and meditative spirit.
Be all that as it may, the finale (Allegro energico e passionato, E minor, 3-4) is of special interest because it is cast in the classic form of the passacaglia or chaconne. It is built up on a majestic theme eight measures long, a noble progression of chords, which recurs thirty-one times, appearing in the high, middle, and low voices alternately.
As to the distinction between those old, patrician dance forms, passacaglia and chaconne, the doctors remain in absolute contradiction, some maintaining a chaconne to be what the others define as a passacaglia, and vice versa.
The curious may be interested to know that Simrock, the music publisher, is said to have paid Brahms 40,000 marks for the symphony—the equivalent in 1885 of $10,000.
Incidentally, the E minor symphony was the last of Brahms’s compositions that their author heard performed in public. It was played at a Philharmonic Concert in Vienna on March 7, 1897, less than a month before his death. This was the last concert that Brahms, already fatally ill, ever attended. Miss Florence May in her “Life of Brahms” gives an affecting account of the occasion:
“The fourth symphony had never become a favorite work in Vienna. Received with reserve on its first performance, it had not since gained much more from the general public of the city than the respect sure to be accorded there to an important work by Brahms. Today, however, a storm of applause broke out at the end of the first movement, not to be quieted until the composer, coming to the front of the artists’ box in which he was seated, showed himself to the audience. The demonstration was renewed after the second and third movements, and an extraordinary scene followed the conclusion of the work.
“The applauding, shouting house, its gaze riveted on the figure standing in the balcony, so familiar and yet in present aspect so strange, seemed unable to let him go. Tears ran down his cheeks as he stood there, shrunken in form, with lined countenance, strained expression, white hair hanging lank: and through the audience there was a feeling as of a stifled sob, for each knew that they were saying farewell. Another outburst of applause and yet another; one more acknowledgment from the master; and Brahms and his Vienna had parted forever.” He died on April 3, 1897.
Concerto for Violin, Violoncello, and Orchestra in A Minor, Op. 102
After the Fourth Symphony Brahms wrote only one more work in which he employed the orchestra, the double concerto for violin and ’cello. Thenceforth until his death his creative activity was devoted to chamber music, piano compositions, and songs for chorus or for solo voice.
This concerto he composed at Thun in Switzerland during the summer of 1887. To Elisabeth von Herzogenberg he referred to it in a letter of July 20: “I can give you nothing worth calling information about the undersigned musician. True, he is now writing down something that does not figure in his catalogue—but neither does it figure in other persons’! I leave you to guess the particular form of idiocy.”
The “particular form” Walter Niemann calls an experiment in the revival of the old Italian orchestral concerto, the “concerto grosso” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so signally illustrated by Handel and Bach, in which the orchestral tutti of the concerto grosso is contrasted with a concertino for a group of soloists.
But here Brahms was experimenting also with a curious concertino consisting of a violin and a ’cello and with unaccustomed combinations of instrumental timbres. In effect his concerto grosso is distinctly late Brahms and a far cry from the concerto grosso of musical antiquity.
Hardly was the double concerto completed before it was performed privately at the Baden-Baden Kurhaus, Brahms conducting and Joachim and Robert Hausmann, a distinguished ’cellist, playing the solo instruments. The same artistic confraternity took part in the first public performance, on October 18, 1887, at Cologne. On a copy of the work that Brahms presented to Joachim he wrote: “To him for whom it was written.”
The first movement (Allegro, A minor, 4-4) opens with an introductory passage in which the orchestra alludes to the chief subject and the ’cello follows with a rhapsodic recitative. The woodwind give out in A major the initial phrase of the second subject. Both subjects are heard in the first tutti. A rising syncopated theme in F major is also to be carefully noted.
The slow movement (Andante, D major, 3-4) is described by Niemann as “most lovely ... a great ballade, steeped in the rich, mysterious tone of a northern evening atmosphere.” Four notes for the horns and woodwind bring on the flowing chief melody
broadly sung by the solo instruments in octaves.
The finale (Vivace non troppo, A minor, 4-4), which has been called the “clearest of rondo types,” abounds in thematic material. The first subject
announced by the ’cello and repeated by the violin, has the gypsy flavor so dear to Brahms. It can be detected in another melody assigned to the clarinets and bassoons against rising arpeggios by the solo instruments, which is prominent in the development. The coda, tender at first and then exuberantly joyous, concludes the double concerto, and at the same time the composer’s employment of the orchestra, in a triumphant A major.
Transcriber’s Notes
- A few palpable typos were silently corrected.
- Illustrations were shifted to the nearest paragraph break.
- Copyright notice is from the printed exemplar. (U.S. copyright was not renewed: this ebook is in the public domain.)