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JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897)
PIANO SONATA NO.3
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FANTASIEN OP.116
KLAVIERSTÜCKE OP.119
JON NAKAMATSU
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HMA 1957339
Have compositional style and substance ever enjoyed a more intimate marriage than
in music by Brahms?
Elliptically avoiding conventional stages of artistic growth, Brahms from the first wrote
works of an uncommon wisdom and of a maturity that is informed by the ineffable.
Nostalgia infuses all of his music, and by the time he reached old age, having composed
for more than forty years, this nostalgia had intensified to a compound for which we
have no name, a poetic tristesse that amalgamates melancholy, wistfulness, longing,
and regret. This essence is Brahms’s alone.
That Brahms was different, even difficult, was immediately evident. After the first
American performance of the Piano Trio op.8 in 1855, for instance, The New York Times
praised its ‘many good points, and much sound musicianship’, yet remarked that the
‘motives . . . suggest something that had been heard before, and induce a skeptical
frame of mind, not altogether just . . .’1 For a critic to question his own skepticism is
fascinating in itself, and it implies that the ‘something heard before’ was not a theme
per se nor a ‘motivo’, but rather, if less definably, an ethos that echoed the past.
The past that still sounded in Brahms’s imagination was Beethoven’s world, the
apogee of musical Classicism. Brahms, however, would not try to artificially prolong an
earlier aesthetic – ‘The process of ossification is a guarantee of respectability’, writes
Rosen on the final page of his indispensable study of The Classical Style, and leads to
‘essays in decorum and respect’.2 Rather, he would take basic lessons learned from
Beethoven, the composer he most venerated, and make a music of his own.
For both composers the piano was the fundamental mode of musical expression. For
Beethoven, the thirty-two sonatas trace the trajectory of his enormous career; their
changing styles map his musical maturation from student to seer. Likewise for Brahms,
his works for piano paint a portrait that is complete. These works begin with the
Sonata op.1, whose opening phrase is overtly modeled on the opening of Beethoven’s
‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata, op.106; simultaneously they proclaim Brahms’s intellectual
allegiance and declare his stylistic independence. And they end with the Piano Pieces
of op.119. In the piano medium Brahms found his alpha and omega.
As performer, Brahms made a highly favorable impression. The pianist Fanny Davies, a
student of Clara Schumann and Britain’s earliest keyboard exponent of Brahms, left a
vivid description of his artistry: ‘(Brahms) belonged to that racial [sic] school of playing
which begins its phrases well, ends them well, and leaves plenty of space between the
end of one and the beginning of another; and yet joins them without any hiatus . . .’
‘Like Beethoven, he was most particular that his marks of expression (always as few as
possible) should be the means of conveying the inner musical meaning. The sign < > as
used by Brahms often occurs when he wishes to express great sincerity and warmth,
applied not only to tone but to rhythm also. He would linger not on one note alone, but
on a whole idea, as if unable to tear himself away from its beauty…
1 Theodore Thomas: A Musical Autobiography, A.C. McClurg & Co., p. 40.
2 Charles Rosen, The Classical Style, W.W. Norton, p. 460.
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Brahms’s manner of interpretation was very free, very elastic and expansive; but the
balance was always there – one felt the fundamental rhythms underlying the surface
rhythms. His phrasing was notable in lyric passages . . . When Brahms played one knew
exactly what he intended to convey to his listeners: aspirations, wild fantastic flights,
majestic calm, deep tenderness without sentimentality, delicate, wayward humor,
sincerity, noble passion.’3
As composer, Brahms was equally admired, at least in certain circles. The most
influential circle was that of Robert Schumann, and when Brahms visited Schumann in
1853 the impact was enormous. Schumann wrote a now-famous article for the Neue
Zeitschrift für Musik in which the younger composer was welcomed as a musical savior.
Brahms was extolled as ‘a musician called to give expression to his times in ideal
fashion; a musician who would reveal his mastery not in a gradual evolution, but like
Athene would spring fully armed from Zeus’s head . . .’.4
Despite this article’s mythic durability, it asks for reevaluation. Deeply enmeshed in the
musical politics of the day, Schumann needed a hero to carry his banner – a composer
whose artistic predilections would accord with his own – and in Brahms he believed he
had found one. In retrospect, however, his praise was disproportionate. Brahms, at the
time, was becoming known primarily as a pianist. As a composer he still was finding
his way; indeed, most of the scores he played for Schumann at their earliest encounter
he later destroyed.
So what was Schumann up to? One might mention, as Jan Swafford5 does in his
helpful biography of Brahms, that Schumann had anointed prior musical saviors before
Brahms, quite literally, would appear on his doorstep; these included such second-tier
talents as Ludwig Schunke and William Sterndale Bennett. One also could speculate,
with Swafford, on a homoerotic attraction that Schumann might have felt for Brahms. In
any case, the title of Schumann’s article, ‘Neue Bahnen’ (New Paths), is itself not free
of irony. What drew Schumann to Brahms were not the younger composer’s innovations
but his firm adherence to traditions. Though Brahms’s Sonata op.1 might have seemed
radically different from other music of the time – its gestures are large and often
ungainly, its character defiant, its technical challenges heroic – the work adheres to
compositional principles that Brahms found in Beethoven. Schumann would perhaps
have been more astute had he called his article ‘Alte Weisen’ (Old ways).
Among Brahms’s early piano sonatas – those that are extant – the Sonata op.5 in
F minor has proved to be the most durable. Without the overt reference to Beethoven
that opens op.1 (a work composed after op.5), Brahms nonetheless writes a large and
vigorous five-movement piece that stands squarely in the late Classical tradition. Not
for nothing did Schumann and his circle refer to Brahms as ‘a real Beethovener’.6
When Brahms first met Schumann, two movements of this sonata were already
completed, the Andante and the Intermezzo (the Rückblick, or Remembrance), and during
his sojourn with the Schumanns he composed the remainder. Grandly proportioned,
boldly scored, and full of extravagant gestures – Schumann had referred to these early
sonatas as ‘veiled symphonies’7 – the work must surely have stunned its first listeners
with the flamboyance of its opening gambit. The initial beat of measure one presents
the note F; it is played forte and splayed over three octaves of the keyboard’s lower
register and, to better prepare the ear for what is to come next, it is given the value
of an eighth-note which is followed by an eighth-note rest. Beat two brings a rhythmic
and melodic motive that is scored over more than two octaves in the treble; its dotted
eighth- and thirty-second notes reaffirm the tonic and with a sense of great propulsion
introduce a thematic kernel that leads to beat three, a first-inversion G-minor chord
that is held for a quarter-note. Tellingly, this harmonically weak sonority is placed on a
rhythmically charged beat, and it leads to the sequential playing out of the six-measure
opening phrase.
As he crafts this movement, Brahms is endlessly inventive. The motive introduced on
the second beat of the opening measure, for example, gets rhythmically elongated in
measure five, as the first phrase nears its conclusion. And in the transitional theme
heard in measure 23ff., this motive appears again, now expanded over two measures
in the right hand and compressed into two beats in the left. Notice, too, the progression
of the bass line from the outset: the downward half-tone stepwise motion suggests a
passacaglia theme like the one that Brahms would use most eloquently in his Fourth
Symphony’s finale.
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3 Performing Brahms: Early Evidence of Performing Style, ed. Michael Musgrave and Bernard D. Sherman,
Cambridge University Press, p. 303ff.
4 Robert Schumann, On Music and Musicians, W.W. Norton, p. 252ff.
5 Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms: A Biography, Vintage, p. 86.
6 Swafford, p. 83.
7 Swafford, p. 85.
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The sonata’s Andante takes its cue from an incipit by the pseudonymous German poet
C. O. Sternau, three lines of a love poem which preface the movement.
Der Abend dämmert, das Mondlicht scheint,
Twilight falls, the moonlight shines,
Da sind zwei Herzen in Liebe vereint
Two hearts are united in love
Und halten sich selig umfangen.
And embrace each other blissfully.
Melodically this is pure Brahms, with a theme of exceptionally expressive warmth that,
characteristically, falls in thirds. In the development, there is an extended episode in
D flat major, and notably, this section shares an elegiac sentiment with other sections
in the piece that inhabit the same tonality. For Brahms, it seems, this tonal region was
a refuge, a relief from the more fevered music in the home key of F minor. The piece
continues with a Scherzo in the style of op.4 and of the scherzo movement that Brahms
contributed (along with Schumann and Albert Dietrich) to the so-called F-A-E Sonata; it
is a waltz-like movement of great brilliance whose trio section occasions a harmonic
shift, and an emotional shift, from F minor to D flat major.
Brahms’s most interesting innovation comes between the Scherzo and the Finale,
where he places a slow movement called Rückblick. An episode of poetic intensity,
the Rückblick looks back to the Andante and echoes its sentiments, and it is given
a melodramatic fillip by the ‘fate’ motive that rumbles in the bass. The Finale is a
musically and emotionally complex rondo that is varied in the service of sentiments
that constantly change. If the contrapuntal writing near the end seems gratuitous, it
perhaps can be forgiven as symptomatic of a brilliant young composer – Brahms was
barely twenty when he started this work – in a rush to grow up.
Almost four decades separate the Sonata op.5 from Brahms’s last piano works, and
over the course of that time the musical universe had changed forever. The era that
embraced The Classical Style described by Charles Rosen was the Golden Age of
functional tonality for composer and theorist Edward Cone,8 and by the nineteenth
century’s last decade, European composers were no longer unified by commonly held
assumptions concerning harmony, melody and rhythm. Functional tonality, and the
apparatus that lent it support, was weakening.
This new reality is made manifest in the op.116; collectively titled 7 Fantasien, none
of the individual movements bears this name, being called instead either ‘capriccio’
or ‘intermezzo’. What Brahms had in mind is unclear, though he might have been
influenced by Schumann, whose works Brahms was editing when the op.116 pieces
were composed. Among the Seven Fantasias are pieces that share with Schumann’s
Kreisleriana a sense of the chimerically eccentric.
Brahms had not composed for solo piano for more than a decade, since the Two
Rhapsodies (op.79) of 1879, and with op.116 he entered a new and different world.
We can point to several of the movements that make the set so distinctive. The D-minor
Capriccio sets out to confound: bar lines are blurred, clear harmonies smudged, weak
beats endowed with major importance, and simple rhythms made complex by irregular
groupings. ‘Yet’, as British pianist Denis Matthews has written, ‘the strange character
of the Capriccio cannot be accounted for in such objective analysis. It is dramatic but
spare in material, mercurial yet ghostly, with flashes of virtuosity kept in check by
intellectual absorption or turned aside into shadows – until the climactic last page. [It
is] a private piece in spite of its athleticism. It reflects rather than displays a virtuoso
manner, and in so doing accords with Richard Specht’s ear-witness account of the later
Brahms: “He always played as if he were alone; he forgot his public entirely.” ’9
No piece in op.116 is more radical, perhaps, than the gentle A-minor Intermezzo.
Throughout the set – indeed, throughout all of Brahms – there is a free and fluid sense
of meter (see the Intermezzo op.118 no.6, for example, which looks and sounds like
improvisation captured by notation); phrases are stretched to unconventional lengths,
and bar lines, as organizational conveniences, are often observed in the breach. The
piece begins with foursquare phrases, quite literally with two phrases of four measures
each (but notice how measure 9, and later measure 18, are Rückblicke in miniature).
Yet though the piece begins sedately – perhaps because it begins sedately – Brahms
is extravagantly imaginative in its middle section, writing phrases of wildly irregular
lengths. Equally stunning is the Intermezzo that is the fourth piece of op.116, a
poignant, wistful work whose harmony finely and fragilely balances between E major
and C sharp minor.
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8 Edward T. Cone, Music: A View from Delft, University of Chicago Press, p. 21.
9 Denis Matthews, Brahms Piano Music, University of Washington Press, p. 60.
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Flashes of Schumann are heard throughout op.116: in the bass-line syncopations of the
D-minor Capriccio, in the melodic sweep of the G-minor Capriccio, in the characteristic
rhythmic lope of the E-minor Intermezzo. This makes for a heady mix, but we might keep
in mind what The Compleat Brahms noted about the A-minor Intermezzo and apply it to
this engaging set as a whole: ‘As listeners, we wander blindly in this strange terrain but
are benevolently guided by one who lives there.’10
The Piano Pieces of op.119 – three intermezzi and, as a pendant, a concluding
Rhapsodie – are less opaque. Written in 1892, along with the Six Piano Pieces of
op.118, these would be the composer’s final works for solo piano. This is music of
great economy. The opening Intermezzo, for example, is constructed from a succession
of eleventh chords, with dissonance resolved as new dissonance emerges; the second
Intermezzo derives its melodic material from a six-note motive; and the third is based
on a four-note kernel. But feelings are what speak to us: the wistfulness of the first
Intermezzo; the introspection of the second; the gaiety, though a gaiety tinged with
sadness, of the third. The Rhapsodie that concludes the set is as extroverted as the
first Intermezzo is introverted. Abundant and unabashed in its high spirits, it suggests
that the urgent intimations of the earlier pieces – indeed, of the late piano music
overall – had been adequately addressed, or that they never existed at all.
Despite the aura of familiarity that surrounds them, these are works of formidable
challenges. When Brahms wrote to Clara Schumann about the Intermezzo that opens
op.119, he acknowledged that it was ‘teeming with dissonances’ and suggested how
it might be played: ‘The little piece is exceedingly melancholy, and to indicate sehr
langsam spielen [play very slowly] is not enough. Every bar and every note must sound
like a ritardando, as if one wished to suck melancholy out of every single note, with
delight and pleasure out of the aforementioned dissonances.’11
Charles Rosen has written about the calculated awkwardness with which Brahms
presents an arpeggiated figure (first heard, in an easier iteration, in measure 19ff.)
in the Rhapsodie that concludes op.119: ‘This preference for the awkward to play
transfers itself to the awkward to hear . . . This is less convenient for the ear as well
as for the hand, although more exciting.’12
Rosen also suggests that Brahms ‘was, perhaps, the only composer who understood
that reviving a tradition of the past was an enterprise that was not only difficult, but
could not appear easy . . . [He] loved the tradition of pure instrumental music, but
he knew that it could not be simply repeated. In continuing it, he followed a path first
taken by Beethoven and deliberately employed compositional materials that earlier
composers would have ignored, considering them too simple for complex expression. It
was, indeed, the contrast between the simplicity of the basic stuff and the richness of
development that gave Beethoven’s works their extraordinary power . . . Brahms chose
material that even Beethoven might have considered unpromising: simple relationships
that were ugly, awkward, resistant to development. He knew the awkward could be
made radically expressive, and how it could be exploited.’13
Though perhaps an incomplete assessment, these words remain helpful to our
understanding of the alchemist’s art.
GEORGE GELLES
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���The Compleat Brahms, ed. Leon Botstein, W.W. Norton, p. 188.
���Performing Brahms, p. 197.
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Charles Rosen, Critical Entertainments, Harvard University Press, p. 169.
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Ibid., p. 177.
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