Johannes Brahms (1833–1897): Four Hand Piano Music, Vol. 15
Symphonies Nos. 3 and 4
Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg in 1833, the son
of a double-bass player and his much older wife, a
seamstress. His childhood was spent in relative poverty,
and his early studies in music, as a pianist rather than as
a string-player, developed his talent to such an extent
that there was talk of touring as a prodigy at the age of
eleven. It was Eduard Marxsen who gave him a
grounding in the technical basis of composition, while
the boy was able to use his talents by teaching and by
playing the piano in summer inns, rather than in the
dockside taverns of popular legend, a romantic idea
which he himself seems later to have encouraged.
In 1851 Brahms met the émigré Hungarian violinist
Reményi, who introduced him to Hungarian dance
music that had a later influence on his work. Two years
later he set out in his company on his first concert tour,
their journey taking them, on the recommendation of the
Hungarian violinist Joachim, to Weimar, where Franz
Liszt held court and might have been expected to show
particular favour to a fellow-countryman. Reményi
profited from the visit, but Brahms, with a lack of tact
that was later accentuated, failed to impress the Master.
Later in the year, however, he met the Schumanns,
through Joachim’s agency. The meeting was a fruitful
one.
In 1850 Schumann had taken up the offer from the
previous incumbent, Ferdinand Hiller, of the position of
municipal director of music in Düsseldorf, the first
official appointment of his career and the last. Now in
the music of Brahms he detected a promise of greatness
and published his views in the journal he had once
edited, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, declaring Brahms
the long-awaited successor to Beethoven. In the
following year Schumann, who had long suffered from
intermittent periods of intense depression, attempted
suicide. His final years, until his death in 1856, were to
be spent in an asylum, while Brahms rallied to the
support of Schumann’s wife, the gifted pianist Clara
Schumann, and her young family, remaining a firm
friend until her death in 1896, shortly before his own in
the following year.
Brahms had always hoped that sooner or later he
would be able to return in triumph to a position of
distinction in the musical life of Hamburg. This
ambition was never fulfilled. Instead he settled in
Vienna, intermittently from 1863 and definitively in
1869, establishing himself there and seeming to many to
fulfil Schumann’s early prophecy. In him his supporters,
including, above all, the distinguished critic and writer
Eduard Hanslick, saw a true successor to Beethoven and
a champion of music untrammelled by extra-musical
associations, of pure music, as opposed to the Music of
the Future promoted by Wagner and Liszt, a path to
which Joachim and Brahms both later publicly
expressed their opposition.
The first of Brahms’s symphonies was slow in
gestation. Overawed by the example of Beethoven and
the manifold expectations of his friends, and
unresponsive to their anxious queries, he eventually
completed his Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Opus 68, in
the summer of 1876. He was still busy with the fourhand
piano arrangement of the first symphony, when, in
the summer of 1877, he started work on his Symphony
No. 2 in D major, Opus 73, while staying for the first
time at Pörtschach on the Wörthersee, completing it at
Lichtental in the autumn. The first performance was
given in Vienna on 30th December, followed in 1878 by
publication, after the necessary corrections of the score
and the four-hand piano version, during a second
summer at Pörtschach.
In the summer of 1883 Brahms took rooms in the
spa town of Wiesbaden, perhaps to be near the young
singer Hermine Spies, his Hermione without an ‘o’,
whose musical abilities served as inspiration for his
Opus 96 and Opus 97 songs. Symphony No. 3 in F
major, described by a contemporary as Brahms’s Eroica,
after the preceding Pastoral, was first performed in
Vienna on 2nd December. In the four-hand piano version
it is the second piano that introduces the opening wind
chords, before the first piano adds the impressive
descending theme, with its nod to Robert Schumann
and characteristic mixture of major and minor. The
clarinet A major second subject is entrusted to the first
piano, a pastoral contrast to the grandeur of the first
theme. The forceful conclusion of the exposition is
followed by the full chords that open the central
development. The clarinet and bassoon opening of the
C major Andante is offered by the first piano, as the
second adds the brief interjections of the strings, and the
clarinet and bassoon second subject is also entrusted to
the first piano. Similarly the cello theme that starts the
C minor third movement is heard at the outset from the
first piano, with its viola accompaniment, while the
second weaves the cross-rhythm of the violins, a world
away from the traditional scherzo. It is the second piano
that takes up the principal theme on its return in the
French horn, after the trio section, with its syncopated
accompaniment. The last movement opens sotto voce
and in unison, before the first piano takes up the chordal
treatment of the theme by the woodwind. The second
subject of this imposing sonata-form movement
translates the repeated note triplets of second violins
and violas into acceptable piano idiom, with
characteristic cross-rhythms. The symphony ends with
none of the defiance of Beethoven, but rather with
gently suggested memories of the motif that started the
whole work, concluding a work that the contemporary
critic Eduard Hanslick found artistically the most
perfect of the first three Brahms symphonies.
The next summer brought the beginning of work on
the fourth and last of Brahms’s symphonies, the
Symphony in E minor, Op. 98. This was completed at
the same summer resort of Mürzzuschlag the following
summer, to be performed under the composer’s
direction at Meiningen in October. The symphony is
amazingly convincing in its four-hand piano version,
from the quiet serenity of the opening and the massive
grandeur that follows, mingled with lyricism, its
structure transparent in the reduced version. In the
second movement Richard Strauss imagined a funeral
procession moving silently across moonlit heights,
suggesting, perhaps, an evocative painting by Caspar
David Friedrich. A cello theme assumes prominence,
with a decorative first violin part, after which the march
resumes. The scherzo opens forcefully. Although it
lacks a formal trio section, there is a relaxation of
tension at the heart of the movement, before the original
material returns in full vigour. It seems that Brahms had
long contemplated a final movement in chaconne or
passacaglia form, derived from his study of Bach. The
movement starts with the passacaglia theme, scored in
the orchestral version for wind instruments, now
reinforced in grandeur by three trombones. In the thirty
variations that follow Brahms demonstrates his mastery
of the form and his debt to tradition, the whole revealed
in the greatest clarity in the piano reduction, at one time
the only sure means of hearing the work.
Keith Anderson