Johannes Brahms (1833–1897): Four Hand Piano Music, Vol. 14
Piano Quartet No. 2 • Five Walzes, Op. 39
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, for which he showed a
natural aptitude, 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 helped his family by playing the piano in
summer inns.
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 autumn of 1857 had brought Brahms a court
appointment at Detmold, teaching the piano and
conducting. He was to return there for the next two
years, while continuing to fulfil a series of concert
engagements. In January 1860 he returned to Hamburg,
living at first with his parents, but soon moving to a
house owned by Elisabeth Rösing at the country suburb
of Hamm, where the Hamburg Frauenchor that he had
established and conducted often met. Here he enjoyed
greater tranquillity, undisturbed by the marital
disagreements of his parents within the limited
accommodation available to them. Clara Schumann
appeared as the pianist in the first performance of his
Piano Quartet in G minor, Op. 25, given in Hamburg in
November 1861, on the occasion of the third of a series
of Hamburg concerts that featured the Hamburg ladies’
choir. The new piano quartet was not his first attempt at
the genre. There had been an earlier piano quartet, later
transposed, revised and published in 1875 as Opus 60.
Brahms himself performed the quartet with members of
the Hellmesberger Quartet on his first concert
appearance in Vienna in 1862. The critic Hanslick was
at first less impressed by the work, while he found
Brahms’s playing more that of a composer than a
virtuoso, a judgement not entirely to the latter’s
discredit.
The Piano Quartet No. 2 in A major, Op. 26, written
during the same period, had its first performance in
Vienna on 29th November 1862 by the same performers,
in a concert in which Brahms played his Handel
Variations and keyboard works by Bach and by
Schumann. The concert followed shortly after Brahms
had received the disappointing news of the appointment
of Julius Stockhausen as conductor of the Hamburg
Philharmonic, a position for which he had hoped. In a
letter home from Vienna, however, he was able to report
the sympathetic reception of his new piano quartet and
his success with the audience as a pianist. Hanslick, who
had followed Brahms’s career with close interest, still
had reservations, but Clara Schumann preferred the
quartet to its immediate predecessor. In 1870 the
publisher Simrock asked Brahms for a four-hand piano
arrangement of both quartets. He agreed to supply these,
asking that his name as arranger should be included.
Simrock did not agree to this last request, and printed the
four-hand piano version of the Quartet in G minor
without this acknowledgement and with many mistakes,
as the proofs had not been sent to the composer for
correction. This led Brahms to delay the arrangement of
the second quartet until 1872. He had at first asked for a
fee of fifteen Friedrichsdor, having received only twelve
for each original composition, but was not pleased to
receive in 1872 only the earlier agreed fee. His
complaint persuaded Simrock to send a further fifteen
Friedrichsdor.
The work, which is admirably suited to piano duet,
is of some length, and makes wide use of sonata form.
The opening subject has two elements, a chordal theme
and a winding thematic element first heard from the
cello. The second subject that follows is replete with the
composer’s habitual cross-rhythms. The central
development unusually includes three variations of the
first theme, before its return in recapitulation. The slow
movement, Poco Adagio, and originally scored at first
with muted strings, offers a lyrical principal theme, the
strings unmuted on its return, after the contrasting
secondary material. The extended Scherzo, unusually in
sonata form, has a D minor Trio that uses thematic
material from the Scherzo in its canonic writing. The
quartet ends with another sonata-form movement, its
rhythmic first subject with touches of the Hungarian. It
makes a splendid and complementary ending to a work
that wears the unmistakable stamp of Brahms
throughout.
Brahms completed his sixteen Waltzes, Op. 39, in
1865, publishing them in a piano duet version in 1866
and a version for solo piano the following year. He
dedicated the work to Eduard Hanslick, the genre and
dedication both, perhaps, a tribute to Vienna, where he
had been welcomed. In 1897 the publisher Rieter-
Biedermann issued a two-piano version of five of the
waltzes, included in the present recording.
Keith Anderson