Behind the Scenes: Torke, Bartok & Brahms with the Harrisburg Symphony

This is the script for the pre-concert talk I gave before the Harrisburg Symphony's January (Thaw) Masterworks Concert this weekend. You can read my posts on the orchestra's website about Michael Torke's Javelin, Bela Bartók's Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin and Johannes Brahms' 2nd Piano Concerto.
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Who would have believed, after living through the coldest weather in 20 years, it could be almost 50° five days after the Invasion of the Polar Vortex!? But that's the way weather works, sometimes – as Mark Twain said about New England, “if you don't like the weather, wait a few minutes.” When they talk about “climate change,” I didn't think they meant every few days...

One could say the same about musical styles, though it may take a decade or two to see real change, historically: whether the pendulum swings back and forth or whether it comes full circle is immaterial. The fact is, every generation since, say, 1700 (as a handy cut-off point) has decided the previous generation was yesterday's “old hat” and anything that needs to be said should be said our way, only to become tomorrow's old hat. Today, most of us are not that conscious of the difference between Haydn and Beethoven or even – at least aesthetically – Brahms and Wagner, lumped together with the Great Romanticists, who in real life were arch-rivals and at the opposite ends of the classical music spectrum.

But in a period of a single concert, you can, however, experience several changes in this musical weather – all within a span of two hours. For some, a piece by Bartók could be the musical equivalent of the dreaded Polar Vortex which, after intermission, will be warmed-up by the sunny familiarity of Johannes Brahms.

Or you might find the newness and even strangeness of the unfamiliar on the first half of the program exhilarating – the way people talk about “a bracing chill” – just as others might find something as overly familiar as Brahms (an old chestnut, to be sure: one of the Three B's, after all) capable of inducing “lazy listening,” unaware there could actually be another way to listen to something you're already well-acquainted with.

If I tell you the first half of the concert is all-20th-Century, you may react one way – positively or negatively – just as if I tell you the second half is one of the great 19th Century Romantic war-horses (“oh, not that again!”).

But if I tell you the first half of the program was written by composers in their 30s and the second half by a composer in his late-40s – does this change the way you might... think about what you'll hear? How many people in our audience are within this age-range of, say, 33 and 48...? ...How many here are older than 48?

What if I told you Bela Bartók finished his ballet “The Miraculous Mandarin” when he was 38 but was still hoping for that first big break-through that would turn him into an internationally recognized “great composer” of the 20th Century? And what if I told you that when Johannes Brahms finished his 2nd Piano Concerto, he was 48 and at the peak of his popularity, having completed his 1st Symphony five years earlier and in between wrote his 2nd Symphony and the Violin Concerto? His 3rd Symphony was a couple years in the future.

What if I tell you Michael Torke was 33 when he composed the first piece you'll hear tonight, called “Javelin”? He'd written a series of color-inspired pieces with titles like “Green,” “Bright Blue Music,” “Purple” and “Ecstatic Orange,” but he seems to have passed a little beyond his youthful popularity, now, even though he's still alive and writing – he's now 51, three years older than Brahms was when he wrote this concerto. It's a little early to question whether he'll be forgotten in the next decade – or if he finds himself on the comeback trail as he reaches a new maturity.

He certainly writes very pleasant music – as one critic put it back in 1996, around the time “Javelin” was first heard and frequently performed, Torke writes "some of the most optimistic, joyful and thoroughly uplifting music to appear in recent years” – which is certainly saying something in the 20th Century. But, when we consider some of the music we consider “Great Art” – is being “pleasant” enough? Brahms' 2nd Piano Concerto didn't become a war-horse just because it has nice tunes.

What if I tell you Michael Torke is one of a generation of composers who grew up listening to rock-n-roll and feels that is as much a possible resource for his own style as Leonard Bernstein devoured jazz or Antonin Dvořák absorbed the folk music of his native Bohemia?

Brahms at the Piano

Brahms once signed an autograph book by writing down the tune from Johann Strauss' “Beautiful Blue Danube” which he signed “Alas, not by Johannes Brahms.” We think of Brahms as this big, stodgy, cigar-chomping man with a big beard, but he was a big fan of Johann Strauss who might be the equivalent of today's “pop music” back then. Brahms would often be found hanging out in the smoky taverns of Vienna listening to gypsy bands which were the equivalent (both musically and socially) of New York City's jazz clubs – and this gypsy music found its way into his concert music quite often: not just the Hungarian Dances but also the finale of the Violin Concerto, the one he started writing in 1878 just as he'd begun sketching what would soon become his 2nd Piano Concerto.

And this Hungarian music Brahms loved and brought into the concert hall was not really folk music, as it's often considered. It's more like Urban Popular Music – the gypsies (who were not ethnically Hungarian) had a style of their own which has little to do with authentic Hungarian Folk Music, despite the popular perception of it, thanks to Brahms' dances and Liszt's rhapsodies. It wasn't until the early 1900s that Bela Bartók, himself a Hungarian nationalist, first heard what he realized was the authentic musical voice of the Hungarian people. He would quickly absorb this into his own style and create the voice we recognize as Bela Bartók.

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When Bartók began writing “The Miraculous Mandarin,” he was still virtually unknown: but there was another influence on his music, the economic and political realities of Europe, especially Hungary, after the 1st World War.

And even if you've only followed the trials of the Crawley Family on Downton Abbey, you'll realize what a change this event made in the social fabric of the time – now, imagine what it did to the people who lived where these armies fought, who lived in countries that, after the war, no longer existed or, more importantly, like Hungary, hadn't existed before and were now faced with a whole new and blank chapter in their history. Once a more-or-less autonomous part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – politically, maybe; culturally, not so much – what did they do, now that they were an independent nation?

All these questions were big news around the time Bela Bartók read a story by Menyhért Lengyel about a trio of thugs, a young girl and the strange appearance of a wealthy Chinese man.

It was published on New Year's Day, 1917, and was a scenario for a “grotesque pantomime” – rather than a fully danced ballet. The story goes that Ernst von Dohnanyi – in the Germanized form of his name: his Hungarian name would be Ernő Dohnanyi – was approached to write music for this pantomime but he said the “grand guignol” aspects of the story were better suited to Bela Bartók who'd just had the first real success of his career with the ballet, The Wooden Prince in April of 1917. (He'd written Bluebeard's Castle but it hadn't been staged, yet.) Whether Bartók had already started work on the music when Lengyel approached him or not, I'm not sure, but the music was sketched between the summer of 1918 and into 1919. (By the way, “Bluebeard” would be staged in May of 1918 but after one performance was banned and not staged again until 1936.)

Given the aftermath of the War, getting the ballet (or rather, pantomime) staged was going to be a problem so, meanwhile, Bartók went on composing other, more practical pieces.

He didn't finish the orchestration until later and the full ballet wasn't staged until 1926 in Cologne, Germany, where it became a scandal, causing a riot that lasted ten minutes: it was closed down after one performance. As a ballet, it would only be staged two more times before Bartók died in 1945 – he never saw the work on stage.

Shortly after that disastrous premiere, Bartók created a suite out of the complete work, basically the first two-thirds of the score, with a brief “concert ending” tacked on. This Suite received its first concert performance in Budapest in 1928, finally – ten years after he'd started working on it – with, ironically, Ernő Dohnanyi on the podium.

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George Grosz, The Explosion (1917)

With the Industrial Revolution, the Big City became an attraction for many young people – looking for adventure and success, looking, primarily, for a job. The Big City was exciting, teaming with humanity and endless opportunity – but many others viewed it with fear and loathing, feeling it was dehumanizing to the spirit and man's dignity.

In one sense, the optimistic view of the Big City might be reflected in the jazzy, up-beat opening of George Gershwin's 1928 “American in Paris” so full of joie-de-vivre, complete with taxi horns; the pessimistic view would be heard in the opening of The Miraculous Mandarin with its whirring wheels and clanging machinery, the noise and hubbub of the factory and how it was grinding humanity down to being just another cog...

As he wrote to his wife when he began work on the music in mid-September, 1918,

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Its beginning—a very short introduction before the curtain opens—a terrible din, clattering, rattling, hooting: I lead the Hon[orable] listener into the apache den from the bustle of a metropolitan street.
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From there, we hear a theme that has, at its root, a folk song, possibly a lament, one way it represents the three thugs and then, with a more tender treatment, the girl. Cold and hungry (as Bartók often was himself during this time), they need money so they force the girl to stand in the window to attract a man to come upstairs – the plan is, then, they'll rob him. Sounds easy: what could go wrong?

The long, unaccompanied clarinet solo – almost like a snake-charmer's chant – represents the girl at the window. Her first responder is an old man – we hear him trudging up the stairs as the thugs go and hide. She is repulsed by him and his pompous little shadow of a march underneath an English horn solo. When they realize he has no money, they throw him down the steps.

She returns to the window and we hear the clarinet solo a second time. Her second respondent is a young student, shy, embarrassed, but she likes him and tries to get him to dance with her. But he also has no money and when the thugs appear, he runs down the steps and back into the street.

The third “siren's call” becomes a little more involved but then her third responder makes his entrance to some terrifying brass fanfares in a pentatonic scale – basically, the five-note scale you can create by playing on just the black keys of the piano. This is the mandarin, a wealthy Chinese man, richly dressed – awesome if not exactly miraculous, yet. He stands in the doorway and stares at the girl. She is, understandably, terrified.

But he doesn't respond to the girl who hesitantly begins to dance. Only eventually does she warm up to the task and only gradually does he seem to notice her. But instead he begins to pursue her around the room, in one of the great chase scenes in classical music.

And why, basically, a Mandarin? Why not an industrial tycoon or an Austrian general, representing the economic or political enemies of Hungary? Why, in the language of the day, a "Chinaman"?

Fu Manchu, film villain

Keep in mind Western Europe was in the grip of the fictional villain, Fu Manchu, created in 1912 by the English writer Sax Rohmer with a series of novels that eventually would become a series of films. He invented the phrase "Yellow Peril" and the character's mustache alone was enough the conjure up the image of pure evil.

But in Hungary, this dread of the mandarin's "otherness" is less brutal. There is a kinship sensed between Hungarians and Asians traced back to the arrival of Attila the Hun who rose out of Central Asia to forge a mighty empire that reached across modern Hungary from central Germany to the Black Sea in the 5th Century. The pentatonic music we associate stereotypically with Chinese music is also at the root of a great deal of Hungarian folk music. There is more in common between the aspect of the three thugs and that of the mysterious (if not yet miraculous) Mandarin who ends up as their victim.

Basically, this is the end of the suite – but since the ballet continues for another ten minutes, I'll give you a run-down of the rest of the story: the thugs attack the Mandarin, knock him down and rob him but they can't get rid of him, so they decide to kill him. They smother him on the bed under the blankets. But he regains consciousness and starts chasing the girl again. Next, the thugs take a knife and stab him, but he doesn't bleed. Again, he comes to and again he goes after the girl. This time the thugs bind him, then hang him from the overhead light and he dies. When they cut him down, he comes back to life but the girl takes pity on him, caresses him – it is only then that his wounds begin to bleed and he actually, finally, dies.

Again, that part of the story is not part of the suite but it is how the Mandarin got his title...

It's interesting to note that just a few days before Lengyel's story appeared in print, an event happened in St. Petersburg, Russia: the murder of the monk Rasputin who had had such a scandalous hold on the Imperial Family of Russia. The Empress hardly made a move without consulting her Rasputin who had prophesied that if he should ever be “separated” from them, the House of Romanov would fall.

Rasputin, 1914

In December 1916, various patriots decided it was time to rid the tsar of Rasputin's control, and so the monk was offered cyanide-laced pastries at the home of Prince Yusupov, presumably eating enough to kill a man quickly. But after an hour, he showed no signs of illness. So Prince Yusupov shot him 3 times in the chest and back, penetrating his stomach, liver and a kidney. When Yusupov returned moments later to check the body, Rasputin opened his eyes and grabbed at the prince, pulling off an epaulet and trying to strangle his would-be killer. He got up and stumbled outside into the courtyard where Yusupov again shot him – four more shots were fired – and also clubbed him over the head till he dropped. There is a grizzly photograph of Rasputin's body with a bullet hole in the forehead – no doubt that stopped him... A couple hours later, Yusupov and his fellow conspirators dumped the body into the river.

As Rasputin's prophecy foretold, only two months later the tsar abdicated the imperial throne during the first Russian Revolution in 1917. The second revolution occurred that autumn, led by the Bolsheviks who had the tsar and his family imprisoned and then executed in July of 1918.

That summer, Bela Bartók began writing the music for Lengyel's story about a Mandarin who wouldn't die.

According to Bartók's letter to his wife, he'd begun working on the music by September, 1918, but the 1st World War didn't officially end until the Armistice that November. The official treaty ending the war wasn't signed until late-June, 1919, around the time Bartók finished the first draft.

There was a revolution in Budapest in October of 1918 – again, before the armistice but while Bartók was composing – which overthrew the autonomous government under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, forcing the Emperor Karl who had only just succeeded to the throne following the death of the old emperor Franz Josef in 1916 at the age of 86, who was also nominally the King of Hungary. So, with him gone as the de facto ruler of Hungary, by mid-November, just days after the Armistice, a Hungarian Republic was proclaimed.

Hoping to remain neutral, the new nation found itself being invaded by its neighbors Serbia and Romania – but the United States and Woodrow Wilson had forced the disarmament of the Hungarian Army, leaving it with no defenses.

By February 1919, unable to control popular dissent or manage the economy, the republic fell in a second revolution backed by Lenin and the Russian bolsheviks, forming a Hungarian Soviet Republic. But the communists had never been popular outside the big cities and so a civil war ensued in which the Hungarian Red Army murdered hundreds of scientists and other intellectuals – some 590, many in Budapest – between March and August of 1919, mostly led by a gang called “Lenin's Boys” who were basically street thugs roaming the city.

Again, this was during the time Bartók was completing The Miraculous Mandarin.

The Soviet Republic fell in early-August when Romanian troops captured Budapest. The Reds fled the city (escaping to Austria after looting the banks and taking numerous “national treasures” with them), leaving now the conservative, pro-royalist faction, the Whites, as the sole fighting force, who managed to defeat the Romanian Army. But with no police force or national army, chaos ensued under the “White Terror” which lasted for almost two years and which aimed much of its anger against the Jews whom they blamed as supporters of the previous communist regime.

A former Austro-Hungarian admiral took charge of the Whites, formed a national army, tried to restore order and created the Kingdom of Hungary with himself as “Regent.” However, no one wanted the actual former Austro-Hungarian emperor as king nor could they find another likely candidate, so somehow Admiral Miklós Horthy served as Regent – that is, royal place-holder as care-taker – until he was ousted by the invasion of his former allies, the German Nazis, in 1944. By that time, Bartók managed to flee Budapest for the West and eventually New York City, but that's another and longer and even sadder story.

Meanwhile, in Paris in 1920, the Western Nations carved away at Hungary, slicing off some 72% of the original country and giving it to Romania, to what would become Yugoslavia and to the new country of Czechoslovakia as well as to what was left of Austria, once a vast empire sprawling across central and eastern Europe, now this small land-locked nation, a shadow of its former self. These divisions were done along ethnic and linguistic lines rather than political and historical lines – but from the standpoint of a Hungarian, it was humiliating, and now almost 3½ million ethnic Hungarians no longer lived in Hungary. Bartók's hometown was now in Romania; the largely Hungarian village where his family moved after his father's death later became part of Ukraine; the city he grew up in was now in Czechoslovakia (and presently in Slovakia).

So perhaps this brief summary of the historical background with its political and social turmoil not to mention the economic instability during the times when Bartók was composing The Miraculous Mandarin might give us an appreciation for the violence of the story and the music he wrote for it. Harrowing music from harrowing times.

Thinking about Bartók's dystopian world, it might bring to mind things we see on our news every night: this growing game of “knockout” or a man shot to death in a road-rage incident, school shootings, drug-related killings... As Bartók wrote to a friend following the horrors of World War I, “all art should face the unspeakable and the horrific without fear.” To someone who wanted to protect himself from such reality, he wrote “why do you want to be protected like a child from what is hard and harsh? The doors of your heart would be closed to human feeling. Do you not want to struggle, to be shocked, to experience life-threatening situations? How else will you understand Beethoven, Goethe, Nietzsche? Whoever wishes to experience ideas which are born from suffering must himself suffer.”

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Johannes Brahms had died in Vienna about 20 years before Lengyel's story of the Miraculous Mandarin. Generally, Brahms had a fairly dull life as great artists' biographies go, and he was fortunate to live in a fairly stable society both politically and economically. He was, by the time he composed his 2nd Piano Concerto, at the height of his fame – his conductor friend Hans von Bülow had already coined the Three Bs, Bach Beethoven and Brahms – plus he was quite well off, enough so he could set royalties aside for a secret fund to help his old friend Clara Schumann, who wasn't having that good a time of it toward the end of her career as a solo pianist.

The day after Brahms premiered his new Violin Concerto, Clara lost her youngest child, her son Felix – she had been pregnant with him when her husband Robert had attempted suicide only five months after a 20-year-old Brahms had introduced himself to them. Brahms' 1st Piano Concerto in D Minor had started out as a theme sketched a few days after Robert Schumann threw himself off a bridge into the River Rhine. Now, Clara was celebrating her 50th year as a concert pianist but arthritis, hearing issues and the failing health of some of her children made it difficult for her – for one thing, she found she could no longer play Brahms' D Minor Piano Concerto. She would never accept outright charity but somehow, through his publisher, Brahms managed to see Clara would get a steady income she thought was from her husband's music.

In April of 1878, Brahms and a few friends of his took a vacation – not a tour, just a trip, tourists in the sunny land of Italy, the first of nine such holidays he would take there – the only country he visited purely for pleasure. It was there that he sat down and sketched some ideas for a NEW piano concerto – but the next month, when he began his summer's composing, he put it aside to write a violin concerto for his friend Joseph Joachim which was premiered on New Year's Day, 1879.

Brahms hated touring as a performer, in fact hated performing, probably almost as much as he hated practicing. Joachim complained frequently about their being under-rehearsed while they were on tour. In the spring of 1880, with Clara Schumann unable to play because of her arthritis, it was Brahms who played Robert Schumann's piano quartet at the unveiling of a Schumann memorial in Bonn and Clara wrote how she suffered listening to her friend “grope and growl” his way through her husband's music, a piece she often played. “It was like I was sitting on thorns.” Joachim, she said “cast despairing glances at me...”

Brahms was often one to keep his work to himself: during the summer of 1880, he composed two piano trios, one of which never saw the light of day, as well as some piano pieces, the 2 Rhapsodies, Op. 79, and the 2 overtures – the “Tragic” and its companion, the “Academic Festival,” musically the equivalent of the theatrical masks of drama and comedy. He also was working on a new piano concerto.

Standing over Taormina

Before he finished it, there was another trip to Italy in April, 1881, where three friends had trouble keeping up with him, he was enjoying himself so much. His doctor friend, Billroth, wrote that one of his favorite places was to stand on the cliffs overlooking the village of Taormina on Sicily, in the shadow of the volcano Mt. Etna, and gaze out over the sea and he found the wine of Venice so much to his liking, when a fan recognized him on the street, he was enjoying himself so much, she had to grab his arm to keep him from walking off into a canal.

It's an interesting image to keep in mind – this idea of Brahms the bon vivant enjoying himself in Italy – during the last movement of the concerto, which if it doesn't paint musical images of the places he visited, gives us an idea of how he felt when he was there, certainly one of the happiest times in his life.

A few months later, then, Brahms announced to his friend Elisabeth von Herzogenberg he'd completed a “tiny concerto with a tiny, tiny wisp of a scherzo.” Now, if you know the piece, it's hardly tiny – in fact, at about 50 minutes, average, it's probably one of the longest concertos in the standard repertoire. A scherzo, which makes this a four-movement concerto rather than the typical three-movement form, is usually a light-hearted dance-like movement (it means “joke” in Italian), but this one is neither “tiny, tiny” nor a “wisp,” but a full-throttle drama with a full-bodied dance in the middle to... sunshine? Or wine, perhaps? Brahms explained he felt the first movement was so “harmless,” it needed something passionate between it and the slow movement. We know he'd originally planned for an added scherzo in the violin concerto – so this is where that idea (if not the music itself) ended up.

Brahms, of course, would often have his little self-deprecating joke about his music – not that he was ever modest about it (in fact, he could be one of the biggest jerks in classical music when it came to that). But unlike the D Minor Piano Concerto which had been a failure at its premiere in Leipzig – where barely three pairs of hands started to applaud before the hissing began – this new concerto was a huge success and Brahms quickly took it on tour both as soloist and as conductor (he and his conductor/pianist friend Hans von Bülow often traded places on the stage).

Clara Schumann wrote in her journal that “Brahms is celebrating such triumphs everywhere as seldom fall to the lot of a composer,” not easy for her to admit, given her own husband's lifetime of neglect. The spring before he'd first sketched the concerto, he was given an honorary doctorate degree and was even offered the job as music director of the St. Thomas Church in Leipzig, where he would've become the successor to Johann Sebastian Bach – an honor he quickly turned down, however (imagine, the city where, 19 years earlier, they'd hissed his 1st Piano Concerto!) – but Clara also knew him well enough to know that whatever his triumphs on the world's stage, in reality Brahms lived a sad life... and always would.

So in the condensed period of one evening, you can explore three different musical eras and worlds – stylistic, personal, historical... Starting with Michael Torke's javelin-like rise to what promised to be an exuberant career (“Javelin” is, after all, only 20 years old) – to the dystopian dysfunction of a world of violence and inhumanity in Bartók's “grotesque pantomime,” to some of the happiest music a lonely man could ever write at the peak of his career.

Enjoy the ride!

- Dick Strawser

Brahms at 50: His 3rd Symphony

Johannes Brahms at 50

This weekend, Stuart Malina conducts the Harrisburg Symphony in one of his favorite works, the Symphony No. 3 by Johannes Brahms (actually, whatever Brahms symphony he's conducting at the time is his favorite: there are only four but how can you pick just one?). Also on the program, pianist Di Wu plays the ever-popular Piano Concerto by Edvard Grieg and the concert begins with En Saga by Jean Sibelius. It's called "Enchanting Escape" and you can join us for this musical get-away Saturday evening at 8pm and Sunday afternoon at 3pm at the Forum (Truman Bullard offers a pre-concert talk an hour before each performance).

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In May of 1883, Johannes Brahms invited a close friend of his to a “little small sad festival” to be attended by only four people. This was the way Brahms intended to celebrate his 50th birthday.

That summer, he wrote his Third Symphony which the Harrisburg Symphony will play this weekend under the direction of Stuart Malina, a self-avowed lover of Brahms’ music.

Here, Sir Colin Davis conducts the Dresden State Orchestra on their Japanese Tour in 2009 (recorded in Suntory Hall).
1st Movement part 1

1st Movement part 2

2nd Movement

3rd Movement

4th Movement
(notice the conductor mouths the words “too loud” to the orchestra even before the music begins! Brahms marks it ‘sotto voce’ and it needs to be whispered, almost inaudible.)

When he was 20, Johannes Brahms met Robert and Clara Schumann and there was much prophesying about future greatness, most of which seemed to backfire. For one thing, if he was the heir to Beethoven, where was all this great music? Even though Robert had described his piano sonatas as “veiled symphonies” and Clara had told him, to succeed, he would need to compose symphonies, the symphony he began sketching shortly after Robert Schumann threw himself into the Rhine – an attempted suicide – in 1854 did not become what we know as his first symphony which was completed in 1876, 22 years later. 

But he took his time, dealing with negative criticism and taunts from other contemporary composers like Liszt and Wagner. Brahms didn’t want to engage in the typical “on-the-job training” so many young composers have, producing immature works that will be forgotten and only incur further heckling from the crowd demanding proof he was, in fact, Beethoven’s musical heir.

Once that hurdle had been (finally) surpassed – Brahms was then 43 years old – he composed his 2nd Symphony in one summer the following year. The 3rd Symphony came along six summers later. It too was largely composed over one summer.

Brahms had become primarily a “summer composer,” going away to holiday spots (or spas, to be more exact) like Bad Ischl. The summer after his 50th birthday, he went to Wiesbaden, a spa-town on the Rhine (See a modern-day panorama of the city, below, taken from a mountain outside of town, looking toward the barely visible Rhine. Ignore the cell-phone tower on the left…)

A Modern View of Wiesbaden

His choice of location was not accidental.

Brahms had been born in the German city of Hamburg, a great port city on the Elbe River. When he visited the Schumanns, they lived in Düsseldorf, a city on the Rhine where Schumann had been the city’s “music director” and where he composed his 3rd Symphony, known as the “Rhenish.” It was the river he would shortly try to drown himself in.

The Rhine is also where Richard Wagner begins and ends his operatic cycle, The Ring of the Niebelung.

And Wagner, whom Brahms respected to a certain degree despite their rivalry, had just died in February, a few months before Brahms’ 50th birthday.

But the main reason Brahms chose Wiesbaden for his summer composing sojourn was one of its residents, a 26-year-old alto named Hermine Spiess (in some sources, her name is spelled Spies).

Brahms first heard her sing at a friend’s home that January and whatever their relationship was, Brahms found himself writing several songs inspired by that beautiful alto voice.

The first of his songs he’d heard her sing was the delightful, folkish “Vergebliches Ständchen” (which he’d heard her sing, that first meeting: a young man begs his sweetheart to let him in to say good night to her, but she laughs and shuts the window in his face – as Brahms joked after hearing Hermine sing it, “I’m sure she’d let him in!”) 

Many of the songs he wrote for her, rather than being the traditional love-songs you might expect, were, despite his flirtations, about unrequited love, rejection or the anxiety of growing older (think “mid-life crisis” 1880s-style). 

Hermine Spiess in 1887

Her family lived in Wiesbaden. Brahms jokingly called Hermine his “Rhinemaiden” (after the seductive young water nymphs who initiate Wagner’s “Ring”) and also, after Shakespeare’s queen in “The Winter’s Tale,” as “Hermione-ohne-O” – Harmione without the O.

How much of Hermine is in the Third Symphony remains to be seen. Brahms’ non-vocal music was always abstract but there were often specific associations he might have had in mind when composing it, regardless of what it might mean as a “program,” the dreaded “what-the-music-is-about” question. 

Certainly, lots of Brahms’ music makes covert references to Clara Schumann right down to his quoting or paraphrasing what Schumann himself called his “Clara Motive.” And then there’s his Farewell to Agathe von Siebold in his 2nd String Sextet, her name spelled out in musical pitches.

If there is anything referring to Hermione-ohne-O in the symphony he composed that summer, Brahms never hinted at it.

A more likely inspiration was his proximity to the River Rhine which might put a man officially in Middle Age reminiscing about the events of 30 years earlier and first met the Schumanns in a town on the Rhine. From the studio he rented on the hillside overlooking Wiesbaden, he could see the Rhine in the not great distance: did that bring to mind musical associations?

The opening theme of Brahms’ new symphony bears a strong resemblance to a passage from Schumann’s “Rhenish” Symphony, inspired by the very river that Brahms could see from his summer home.
 

It has the same kind of “swing” Schumann’s first movement theme has but later, Schumann varies his theme – check here to hear Schumann’s “Rhenish,” at 6:44 into the clip. (In the example above, I’ve transposed it from Schumann’s original pitches, starting on G, to Brahms’ theme, starting on F.) Interestingly, the theme is not really something you can build on: in Schumann’s case, it “closes” the harmonic motion and so Brahms has to open it up to make it a suitable theme he can build on. But perhaps, consciously or not, that is the inception point for Brahms’ inspiration: the proximity of the Rhine and the memory of Schumann’s musical tribute to it.

Whatever Brahms may have thought was behind his new symphony, what secret meanings there might be inside the music, he was completely silent about it. But others saw in it specific references: Hans Richter, who would conduct the premiere, after referring to Brahms’ 2nd Symphony as his Pastoral, called this one “Brahms’ Eroica” after Beethoven’s 3rd. Clara Schumann heard “the mysterious charms of woods and forests [in the first movement]… worshippers kneeling about the little forest shrine.” Joseph Joachim, for whom he’d composed his Violin Concerto a few years earlier, said the finale brought to mind the Greek myth of Hero and Leander: “I cannot help imagining the bold, brave swimmer, his breast borne up by the waves and by the mighty passion before his eyes, heartily, heroically swimming on, to the end, to the end, in spite of the elements which storm around him.” 

Certainly, there’s drama in the symphony – as naturally there would be, given the nature of the form – but is Brahms’ 3rd really his equivalent of Beethoven’s 3rd? The unexpected mood of the finale in the dark key of F Minor rather than some joyously affirmation in F Major, might lead you to think of dramatic struggles, but rather than a tragic ending or a final heroic resolution (as he ended his 1st Symphony), Brahms lets the clouds part and, in a very un-Brahmsian texture (but reminiscent of Wagner’s “Forest Murmurs”) brings back the opening movement’s first theme – perhaps his Rhine Motive – as a beautiful benediction. Perhaps, like Wagner’s “Ring,” it all begins and ends with the Rhine?

Perhaps it wouldn’t have been too far-fetched had someone called it “Brahms’ Rhenish”?

Opening Page of Brahms' original manuscript of his Symphony No. 3

Another famous association concerns its opening “gesture,” a musical motive that permeates the symphony.

Schumann had suggested he, Brahms and another of Schumann’s friends, Albert Dietrich, write a violin sonata by committee to honor violinist Joseph Joachim. They were to be given to him anonymously, he would play through them and then try to guess who wrote which movement. Brahms supplied the scherzo, usually known as the “Sonatensatz” (unimaginatively translated as “Concerto Movement”).

Collectively, this is known as the “F.A.E.” Sonata because Joachim’s life-motto, he said, was “Frei aber einsam” – Free but lonely.

Brahms, the perpetual bachelor – he had said he would attempt neither writing an opera nor marriage – joked that his motto was “F.A.F.” – Frei aber froh. Free but happy!

In that sense, the opening motive of the symphony he wrote at 50 starts off with a rising gesture, F–A-flat–F (see red bracket in the example).

The Opening of Brahms' Symphony No. 3 (without the inner voices)

Though our attention is commanded by the Schumann-quoted melody in the violins, in the basses and trombone, you hear the F–A-flat–F motive. A few measures later, it’s in the horns in the inner voices, transposed to C–E-flat–C and again in the trumpets. In the next measure, it’s in the lower strings and horns, this time as B-flat–D-flat–B-flat. After what sounds like a transition to a new theme a few more measures later, it reappears in the lower voices as A–C–A, what seems to be A Minor but it accompanies the F Major resolution before the violins restate the opening chords again, back into the F–A-flat–F pattern. So in the first 23 measures, you’ve heard that “Frei aber Froh” motive seven times, making a full-circle from F back to F!

What’s surprising about this – aside from the fact the motto should abbreviate to F–A–F, not F–A-flat–F – if the symphony’s in F Major (with an A-natural), why is this generating motive in F Minor (with an A-flat)?

It gives his harmony a pungent non-traditional sound: instead of a standard basic chord progression at the opening, he immediately swings from an F Major chord to a diminished seventh that should resolve to a C major chord but instead swings back to F Major before swinging off, once again, to an F Minor chord to a totally unexpected D-flat Major Chord before turning into that diminished seventh chord again but this time resolving as it should to the expected C Major chord which is also the dominant of the symphony’s tonic key, F Major.

Okay, I know that’s a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo, but if you wanted to know why this sounds different from, say, the opening of Beethoven’s 1st Symphony (speaking unexpected harmonic twists), that’s why. 

It also helps explain why the last movement is in F Minor rather than the expected F Major. And then, at the very end, after all this dark drama, the heavens open up and we hear this tremulous string texture – very unlike Brahms but bringing to mind, perhaps, Wagner’s “Forest Murmurs” – with the opening Rhenish theme in a benedictory F Major, leading not as you’d expect to an ultimately triumphant conclusion (like the 1st) or a joyous celebration (like the 2nd) but a peaceful resolution.

While it was one of possibly only two major successes Brahms ever had at a premiere – the public reaction to his German Requiem was the other one – and has gone on to become an audience favorite. Not quite a year after that world premiere in Vienna, it received its American premiere in New York – at a “Novelty Concert” – and a month later was performed in Boston where several hundred people walked out of the concert in protest of this “new music.”

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Oh, and what ever happened to Hermione-ohne-O?

In December of 1884, a year after the symphony’s premiere, Brahms was honored with an all-Brahms concert in the town of Oldenburg. He stayed with his friend Albert Dietrich (the third part of the F.A.E. Sonata’s committee) and brought with him seven guests including Hermine Spiess. Afterward, Hermine wrote to Dietrich’s daughter,

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“What I value most particularly is to have now enjoyed Brahms as a man. How charming he was with us when we were making and guessing riddles. What delightful hours we spent! …Of course, now I only play Brahms the livelong day.”

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As Jan Swafford notes in his excellent and wonderfully readable biography of Brahms,

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“She had met him more than a year before and spent much of the previous summer [when he was composing the 3rd Symphony] in Wiesbaden in his company. If Brahms had undertaken to court Hermine, and in his fashion he probably had, his approach was remarkably oblique. There is every reason to assume, anyway, as with other “respectable” women, that he flirted full-tilt and kept his hands to himself.”
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The following summer, Klaus Groth, a poet (then 66), sent both Brahms and Hermine a poem, “Come soon!” He and Brahms had a running joke about vying for Hermine’s attention, and so Brahms immediately sat down and composed a song to Groth’s poem and sent it to Hermine. That summer, he was working on the last two movements of his 4th Symphony.

The next summer, he composed one of his most ingratiating songs, “Wie Melodienzieht es mir,” as a musical portrait of “the effervescent Hermine” and sent it to her. She sang it frequently. By now, she was an acclaimed Brahms interpreter, especially of his Alto Rhapsody. 

Brahms wrote to another friend that summer, “I’m now getting to the years where a man easily does something stupid so I have to doubly watch myself.”

While he was waiting for Hermine to arrive for a visit that summer, he was working on the 2nd Violin Sonata. That November, he made arrangements for Hermine to make her Viennese debut as her accompanist, singing his songs. Friends pointed out that, his enthusiasm aside, Hermine was not developing as a singer. At that point, one could say their relationship, whatever it might have been or become, had crested.

Meeting again in 1888, Hermine met Brahms at a train stop in Basel and was shocked how gray he had become, though she still saw the youthfulness in his “beautiful blue young-man’s eyes and the fresh, dear features.” (He was 55…)

By now, Brahms comments to friends about any possible marriage is like a paraphrase of Groucho Marx about any country club that would accept him: Brahms would despise “a girl for taking me as a husband.” Before, it had been that he was too poor; now it was that he was too old. (He was, by the way, 56.)

Four years later, Hermine Spiess married a lawyer and retired from her career. A year after the wedding, she died in childbirth, a day after her 36th birthday.

By now, Brahms had passed whatever mid-life crisis may have affected his 3rd Symphony. Disappointed in the failure of his 4th Symphony and the Double Concerto (even with his friends), he destroyed a second violin concerto, a second double concerto and at least one more symphony.

- Dick Strawser

The Difficult: Thinking about Roger Sessions & Johannes Brahms

Last week, I snatched up a copy of Frederik Prausnitz’s biography of Roger Sessions, subtitled “How a ‘Difficult’ Composer Got That Way.” It was published in 2002, so it’s not like it’s an old book and hard to find – it hadn’t crossed my radar yet, not likely to show up in your typical American bookstore or public library shelf. I found it at an independent book-seller in uptown Harrisburg called “The Mid-Town Scholar” which has a pretty decent music collection among its used books.

(One of the things I like about the store is that, 56 years ago, my dad was getting this converted movie theater ready as a new clothing store called “The Boston Store,” helping to turn the area around the Broad Street Market into the Uptown Business District. Today would be my dad’s 93rd birthday, as it happens.)

Now, Roger Sessions is a composer I’ve always been fond of but, like many American classical music lovers, I was never really familiar with his music. Much of that is because of this “difficulty,” though that hasn’t stopped me with other composers. I own several CDs of Sessions’ music – symphonies, some piano pieces, the piano concerto – and when I was teaching at the University of Connecticut, I took a caravan of students up to Boston to see the American premiere of his opera Montezuma with Sarah Caldwell and her Boston Opera. But for some reason, he's never been high on my listening list.

So finding something that was a biography that might shed some technical light on the details of his style, especially the evolution of that style, was a must-purchase no-brainer for me (and fortunately at a price that fit within my limited budget). I look forward to getting into it in the next few weeks.

How a composer composes is something I find fascinating. I’m not even sure I know how I compose, but reading the thoughts about other composers, about how their creativity works, is something both informative and comforting: usually, when I try to analyze my own process, I can only presume this is how it works for others, so it is reassuring to find other composers who appear to think the same way or present a different process – which in turn might shed some light on how the great composers of the past dealt with their creativity. One can only assume so much, looking at or listening to their music: unless they’ve specifically written something somewhere, there is nothing to prove your assumption.

This was something on my mind a lot, the past few weeks, listening to Brahms’ 1st Symphony as the Harrisburg Symphony was getting it ready for their last concert of the season last week. I have heard this work many times – even listened to it several of those times – and I am constantly amazed by at least one thing: not that it took him so long to complete it (he spent 24 years working on his first attempt at a first symphony, 14 of which were spent actually working on what would become his 1st Symphony), but that it sounds like such a unified work from beginning to end, you would have no idea he was 29 years old when he started the first movement and 43 when he completed the last movement.

In his preconcert talk, conductor Stuart Malina mentioned how much of the thematic material throughout the symphony is based on certain note-patterns – mostly thirds (either as specific intervals or as melodic outlines) and half-step lower- or upper-neighboring tones – often used beneath the surface level of the melodic material. Whether this was something conscious in Brahms’ composing the piece – even on the installment plan – one can only guess: not only did Brahms notoriously destroy his sketches and rough drafts, he never really said much about how he composed and certainly never wrote articles for music periodicals or gave interviews to people asking questions like “So, tell us, Johannes, how did you come up with that theme in the first movement?” Unlike Olivier Messiaen, he never wrote something called “My Musical Language.”

(That’s why his talking about such general aspects of his creative process with a student, George Henschel, who wrote them down for posterity, is so important. You can read a post about those comments he'd made the summer he was completing the 1st Symphony, here.)

That the interval of the third was structurally important to Brahms is obvious – look at the opening of the 4th Symphony for perhaps his most famous example, and how chains of thirds ‘inform’ the late piano Intermezzo, Op. 119, No. 1 or the third of the Four Serious Songs – but is it coincidental the key scheme of his 1st Symphony is also based on thirds?

The first movement is in C Minor, the second is in E Major, the third is in A-flat Major and the finale ultimately in C Major. That’s a series of rising 3rds (considering A-flat the same as G-sharp) – I also think of the symmetry of E being a major third above C and A-flat being a major third below C – same difference.

Is that significant?

Well, Brahms did it elsewhere. The Third Piano Quartet in C Minor – which, along with the C Minor String quartet, was another work that was slowly gestating along with the C Minor Symphony – begins with two movements in C Minor, followed by a gorgeous Andante in E Major – and, not surprisingly, with a melodic chain of descending thirds: G-sharp – E – C-natural – A resolving to G-sharp , a melodic sequence that also gives the movement its peculiarly haunting harmonic sound.

But he also does this in two works completed shortly after finishing the 1st Symphony. In his 2nd Symphony, the 1st Movement in D Major is followed by an Adagio in B Major (a minor third down) which is in turn followed by an intermezzo in G Major (a major third down), before returning to D Major. The Violin Concerto’s luminous Adagio – his calling it a “wretched little adagio” is more self-deprecating humor than his actual assessment of the piece – is in F Major, a minor third above the home key of D Major.

Standard Procedure in the late-18th Century was for contrasting movements to be in “closely related” keys. The second movement of a work in the white rat, garden variety key of C Major, for instance, could be in the dominant or subdominant major or relative minor – in other words, G or F Major or A Minor. A work in C Minor would normally have a contrasting second movement in the relative major, or E-flat Major (same key signature, but different pitch as the tonic). The third movement would usually be in the home tonic.

Only later did composers try to find more variety in their options. Beethoven, in his 3rd Piano Concerto which is in C Minor, writes his slow movement not in E-flat Major as you’d expect, but in E Major. It’s a much brighter sounding key and while the switch from the pitch E-flat of the ‘darker’ minor key to an E-natural implying a ‘brighter’ major key is one thing, but the switch from the dominant pitch G to the G-sharp of an E Major chord is one of those emotional frissons when listeners probably sat up and went, “what? ”

And Beethoven’s 3rd Piano Concerto is a work that Brahms performed and especially liked. It served as a model for his 1st Piano Concerto – a work that began as his first attempt at a first symphony, by the way.

That this scheme of thirds – either in the melodic writing or in the overall key scheme of the complete work – is not original doesn’t make it any less interesting. It’s what helps make the work sound a little different from the ordinary. A lesser composer would have written the 2nd movement in the expected E-flat Major, the 3rd movement most likely in G, a key scheme spelling out, after all, a C Minor triad. And while it also helps make it sound more like Brahms than that theoretical lesser composer (who could never have written a 1st movement like that in the first place), it also helps make the symphony more of a whole, whether we realize it consciously or not.

It is one of those moments where the brain, seriously engaged or not, is still given something to savor as the heart enjoys the overall surface of the work.

This underlying logic is one of the reasons Brahms was considered, in his day, a “difficult” composer. In an age when Wagner and Liszt were writing more dissonant or more harmonically adventuresome music “for the future,” Brahms’ music sounds more academic, not just because he wrote in old-fashioned forms like variations and fugues. Even if he isn’t using outright fugues in his 1st Symphony, its heavy reliance on counterpoint and the frequent use of contrary motion between melody and bass was usually dismissed as “academic,” things one learns in school to help your craft but which you jettison as soon as you arrive in the real world.

Because he wasn’t writing operas or using the symphony to tell involved dramatic stories like Liszt’s “Faust” Symphony or even implied stories like Tchaikovsky in his 4th, 5th and 6th Symphonies, Brahms was considered an abstract “classicist” in an emotional, “romantic” age, despite the passion in his music – is anything more passionate-sounding than the first movement of this 1st Symphony?

Curiously, it is Brahms’ reliance on technical control – the fine structural, often imperceptible details exhibited even in the short piano pieces written at the end of his career – that proved more important to a composer like Arnold Schoenberg who, after following the harmonic evolution from Wagner’s chromaticism to its inevitable dissolution of tonality altogether, decided he needed more of a “system” to wrap his musical ideas around, curiously finding inspiration in “Brahms the Progressive” as he invented something called “serialism” (more correctly a “system of composing with twelve tones”) which is only a neo-classical way of looking for something different from but comparable to the systematic rules we learn in theory classes that comprise what we call “tonality.”

And I can’t think of a composer more maligned for being “difficult” than Arnold Schoenberg.

Prausnitz uses a quotation of Sessions’ as an epigram for his biography’s preface:

“Every composer whose music seems difficult to grasp is, as long as the difficulty persists, suspected or accused of composing with his brain rather than his heart – as if one could function without the other.”

The same is true of Elliott Carter and Arnold Schoenberg, composers whose music is usually dismissed as requiring too much work to listen to and is too different from what we’re familiar with to warrant serious attention.

But the same was true of Brahms, a composer who you’d think had gained a certain amount of self-reliance after coming to terms with writing a symphony after Beethoven, yet following the reaction to his 4th Symphony was still insecure enough to destroy at least two more symphonic works, one far enough along to have played it for a test-drive with his friends!

The key to Sessions’ comment, written (I suspect) in the 1950s, is that “as long as the difficulty persists.”

Perhaps there will come a time when Schoenberg and Carter’s music – as well as Sessions’ – will be accepted on its own terms, and the negativity, like that which pursued Brahms as well as Beethoven and, most certainly, Bach, will have been forgotten.

- Dick Strawser

A Trio, a "Lost Chord" and Lots of Brahms

It’s been busy, here, at Dr. Dick Central – while I’m still finishing up editing a complete novel, “The Doomsday Symphony” (all 130,000 words of it), I’ve already begun working out some details to begin a new one. Well, not exactly “new” – it’s going to be a complete rewriting of one I completed last year, “The Lost Chord” (all 188,000+ words of it), a parody of Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol.”

I’ll get into why and how I’m going to revise it – no, ‘revise’ is too polite a word for what will be a complete overhaul, starting over, basically, from scratch – at a later time, but basically, since I wasn’t as satisfied with Brown’s novel as I was with “The Da Vinci Code” (and I’m still very pleased with my parody, “The Schoenberg Code”), I found myself less than satisfied with my take-off on it, to the point I want to salvage what I can from the characters and many of the scenes, then implant them into a whole new plot which, rather than being a parody of Brown, becomes a parody of the genre, instead.

In addition to that, I’ve started composing again, much to my surprise. It’d been bothering me that it’s been a year since I completed (but not yet finished copying) the seven songs of the cycle, “The Other Side of Air” with no new work anywhere near a back burner.

True, writing a novel might constitute as an excuse for that, but still…

At some point around last Christmas, I jotted down a few ideas for what might become a piano sonata. At the end of April, I got those out to see what I might be able to do with them. It had also occurred to me, if for nothing more than an exercise in keeping the creative muscles moving – a form of exercise – I might transcribe one or two of the songs into... I don't know - a piano trio?

In a few minutes, I was jotting down some new ideas – not for a piano sonata or a song transcription, but for a piano trio. Fifteen minutes earlier, I hadn't even thought of writing a 'real' piano trio...

On May 2nd, I began actual composition on it and in a few days had written most of the first minute of it (it took over 27 hours, by the way, to get that much composed). But then I woke up one morning thinking “ya know, the main motive of this trio sounds awfully familiar,” like I’d written it before. In fact, I had – it was the generating force behind the String Quartet completed in 2003 which also was significant in the Symphony composed subsequently which was based on the same framework (if not the same material). While that wasn’t an “arrangement” of the quartet, I didn’t want this new piece to become “The Piano Trio Version of the String Quartet .” I mean, really…

So I decided to scratch the sketches and start over.

By the next day, I had fashioned a different six-note motive which, though not as dramatic an opening, actually turned out to be more “pregnant,” more filled with potential and found, since the structure I had planned originally was still usable, I could basically plug new notes into the old rhythms and phrases, though it hasn’t turned out to be quite that easy. Plus I found a few spots – even in only the first 17 measures – that could be tweaked a little better.

After all, better now than realizing all this 170 measures into the piece and having to start over again, right?

Curiously, I find the piece is now much better. Funny how things work like that.

I’ve also been blogging about Brahms for the Harrisburg Symphony Blog. Their concert this weekend is called “Brahms Brahms Brahms” and while I joke about calling it “Brahms Cubed” (“Brahms in Triplicate” sounds too bureaucratic), it offers me – as a writer about music – an opportunity to spill the cyber-equivalent of much ink about it.

The First Symphony post is a transcription of my pre-concert talk from several seasons ago, examining what was going on in Brahms' life as he tried to write that first symphony. Curiously, I'd also posted about some comments Brahms had made to a friend of his, the closest thing we've come to Brahms talking about his "creative process" which this friend was kind enough to write down.


This morning, Stuart and I got together to record a podcast, chatting about the program. You can hear that on this post at the Symphony Blog, one of a series of podcasts or video-chats we’d tried to do for each concert (pending the reality of schedules).

This afternoon, I added a post about the Violin Concerto, too, which Odin Rathnam will play with the orchestra, celebrating his 20th season as concertmaster of the orchestra. The post includes three different performances, videos embedded with legendary performers Henryk Szeryng, Jascha Heifetz and David Oistrakh, each playing one movement of the concerto. That in itself was a lot of fun.

There’s also the realization that – jeez – even a composer like Brahms has his moments with self-reliance: it took him over 20 years to complete his first symphony (and 14 of those years on the work that became his 1st Symphony and then in a burst of creative energy, he completed a second symphony and this violin concerto in the same of two more years.

But the Violin Concerto – regardless how we think of it today – did not go over well (yes, Vienna loved it, but it only received due recognition after Brahms died) and Brahms scrapped his plans for a second violin concerto. When some of his friends, a kind of creative advisory board and support group, were unable to find any enthusiasm for his 4th Symphony and the Double Concerto, he also scrapped sketches he’d had for a second “double concerto” and a 5th Symphony – apparently far enough along he could play it as a piano duet for his friends – as well as another symphony (a new one or a revisiting of the ill-fated 5th?). It makes you wonder what happened to the self-reliance he’d discovered after having finally finishing that 1st Symphony – after the Double Concerto, Brahms clearly went into a creative slide (I’d hesitate to call anything that could produce those last chamber music pieces a “slump”) but he decided to write no more orchestral works. And the Double Concerto was written only 11 years after he completed the 1st Symphony – that’s not a long time, when you consider Brahms’ stature in the world!

It’s made me think about the delicate balance that is creativity and how, even with Brahms’ obvious craft and genius, he could still fall prey to self-doubts.

Part of the reworking of “The Lost Chord” is to set it at a combination writer’s colony and clinic where the hero of “The Doomsday Symphony,” Dr. T.R. Cranleigh, runs into three composers on a mission.

One is a very systematic composer (perhaps a serialist) who is trying to discover how to bring more emotion into his music.

A more emotionally-oriented composer who relies on inspiration rather than craft is trying to find something intellectual he can use to build a stronger framework for his music, so it has more to offer than just "sound-appeal."

And the third composer is searching for the courage of his own convictions to continue being a composer, almost afraid to commit to putting anything down on paper. He hopes to overcome his doubts and fears, the negativity of critics and well-meaning friends and teachers, to write the kind of music he wants to write.

So, yes, one is looking for a heart, the other is looking for a brain and the third is looking for some courage.

And not only do I have to come up with names for them, I have to find a name for the little dog, too…

- Dick Strawser

Brahms' First: Years in the Making

This post about Brahms' 1st Symphony is a transcript of a pre-concert talk of mine from several seasons ago. For more about the composer talking about his creative process at the time he completed the symphony, check out this post at the Harrisburg Symphony Blog.

The Harrisburg Symphony, conducted by Stuart Malina, performs Brahms 1st at their next Masterworks Concerts – May 14th & 15th at the Forum. Also on the program, Brahms' Violin Concerto with concertmaster Odin Rathnam celebrating his 20th season as the orchestra's concertmaster and a little something called “Brahms Fan-Fare” by Stuart Malina who always considers himself a Brahms Fan.
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On a bright February day, Robert Schumann jumped into the Rhine, a suicide attempt that became his last public act before being taken away to an asylum. A few days later, Johannes Brahms jotted down a musical idea in his notebook, the opening of a new symphony.

In an article called “New Paths,” Schumann, a composer and writer about music, declared Johannes Brahms the heir to Beethoven, anointing him the Musical Messiah for the future of Classical Music.

Brahms, a short man with long blondish hair, boyish looks and a voice barely changed, long before he grew that famous beard, was 20.

He’d appeared on Schumann’s doorstep the previous September to play some of his piano music for him but after he’d started to play, Schumann tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Wait a moment, my wife must hear you.” And that was how Brahms met one of the greatest pianists of the day.

That month, Clara Schumann turned 34.

And so the long association with the Schumann family began, though unfortunately it was too late for Robert to teach him how to become the Musical Messiah: five months later, Schumann would be taken to the asylum where he would remain the last two years of his life. Clara, a few months away from giving birth to her eighth child, needed to increase her concert schedule to bring in much needed money, so their new friend Brahms stayed home to help raise the children, including their 9-year-old daughter Julie.

Meanwhile, that first sketch of a symphony just wouldn’t turn itself into one: he even had a dream where he was playing it as a piano concerto. The ideas for a second movement scherzo, dropped from the concerto, were later used in the German Requiem and he wrote a whole new finale in the Hungarian style. The whole process of conversion to completion into the Piano Concerto in D Minor took three years. It was not long after Schumann’s death that Brahms realized he was in love with Clara and decided this relationship had to end. Clara wrote a letter after seeing Brahms off to the train station, feeling as if she’d been to two funerals in three months.

Brahms then worked briefly with a women’s chorus in his hometown of Hamburg. When he fell in love with one of the women in the choir, he wrote a happy chorus called “Bride’s Song” but when he broke off that relationship, he wrote a companion “Grave Song” full of dire thoughts about Fate. The symphony sketch that became his 1st Piano Concerto started off with a dramatic roll on the kettledrums, but in the new “Grave Song,” it became relentlessly pounding kettledrums.

Not long after this, Brahms asked his friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim, to send him some large-sized manuscript paper because he was starting to work on a symphony again: this time, what had started out as chamber music for winds and strings was going to be turned into a symphony, but shortly afterward he changed his mind: “If in these days after Beethoven you presume to write a symphony, they’d better look entirely different!” The original manuscript called it a Symphony-Serenade before he crossed out the word “Symphony.” It became his 1st Serenade in D Major, a chance to practice his skills at writing for orchestra on something less substantial than a full-blown symphony.

Brahms was 25.

Meanwhile, Wagner and Liszt were championing the “New Music” which Brahms thought would send music into the “manure pit.” This didn’t earn him any points with contemporary composers who were still waiting to see what Schumann’s Anointed was going to produce. And so he began a third attempt at a symphony under this cloud. Meanwhile, a Viennese critic, examining the few pieces Brahms had produced so far, wrote that rather than looking back to Beethoven and Schubert (whose Unfinished Symphony hadn’t surfaced yet) – composers who’d been dead only thirty years – he was looking back to earlier centuries for inspiration from Bach (only recently rediscovered) and the Renaissance (virtually unknown to the general public). He would create something new by learning from the old. Followers of the New Music thought this silly.

Now friends again with Clara Schumann, Brahms sketched a number of chamber works one summer, continuing to work on the opening movement of a symphony “from previous sketches,” sending her a copy of the rough draft by July 1st. This is essentially the first movement of the 1st Symphony as we know it, but without the famous introduction. It was finale that was the real thorn. When Joachim heard about it, he hoped to be able to give the premiere that October. Little did he know it wouldn’t be 14 weeks but 14 years before it would be finished. There was also an F Minor String Quintet that didn’t seem just right, so he put it back in the oven.

Brahms was now 29.

He hoped to get the conductorship of the Hamburg Philharmonic. He’d just gone to Vienna when a letter reached him that in he fact he did not get the job. If he had, he might have had a use for that symphony, but still, why did it take so long to actually finish it? But in Vienna, he could walk the places were, only 35 years earlier, Beethoven had walked. When his G Minor Piano Quartet was played at the home where Mozart had composed “The Marriage of Figaro,” one of the musicians said “Here is the heir of Beethoven.”

Brahms was now 30.

Meanwhile, many things were happening: his parents separated and then his mother died, he wrote “A German Requiem” and he was turned down a second time for the conducting post in Hamburg. The String Quintet became a sonata for two pianos. Clara found him insufferable and often dis-invited him to dinners, and she’d wonder why he wrote all these dark, depressing pieces. Perhaps at 34, he felt he was too old to have his career ahead of him (at that age, Beethoven had composed his “Eroica” and Schubert was already dead 3 years). She suggested maybe he should get married: little did she know he was already in love – with her daughter, Julie.

Brahms suggested Clara should move to Vienna and perhaps spend less time concertizing – like she was doing this for fun? She needed the money and now two of her children were ill. Their friendship cooled once again. The 2-Piano Sonata which Clara said begged to be orchestrated was turned into the F Minor Piano Quintet. Then came the premiere of the German Requiem which left Clara in tears: here, she felt, was the realization of the promise her husband had seen 14 years earlier! After the performance, they quarreled and parted with more tears.

There was an old piano quartet in C-sharp Minor he’d never finished, the first one he’d started back when he was first in love with Clara; he started work on it again, changing it to that dramatic key of C Minor. And he wrote two melodies – a song better known as Brahms’ Lullaby composed for an old-girlfriend-now-married-with-her-first-child (in the accompaniment, he quotes a Viennese waltz she’d sung to him back in the days they were friends, so while she’s singing a love-song to her baby, another love-song is being sung to her). The other was scribbled down on a postcard from Switzerland, supposedly an old alp-horn tune he’d heard to which he added these words: “High on the mountain, deep in the valley, I greet you a thousand times!” This became the melody that would soar out in the horn over shimmering strings once the last movement of the C Minor Symphony succeeded in struggling through its opening turmoil, allowing the finale to unfold its great hymn.

And the melody worked its magic on Clara – they were friends again, he visited the family, began the Love-Song Waltzes for four voices and piano duet, all about young love, shy to build: Clara wondered who the young girl was that inspired these delightful tunes? Then, a few days after his 36th birthday, she told Brahms some great news – Julie was engaged to marry an Italian count! She had no idea why Brahms, struck speechless, just ran out of the house. Then it hit her who the young girl was behind the “Liebeslieder Waltzes.” No one had any idea. Brahms was devastated and the rest of the waltz-songs changed mood, now focusing on jilted love and broken vows. He wrote his bitterest piece, the “Alto Rhapsody” which he dubbed his “Bridal Song,” a grueling battle with grief and despair. He vowed he would never marry.

Settling into a new apartment where he ended up spending the remaining 24 years of his life (eventually, he would die there), his routine was now fixed: up early, strong coffee, walking, then working or loafing. The piano was the focus of this small apartment, with its huge bust of Beethoven in the corner. He worked things out in his head rather than through laborious drafts like Beethoven. He was a great believer in walking and his carpet was well-worn with his constant pacing. Friends who listened at the door to hear if he were busy would not hear much when he was – a few notes at the piano, some humming, footsteps. Brahms had said a composer’s most valuable piece of furniture was a wastebasket: when he was done with a piece, he burned all the sketches.

He toyed with the idea of writing an opera – on the fairy tale that became “The Love for Three Oranges” which Prokofiev would later use; another was about gold prospectors in California! – but he decided, like marriage, opera was something he would never try, either. In 1873, he wrote a set of variations for two pianos based on a theme Haydn had used and before he’d finished them two months later he realized they needed to be re-worked for orchestra. His next work was not a symphony but a string quartet, one he’d started working on 20 years earlier – also in the dramatic key of C Minor. He said he had written enough music for twenty quartets before he’d finished one.

Brahms was now 40.

Then the stock market crashed and Vienna was hit hard. He had success, though, with three new works – the Haydn Variations and two string quartets. Now he decided it was time to pick up the symphony... but the C Minor Piano Quartet intervened, the third time around. In it, he’d used a theme based on what Schumann called his “Clara Theme,” a musical depiction of the letters of her name. Clara never liked this first movement, finding it too dark and depressing. Brahms wrote to friends hinting it was inspired by Goethe’s “Werther,” about a man, in love with another man’s wife, who commits suicide by shooting himself with a pistol borrowed from her husband. He told a friend he was working on “highly useless pieces in order not to have to look into the stern face of a symphony.” That summer he took a vacation by the Baltic Sea and by the end of August had completed the last movement of the symphony that had first come to him 22 years earlier and whose first movement he’d completed 14 years before. Once he’d figured out what to do with that finale, it took him a few summer months to complete it.

Rather than starting with the dramatic rolling of the kettledrums as it had first started, the symphony now began with relentless fate-like treading of the drums, later incorporating into its first theme one of the rhythmic motives from Beethoven’s 5th with its “Fate-Knocks-at-the-Door” motive as it appeared in the scherzo (the triplet figure, dee-duh-duh DAAH). The final movement began out of the mists like Beethoven’s 9th, searching for a theme before landing on the hymn tune that someone told him sounded just like The Ode to Joy (“any ass can see that,” Brahms responded). What most people didn’t see was where the opening idea of that theme may have came from.

Remember Schumann’s “Clara Theme”? C - B - A - G# - A (in the key of A Minor) with the G# standing in for the R, and the B – or as the Germans called it, “H” (since “Chiara” was Italian for Clara, meaning “bright”) for the L. Schumann often crafted themes like this through a “secret alphabet.” When Brahms was in love with a girl named Agathe, he buried his love for her in his G Major String Sextet by spelling out her name in the melody (minus the T) which he answered with A-D-E, German for “farewell.” It was just a personal association, not that the listener should hear it, necessarily.

Back to the C Minor Symphony’s finale. In the searching violin not-yet-a-theme peering over the mists, he writes C - B - C - A-flat which in C Minor resolves to the G (A-flat on the piano is the same note as G-sharp which should resolve into A Minor). Now look at the “Clara Theme” above. He wouldn’t quote it outright, necessarily, but it’s characteristic of the way Brahms might alter a theme, switching notes around as it evolves. This is then followed by that great alp-horn tune he’d sent to Clara on a postcard seven years before, greeting her a thousand times. A conscious personal association? When it finally resolves to that great Beethoven-like hymn, the tune, now firmly in C Major, is C - B - C - A - G.

Perhaps in addition to having to deal with the ghost of Beethoven in his first symphony, he also needed to deal with the ghost of Clara?

Brahms was now 43. And two years later, after finishing his 2nd Symphony and the Violin Concerto, he grew his beard.

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- Dick Strawser

A Testimony to a Friendship: Brahms' Double Concerto

This weekend, the Harrisburg Symphony opens its new season with a program featuring a concerto featuring two soloists. Violinist Kurt Nikkanen and cellist Daniel Gaisford will perform the “Double Concerto” by Johannes Brahms with Stuart Malina conducting the orchestra. The concert also includes a highly-charged Romantic tone-poem by Franz Liszt and some very American romanticism represented by Howard Hanson’s Symphony No. 2, the “Romantic” Symphony as it’s usually known. You can find out more about the Hanson symphony with Stuart Malina’s podcast.

These performances are Saturday, October 4th, at 8pm and again Sunday, October 5th, at 3pm. There’s also a pre-concert talk an hour before each concert.

Both “world-class artists” as well as friends, Kurt Nikkanen has played with the orchestra in the past, coming in from New York frequently to perform and teach at the State Street Academy of Music in Harrisburg. Daniel Gaisford, the Academy’s director, lives just outside Harrisburg when he’s not off performing himself (several times this past summer, he’d tell me “I’ll get back to you after these performances in New York” or “I’ll be playing in Italy next week, so we’ll talk later”). Just two weeks after the Brahms, he’ll be playing two sonatas for unaccompanied cello written for him by Michael Hersch who will also be present for the performances on Sunday, October 19th at the Academy’s St. Lawrence Chapel. Then the following month, Nikkanen and Gaisford will join with other friends to play chamber music at the chapel on Sunday, November 16th, a program that includes a Beethoven String Trio and Robert Schumann’s Piano Quartet.
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Update: As of Thursday, October 10th, Daniel Gaisford resigned as director of the State Street Academy. The Sunday afternoon concert series, he told me, has been canceled for the season.
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This photograph of Johannes Brahms was taken in his library in 1892, when he was 59. This was about five years after he wrote the Double Concerto, the last of four concertos he composed and, as it turned out, his last completed orchestral work. Written two years after his 4th Symphony, the cool reception both works received prompted Brahms to doubt his creative powers. At the age of 57, he decided to retire from composing.

Almost forty years earlier, Robert Schumann had described Brahms’ three early piano sonatas as “veiled symphonies” and he and his wife, the pianist Clara Schumann, were soon urging the young man to take on the challenge of writing a symphony: that was the true test of genius.

But Brahms (pictured here at the age of 20 in a portrait made shortly after he'd met the Schumanns) didn’t want to “learn by doing,” and so he took the challenge quite seriously, becoming a perfectionist who destroyed all of his sketches, rough drafts and any works, completed ones as well as fragments, that he did not deem satisfactory for publication.

Whether or not it would have taken him 22 years to complete a first symphony if Schumann, as one of the leading music critics of the day, hadn’t hailed him as the Heir to Beethoven and anointed him music’s Messiah, it’s impossible to say. What he began in 1854 ended up turning itself into his D Minor Piano Concerto. Other, later attempts became the D Major Serenade, probably the F Minor Piano Quintet (eventually). At one point, he played for Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim, two friends he often turned to for advice when working on a new piece, what became most of the C Minor Symphony’s first movement but it was 14 years until he figured out what to do with the last movement.

Premiered in provincial Karlsrühe, Brahms’ 1st Symphony was well-received, even if subsequent performances were respectful more than receptive, except Munich, which was Wagner’s town, where it was downright frigid.

When it arrived in Vienna, the audience was cool but respectful. Brahms could deal with that: in time, he felt, they would come to like it. He already had in mind another symphony, one that was ready to be premiered the following year and geared more toward Viennese tastes. A success there, when the 2nd Symphony was performed in Leipzig, their attitude was that it might be okay for Vienna which likes its music lighter, but here they expected more out a symphony than just pretty melodies. If the 1st had been called “Beethoven’s Tenth,” the 2nd was dubbed “Brahms’ Pastoral.”

Perhaps he felt a renewed confidence, after meeting the Symphonic Challenge: the next year, he completed the Violin Concerto, written especially for Joseph Joachim. One critic said it was a concerto against, not for the violin. Two years after that, he produced just two small overtures – the Academic Festival and the Tragic – but his 2nd Piano Concerto (“a symphony for orchestra with piano obligato”) was ready the following year. His readily acclaimed 3rd Symphony (quickly dubbed “Brahms’ Eroica”) came two years after the piano concerto; and the 4th Symphony, two years after that.

But with the 4th, there was a new creative crisis: Brahms was concerned how audiences would react to it. If the 1st was too intellectual for the Viennese, how would they react to the 4th which proved to be even too intellectual for his intellectual friends? He was very cautious about presenting the work to the public, even wondering whether he should publish it. After all the trepidation, its premiere was received with applause after each movement and a delirious ovation at the end.

Subsequent performances on a tour of over a dozen cities proved mostly less successful but not the disaster the composer feared. Three months later, Vienna received it respectfully, though Hans Richter’s “skimpy rehearsals” had made Brahms nervous. If there were no cheers at the end, there was no demonstration from “The Wagner Club” either, and Brahms was pleased with the performance. Hanslick, his staunchest defender in the press, was more reserved than usual, though, and that bothered the composer.

If it took a while for Brahms’ 4th to find its public acclaim, the symphony received no Beethoven-like nickname, this time, though later one critic would refer to the dark ending as the opposite of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, as if it were an Ode to Gloom. For many, it could not simply be an abstract symphony about nothing more than music and form. Later, some critics felt this tragic, seemingly pessimistic ending, led the way, as if the sign of the times had been tempered from the days of Beethoven’s 9th (premiered only sixty years earlier), to the darker, and often pessimistic symphonies by Gustav Mahler.

In this atmosphere, Brahms contemplated something a close friend had said, that “no artist could surpass himself after his 50th year.” Brahms was 52 when he finished the 4th and he wondered if that was the reason behind his new-found insecurity. If his career had been overshadowed by the seemingly incompletable 1st Symphony until its premiere in 1876, that meant Brahms really had barely a decade of creative self-assurance before the doubts came rolling back again.

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In the two years between the 4th Symphony and the Double Concerto, Brahms was becoming more consciously aware of old friends. Clara Schumann was one of the most famous pianists of the day. Joseph Joachim was easily the greatest violinist the Germans had ever produced.

His ups-and-downs with his closest friends are well documented in their letters, something Brahms hated to write, could not write diplomatically when required to and which often left too much information to be supplied by the reader which frequently led to misunderstandings.

Brahms was brusque and often inconsiderate. Unaware how important concertizing was to Clara, he would write to her that if she needed money, he would gladly give her some so she could cut back on the touring to spend time with her children, not realizing performing for her was as necessary as breathing. She was livid. Trying to be humble when Joachim wanted to conduct his German Requiem at a festival dedicated to Robert Schumann’s memory, Brahms’ elliptical reply actually led Joachim to assume Brahms didn’t want the work performed there, which then led to further misunderstandings.

Over the years, his relationship with Joachim lessened after the violinist had gotten married and then became tenuous at times as the marriage began to sour. It snapped completely when she won the divorce case because of a letter Brahms had written to her supporting her side of the accusations of infidelity.

In 1886, he and Clara were essentially negotiating the return of each others letters. Clara was now 67 and in ill-health, concerned that perhaps their very personal correspondence would become fodder for a tabloid-minded society long before there were tabloids and papparazzi.

The following year, Brahms wrote to her that he had “the rather amusing idea of writing a concerto for violin and cello. If it is at all successful it might give us some fun. You can well imagine the sort of pranks one can play in such a case... I ought to have handed on the idea to someone who knows the violin better than I do...”

Flippancy aside, a typical way Brahms might use to introduce a new major work to his friends, the implication was that “someone” who knew the violin better than he did was his old friend Joseph Joachim. They had not been talking to each other for a few years, now, following a rather messy divorce during which Brahms had sided with his wife. Perhaps it would be a way they could be reconciled? That certainly seemed to be behind the piece.

But why not a 2nd Violin Concerto? He had written one the year after the 2nd Symphony especially for Joachim, a work that remains one of the “Top Two” concertos in the repertoire of today’s violinists, the other one being Beethoven’s.

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Quick: of the four most popular violin concertos being performed today, which two is Joachim most closely associated with? I just gave you the Brahms, but is the other one...

... the Beethoven Violin Concerto (premiered in 1806)
... the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto (premiered in 1845), or
... the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto (written in 1878 but premiered in Vienna in 1881)?

Curiously, the Tchaikovsky concerto was composed the same year Brahms was writing his own concerto and it would later be receive its premiere not in Russia but in Vienna. In fact, Brahms’ friend Hanslick wrote in his (in)famous review that this was “music that stinks in the ear.”

Since the Beethoven was premiered by Franz Clement 25 years before Joachim was born, it must be the Mendelssohn, right?

Though he certainly performed the work during his career, Joachim did not premiere it: that honor went to Ferdinand David for whom it was composed, the concertmaster of the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Leipzig and a teacher at the school Mendelssohn founded there, then becoming his successor after Mendelssohn’s death a few years later. So if you guessed that, you’re close, but at this point, Brahms would not be handing out any cigars.

It was actually a work that Mendelssohn conducted for Joachim’s successful debut in London. It was also the first time the work had been “popularly” received. Until then, no one was playing it regularly (if at all) but after this historic and highly acclaimed performance, the Violin Concerto by Ludwig van Beethoven entered the standard repertoire. Not exactly the premiere but Joachim was responsible for its successful launch into the world.

At that performance, by the way, Joachim was one month shy of his 13th birthday!

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Let me rephrase my question: “Why a concerto for violin AND CELLO”?

There were no real precedents in the repertoire and while Brahms was something of an antiquarian (collecting original manuscripts was a hobby of his and he edited and performed a great deal of music by composers even earlier than Bach, an interest even Clara Schumann couldn’t understand), why imitate models like the Bach Double Concerto for two violins or resurrect the old French formula of the symphonie concertante – the classical era’s answer to the Baroque concerto grosso – even excepting Mozart’s wonderful contribution for violin and viola?

Johannes Brahms, as a child, studied piano and composition. He also studied the cello, at least briefly: there’s an old story I haven’t been able to corroborate anywhere that the cello teacher absconded with the boy’s instrument. According to Jan Swafford, in his very human biography of Brahms, he played the cello well enough to manage a concerto by the Hamburg cellist, Bernhard Romberg (whose E Minor Cello Sonata was said to have been a considerable influence on Brahms’ 1st Cello Sonata in the same key, written when he was in his early-30s). When he was 18, Brahms was the pianist for a performance of a cello sonata he’d written, which like many of his earliest works, this too was subsequently destroyed.

It is interesting to mention this, hearing all those great themes Brahms composed for the cello. As someone who has a cello in his closet (quite literally), I’m thinking beyond the two cello sonatas, to the opening of the C Minor Piano Quartet’s slow movement, the song-like solo in the slow movement of the 2nd Piano Concerto or the big cello-section themes like the ones in the slow movement of the 2nd Symphony and the 2nd theme of the 4th Symphony’s opening movement.

So is it too much to infer, though I don’t think there’s anything in writing to prove it, that Brahms may have been thinking of himself as the cello to Joachim’s violin?

How does the work open? With the cello playing a long recitative-like statement, more cadenza than melody after a suggestion of what will be the main theme, answered, after a suggestion of the second theme-to-be in the winds, by the violinist, the cellist then tentatively joining in. This is musical conversation: once they have agreed to talk, the orchestra comes back in to present the main theme just like any ordinary concerto.

It’s not that personal associations aren’t unusual in his works. He is, first of all, a very private person as well as composer. But the famous use of the alp-horn theme he had sent to Clara, greeting her a thousnd times from the mountains and the valleys, not to mention the suggestion of Schumann’s old “Clara Theme” in the last movement of his 1st Symphony would be too much a coincidence for a composer as careful and architectural as Brahms.

There are other examples as well – cabalistic-like themes like one in the G Major String Sextet, carved out of notes spelling the first name of Agathe von Siebold, another of Brahms’ lost loves (he had gotten close enough to consider an engagement) which, at one point, is counterpointed with a motive A-D-E, spelling out the German word for “farewell.” It was written nostalgically six years after they parted: he had recently returned to her town and walked through the streets where they had once walked together.

In a song written for an old girl-friend, Brahms unfolded a simple tune that ran as counterpoint to an old Viennese ländler she used to sing to him when they were young and in love: so that “while Bertha was singing [her son] to sleep, a love-song is being sung to her.” Everyone knows the singer’s melody as Brahms’ Lullaby.

Perhaps the most direct use of such a personal message would be in the song Brahms had composed for Joseph and Amalie Joachim, on the birth of their son, Johannes, named after the composer. It is written for alto voice and piano with viola obligato (Amalie was an alto; Brahms a pianist; Joachim also played the viola) as if all the friends would be there together, whether playing and singing it or not. There’s also a quotation in the viola part: the old Christmas carol, “Josef lieber, Josef mein.” The composer was speaking directly to his dear old friend Joseph Joachim.

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When Brahms was still a teenager, he was the pianist for a promising young Hungarian-born violinist then living in Hamburg named Eduard Remenyi, three years older and by comparison world-wise. Not the best-matched personalities, musically they were a good team, and Brahms learned to improvise accompaniments to Remenyi’s heart-wrenching playing of Hungarian gypsy tunes. In those days, people went to smoky restaurants and dives to listen to gypsy bands much the way people in the 20th Century went to hear jazz. This Hungarian style – not really folk-music – became a very important influence on Brahms whose publisher would later earn a great deal of money from the two sets of Hungarian Dances Brahms arranged. He also included gypsy elements in the last movements of his G Minor Piano Quartet, the Violin Concerto, and the String Quintet, Op.111 - as well as the Double Concerto.

Anyway, Brahms and Remenyi decided to take a recital tour across Northern Germany, stopping off in Hannover to visit Remenyi’s former fellow-student, Joseph Joachim.

Seven years earlier, Brahms had heard Joachim play the Beethoven concerto in Hamburg and had been very impressed. When he’d played in Vienna, critic Eduard Hanslick wrote that he didn’t “play the crowd but searched deep in the music for structure and meaning,” a very different approach to the usual slap-dash virtuosity of the day.

So it was odd that, after becoming a professor at the Leipzig Conservatory at the age of 17, Joachim would go off to become the concertmaster for the orchestra Franz Liszt conducted in Weimar, where this great pianist and traveling virtuoso settled down to become a composer and conductor. It had to be more than the common factor of their Hungarian nationality. One of the functions of the Weimar orchestra, by the way, was to work as Liszt’s laboratory: he often tried out his sketches there, then would go back to revising or rewriting them. Eventually, Joachim tired of all this and in 1852 left to accept the concertmaster and soloist position open at the court of the King of Hannover.

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It was during this time, incidentally, that Franz Liszt was working on what became Les Preludes. In the 1840s, Liszt had hired composer Joachim Raff to be his all-around secretary and house-orchestrator. Liszt was not a trained composer in the old-fashioned sense and Raff was as much a guide and ghost-writer as he was as a secretary. In the mid-1840s, Liszt had decided on a series of choral works on the Four Seasons as inspired by the poetry of Lamartine. The Overture was orchestrated by Raff and no doubt tried out with the Weimar orchestra at some point. The choral works may never have materialized but the overture eventually became a symphonic poems. This was something new on the concert scene which Liszt supposedly invented, not that writing descriptive music to paint images or tell stories was new – that went back long before Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, for that matter, and there was certainly Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony – but Liszt was more interested in the philosophical essence of something literary, not mere “programmatic” story telling or scene-painting. Without getting into further detail here (this post is already long enough!), it was premiered officially in 1854, but he had been working on it (with Raff’s help) for several years. No doubt, Joachim was involved in some of the trial run-throughs before he left Weimar, trying to hide his distaste for Liszt and his music, in 1852.

Planned or not, it’s an interesting segue in the Harrisburg Symphony’s opening concert to go from Liszt’s Les Preludes to a work written 30 years later by Brahms, both with only one degree of separation: the violinist Joseph Joachim.

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When he and Brahms met, Joachim was almost 22, his birthday a few weeks away, already acknowledged as one of the leading performers of his time for almost a decade. Brahms had just turned 20 and was not even known in his home town of Hamburg except to a few fellow music afficionados. The violinist was happy to see his old friend Remenyi and intrigued by this shy boyish-looking pianist with long blonde hair and piercing blue eyes he had brought along with him as his accompanist. Well, if he’s a composer, have him play something.

And he did – there were two large-scale sonatas, a demonic little Scherzo in E-flat Minor plus several other works which never made it to the publishers.

Joachim was impressed – in fact, remembering that day fifty years later, he was “completely overwhelmed.” Having lost sympathy with the newest of new music, courtesy of Franz Liszt, Joachim was just beginning to look around for some other composer who could be such a major force in the music world. He had thought perhaps Schumann, perhaps too underrated to be the antidote to Liszt, but there were not many major composers as we think of them today, following Mendelssohn’s death a few years earlier. Listening to Brahms, he thought perhaps he had found the answer.

Already wise about the musical world, Joachim immediately began to promote his younger friend: he arranged to have him play for the King of Hannover who dubbed him in his delight “Little Beethoven.” He arranged for Remenyi and Brahms to go to in Weimar so he could play for Franz Liszt, which did not go over well. Liszt sight-read the music when Brahms was too nervous to play: when the C Major Sonata turned out not to be as compatible with him as the E-flat Minor Scherzo, he decided to play his own B Minor Sonata instead, only to notice Brahms had dozed off in the middle of it. Brahms and Remenyi ended up parting ways, the violinist staying with Liszt and Brahms going back to visit Joachim.

A few weeks before, Joachim had just gotten back from Düsseldorf where Robert and Clara Schumann lived: they were very impressed with his playing of the Beethoven concerto there and he was excited to hear Robert conduct his 4th Symphony and Clara play his Piano Concerto. So Joachim thought it a good idea to take Brahms to meet them, too. At first, Brahms was reluctant: when they had gone to Hamburg to perform a couple of years earlier – the composer tagging along on the petticoats of his famous wife and otherwise overlooked by the local critics – Schumann returned the package of music Brahms had dropped off for him at their hotel, hoping for an introduction. Not only were there no comments, the package hadn’t even been opened. So, no – Brahms had no interest in trying to meet him again.

But at noon on September 30th, 1853, Johannes Brahms stood at the front door of the Schumanns’ little house in Düsseldorf and rang the bell.

The rest is history.

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Well, almost...

Actually, the Schumanns weren’t home at the time, but their daughter told the young visitor to come back the next day an hour earlier. In a way, they were expecting he’d show up some day soon: Joachim had already been espousing “the gospel of Johannes.”

In the next few months, Brahms’ life must have been very exciting – Schumann arranged for four of his works to be published (though there were several works that weren’t). He began working on a third piano sonata (unfortunately, his last) and he spent much time with the Schumann family and with their friend Joachim who came to town in October for a concert.

The rehearsal had been a disaster, Schumann sometimes getting so engrossed in the music he stopped conducting. The night after the concert, there was a special party for Joachim in which he was given a new violin sonata written just for him by a committee of friends. Sight-reading it with Clara at the piano, he quickly guessed the composers’ identities: Albert Dietrich, a close friend and associate of Schumann’s, wrote the first movement; Schumann himself, the Intermezzo and the Finale; Brahms, the Scherzo, the only movement from the work that has survived in the repertoire (known as the “Sonatensatz” or Scherzo in C Minor). On Schumann’s suggestion, the thematic tie that binds the work together is a motive based on what Joachim called his “life motto” – Frei aber einsam, “Free but lonely” – turned into the musical pitches F, A and E. Consequently the work is known to history as “The F.A.E. Sonata.”

Schumann wrote an article about Brahms called Neue Bahnen - “New Paths” - hailing the young man as the heir to Beethoven, the anointed Messiah of music. This caused quite a stir not just in the music world, considering very few in the wider world had heard any of his music. True, Schumann had said this before about any number of young composers, none of whom ever lived up to the prophecies, like Ludwig Schunke and William Sterndale Bennet, just to name two. The “New Music” crowd around Liszt and Wagner hooted at the idea, so it was with some trepidation that Brahms went off to Leipzig to meet with his would-be publishers and be introduced to the city that was famously associated with Bach and Mendelssohn. And Liszt just happened to be in town.

Berlioz, the “spiritual father of the New German Music school,” was also in town and heard Brahms play: more impressed with him than Liszt had been, Berlioz wrote to Joachim after Brahms had played parts of his new piano sonata. “I am grateful to you for having let me make the acquaintance of this diffident, audacious young man who has into his head to make a new music. He will suffer greatly.”

While there, Brahms played his A Minor Violin Sonata (another work that has disappeared) with Ferdinand David for whom Mendelssohn wrote his violin concerto. They played chamber music and Brahms performed some of his piano music in public on one of David’s quartet concerts.

After returning home to Hamburg at Christmastime bearing copies of his first music to be seen into print, Brahms returned to Hannover at the start of the new year, running around with Joachim and a new friend, a composer and conductor (and presumably cellist), Julius Otto Grimm, the three of them forming a kind of Rat Pack to which they gave the rather Monty-Pythonesque name Das Kaffernbund or “League of Silly Asses.”

To Brahms, this kind of friendship was new and exciting. In Hamburg, he had been something of a loner and though still, basically, an introvert, he enjoyed the time spent with the Schumanns and Joachim. A chain-smoker, Brahms initiated Joachim into the world of cigars. They talked of many things, philosophy and art, and of course played lots of music.
But Joachim, like many vituosos thriving on the adulation of the crowd, needed constant reinforcement from his friends, something Brahms occasionally found unbearable. And while Joachim had a vindictive and jealous streak he found difficult to control, he wrote to his fiancee that Brahms was “egotistic and always on the lookout for something to his advantage – but at any rate he is sincere... with none of the false sentimentality with which others of his kind like to deceive themselves.”

Joachim’s fiancee did not like Brahms though that’s probably not why she declined to marry the violinist. Joachim was devastated but found strength in his motto “Frei aber einsam.”

Then the unthinkable happened, just weeks after another concert when the Schumanns came to Hannover for a program that included Schumann’s 4th Symphony with Joachim playing Robert’s Fantasy for Violin & Orchestra and Clara playing Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. A month later, Brahms and Joachim received an alarming message from Albert Dietrich, that Schumann had tried to commit suicide two days earlier, throwing himself in the Rhine. Pulled out by some men who had been there at the time, he was about to be committed to an asylum.

Brahms arrived in Düsseldorf two days later, Joachim the next day. That day, as their friend was escorted to the carriage to take him away, Clara, five month’s pregnant with her eighth child, was not allowed to see him: the children watched from an upstairs window.

The members of the Kaffernbund stayed close by with the family, helping Clara and the children through these awful months. There was also music making, including read-throughs of Brahms’ newest work, the B Major Piano Trio, with Joachim and Grimm. As months passed on to a year, Clara had to resume performing to bring in an income and Brahms stayed with the children, becoming Uncle Johannes. At one point, he taught them how to somersault; one of the Schumann daughters recalled him doing a handstand on the banister before jumping down to the floor.

Joachim had to resume his duties in Hannover, but visited often. By the end of the year, Clara made her first tour in years, playing 22 concerts in two months.

In German, people usually address each other by the “formal” pronoun “Sie,” but close friends might use the “familiar” form, “du.” Brahms and Joachim used “du” almost from the beginning. Liszt had invited his errant acolyte to use “du” but Joachim declined. In all the decades Joachim was a member of Clara Schumann’s close circle, they never used “du.”

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And so it went for years, this friendship between composer and violinist. Like any friendship, it had its ups and downs.

For his 22nd birthday, Joachim gave Brahms a copy of “The Complete Kapellmeister” by a contemporary of Bach’s, something Brahms had been looking for – curious about what a “music director” did in the days of the Baroque, he was also looking for some background information for his own situation, having been “appointed Messiah” without anyone to give him advice (Schumann being ill and the older generation all on the other side of the artistic fence).

Brahms suggested they trade and grade each others “homework assignments” in counterpoint, one of the oldest and most abstract technical exercises a composer could study but which few in the 19th Century cared much about (even Schubert, in his last days, began taking counterpoint lessons, feeling he was missing something). For the spring and summer of 1855 and off and on for several years, back and forth went their exercises, and while Joachim may have eventually realized he was not the composer he wanted to be, Brahms found much of value in this project, using some of his Palestrina-style canons in some of the choral works he was writing at the time.

While Joachim and Clara toured often (see drawing, left, made in 1853), on occasion Brahms would join them, though he found himself nervous on-stage and uncomfortable performing. Later he was able to bring in some money from concertizing. He played Beethoven’s 4th Concerto and Mozart’s D Minor Concerto (a fee for a single performance was greater than the money his publisher paid him for the Four Ballades, Op. 10, about the only work he wrote that year to survive to the publishers).

One thing they had in common was their dislike for the music of Liszt and Wagner, the “New German Music” that repudiated the past (basically, the best thing about Beethoven was, he paved the way for Wagner) and denounced as useless the “formalist” approach to abstract or pure music. As far as Brahms and Joachim were concerned, Liszt’s histrionic style and Wagner’s “Total Work of Art” were the death of music.

Earlier, Joachim had finally written to Liszt, his former mentor whose music he was increasingly less comfortable with, "I am completely out of sympathy with your music; it contradicts everything which from early youth I have taken as mental nourishment from the spirit of our great masters." And so in 1860, he and Brahms co-wrote a Manifesto of sorts against Liszt and Wagner’s progressive style and their far-reaching influence.

Unfortunately their Manifesto was leaked to the Lisztians before it had gathered more than four signatures – a rather puny manifesto – and though it did no real harm to either Brahms or Joachim, it made them look pretty ridiculous in the eyes of the new music scene. One thing it did do, unfortunately, was politicize the two styles of music. It would be unlikely, afterward, if someone of Berlioz’ stature would have spoken so warmly of someone like young Brahms’ potential stature in the world. Where Liszt had been supportive of Schumann as Schumann had been supportive of Berlioz, Liszt would never play or conduct any music by Brahms in his life. Like it or not, now, audiences began lining up behind one or the other: it was as if auditoriums across Europe were turning into Red Halls and Blue Halls...

A few years later, Joachim married one of the opera singers in Hannover, a contralto named Amalie Schneeweiss (see photo, right). Brahms was in the midst of discovering some previously unknown works of Franz Schubert’s (the drying sand was even still stuck to the ink, as if Brahms were the first person to see them in the 35 years since Schubert’s death - he scraped the sand off and kept it in a glass container on his own desk), but he wished the newlyweds the best even as he knew what the loss of his closest bachelor friend would mean to him: perhaps no longer “einsam” but also no longer “frei”...

When their first child was born – a son they named Johannes – Brahms composed for them the “Spiritual Lullaby” I’d mentioned above, with the viola part (intended for Joachim) quoting “Josef lieber, Josef mein.”

Brahms admired Amalie’s voice: on the same program that saw the premiere of A German Requiem (which then did not have the famous soprano solo movement), she sang “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth” from Handel’s Messiah and with Joachim, who was the concertmaster, “Erbarme dich” from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. In later years, Brahms would conduct performances of the “Alto Rhapsody” with her, a work associated with failed love.

Amalie had agreed to give up the operatic stage – apparently because Joachim thought it a loose lifestyle – and sang only in concerts and recitals. There were concerns that Amalie came between them, not least from Amalie herself who wrote to Clara that she wished nothing better for her husband (she called him “Jo”) than to spend time with his friends. She admitted to being “an unskilled housewife” and that Joachim didn’t find her an inspiration. Two years into the marriage and already it seemed to be in trouble.

Part of the problem was Joachim’s constant need for confirmation, as he had plagued Brahms early in their own friendship. After the birth of their second child, Amalie became ill with frequently recurring bouts of rheumatism. Joachim was always threatening to leave her.

Then in 1873, just as Brahms was turning 40, oblique remarks in one of his letters about Joachim’s plans to conduct the German Requiem at the Schumann Festival implied he would rather it not be performed; then he was upset when it wasn’t; then Joachim stuck to his guns and on it escalated. Finally, Joachim wrote to him,

“Let us be quite frank. For the last few years, whenever we have met, I have always felt that your manner towards me was not what it used to be... No doubt I have disappointed many of the hopes you set on my development and have been more indolent [than] you liked in many respects [particularly pertaining to his compositions which, by this time, he had largely abandoned]...What more natural than for me to imagine that you [now] regarded our old intimacy... as something embarrassing rather than desirable. You wanted a reassuring answer. I wonder if this is one?”

The following year, gossip reached Brahms that Joachim’s jealousy of Amalie and the men around her brought about accusations of an affair with the publisher Fritz Simrock, a friend of Brahms’. Brahms thought it was all in Joachim’s imagination.

Then three years later, toward the end of summer, Brahms wrote to Joachim that he had jotted down “a few violin passages” which actually turned out to be sketches for the first movement of a large-scale concerto! And he was asking him for advice, at least theoretically. They got together and Joachim, violin in hand, would try things out, showing him how to notate the bowing, sometimes rewriting passages to make them easier for the violinist. Sometimes Brahms accepted his changes, sometimes he ignored them.

Joachim was pressuring for a quick premiere, but Brahms got frustrated with the two middle movements he had planned. Originally, the work was to be in four movements like a symphony rather than the traditional three of a concerto. He discarded the scherzo which later found its way into the 2nd Piano Concerto (he was, after all, more comfortable writing for his own instrument than for the violin), and he said he was now writing “a wretched adagio.” As beautiful as we may find this movement, with its exquisite oboe solo, it was one reason another great violinist of the day refused to ever play the work: Pablo de Sarasate complained he could never stand silent on the stage “and listen while an oboe player plays the only tune in the Adagio”.

He and Joachim worked on the revisions through the summer of 1878 and the work was finally ready for a New Year’s Day premiere in Leipzig, Joachim unnerved by last-minute changes and Brahms more nervous than usual on the podium. In Vienna, surprisingly, it was rapturously received. When Joachim took it to Berlin, people wondered why they had to be subjected to such trash. Overall, the wider world did not much care for the work. Disappointed, Brahms took the rough draft for a second violin concerto he was already working on – and burned it!

After the concerto, Brahms wrote his first published violin sonata (he’d written at least three before) which he and Joachim then took on tour. It was rough going, at times, mostly because of Brahms’ rather cavalier attitude toward practicing.

A year later, in 1880, Joachim turned to Brahms for personal advice, thinking again of separating from his wife, Amalie. He was stunned to realize Brahms sided with his wife. Afterward, the composer wrote to her,

“Let me say first and foremost: with no word, with no thought have I ever acknowledged that your husband might be in the right... Despite a thirty-year friendship, despite all my love and admiration for Joachim, despite all our artistic interests... I perhaps hardly need to say that, even earlier than you did, I became aware of the unfortunate character-trait with which Joachim so inexcusably tortures himself and others... The simplest matter is so exaggerated, so complicated, that one scarcely knows where to begin with it and how to bring it to an end... His passionate imagination is playing a sinful and inexcusable game with the best and most holy thing fate has granted him.”

In 1884, this letter was later used in court during the inevitable divorce proceedings. Joachim sued on the grounds of adultery. Brahms had no idea she would use his letter for such a character reference, but it was the reason Amalie won the case. After this, the friendship was at an end. Even after he’d complain loudly to other friends about Brahms’ disloyalty, Joachim would then walk out on stage to perform the concerto Brahms had written for him.

The next year, Joachim wrote tentatively to Brahms telling him he thought his new 4th Symphony, the one most people thought too intellectual and old-fashioned, was his favorite. Brahms’ rather stuffy reply (“...as though one had to wait for [praise like this] for permission to enjoy one’s own work”) didn’t seem to open any possible reconciliation.

Then, in the summer of 1887, Brahms wrote to Clara that he was writing, of all things, a concerto for violin and cello. The intended cellist, Robert Hausmann (photographed, right, with Brahms in 1889), was a member of Joachim’s quartet, for whom he’d recently written his second cello sonata (well, the second one he published). By September, Joachim joined Hausmann, Brahms and Clara for some rehearsals. Uncharacteristically – since Joachim had to wait one year for his concerto and fourteen for the 1st Symphony – this concerto was ready for its premiere a month later with Brahms more comfortable on the podium.

As he told a friend after the performance, “Now I know what it is that’s been missing in my life for the past few years. It was the sound of Joachim’s violin.”

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If the dark 4th Symphony with its E Minor finale was considered tragic, the A Minor Double Concerto with its gypsy-style finale largely in the minor key did not seem quite so dark yet it failed to win much support from Brahms’ public. Clara didn’t think the work had any future, lacking the warmth and freshness of his earlier works. Another close friend found it “tedious,” a “senile production,” and he was convinced “it was all up with our Johannes.” Even Joachim was fairly cool toward the piece at first, warming up to it only after several performances.

As he had started work on a second violin concerto after what he thought would be an easily accessible work and, incidentally, had also started not one but two more symphonies after the 4th’s premiere – one far enough along to play at the piano for some friends before it, too, was consigned to the flames – Brahms had started sketching a second double concerto but then destroyed it, also. He was, if nothing else, feeling very old-fashioned: he was convinced when he died, the great stream of Classical Music - from Bach to Beethoven to Brahms - would dry up with him.

The year he wrote the Double Concerto, Brahms met a young Frenchman named Claude Debussy. A teen-aged Arnold Schoenberg was beginning to compose in Vienna – the man who “destroyed” tonality, as some like to demonize him, was more influenced by Brahms than by Wagner and Liszt, ironically. A year later, Mahler completed his 1st Symphony and Richard Strauss premiered Don Juan.

In 1890, Brahms wrote his G Major String Quintet – Joachim advised him that you’d need three cellists to cut through that wall of sound of the other string players and Brahms, characteristically, ignored him. Thinking this would be his last work, he decided to retire from composing. He wrote to his publisher that he had thrown “reams” of paper into the river, sketches and unfinished works as well as complete pieces which he deemed not good enough to entrust to the public.

Fortunately, the sound of Richard Mühlfeld’s clarinet brought him out of retirement within a year and he produced a series of chamber pieces for him – alas, no concerto – before he was diagnosed with cancer. He barely made it to Clara Schumann’s funeral in time and the loss took its toll on him. He himself died the following year, a prematurely old man at the age of 63.

Joachim was touring in England when news came that Brahms had died. To a friend he wrote,

“I often think sadly of the last pleasure it was in our power to give him... I have never heard him express his gratitude so warmly as after listening to his G Major Quintet; he seemed almost satisfied with his work. We still have his works – as an individual I counted for little with him during the last years of his life.”

But at least their friendship gave us many works we can still savor today, whether directly like the Violin Concerto or indirectly like all those pieces Brahms had asked his advice about, even if he ignored it.

And certainly the Double Concerto, which would never have come about otherwise. Every time I hear it, I hear two old friends talking over old times, conversing, arguing, perhaps waxing nostalgic (as in the slow movement) and now and then the old Kaffernbund peeking through the finale: but in general having a good time of it, as old friends might.

For a composer who was often described by his friends as well as his critics as cold and formalistic, this is a very human piece of music. A friendship like this one was a rare gift and music can only be an approximation of its value.

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Most of the material mentioned here is available in any number of sources, but much of the detail and all of the quotes can be found in Jan Swafford's Johannes Brahms: A Biography.