No. 2047 Subscription (Program C)

Born in Hamburg in northern Germany, Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) grew up in relatively humble circumstances. It was probably his father, a jobbing musician, who gave him his first music lessons. The young Johannes learnt to play the piano, cello, and horn, and later studied piano and composition with Eduard Marxsen. After leaving school, he earned his living as a pianist and conducting amateur choirs. His early breakthrough came in 1853 when he visited the Robert and Clara Schumann in Düsseldorf and played them his music. Recognizing his talent as a composer, Schumann hailed Brahms as the next great hope for German music in an essay and introduced him to a publisher. His next big success was the premiere of Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem) in Bremen in 1868 which helped establish Brahms as a composer of major significance abroad. In 1872, he took up the director of concerts of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde and settled permanently in Vienna. From then on, he could concentrate more on composition, although he continued to tour as pianist and conductor.
Brahms composed his Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major in 1881, more than twenty years after his first piano concerto in D minor which was coolly received at the premiere. By this time, he had two symphonies under his belt, and he was at the height of his creativity. The concerto is a monumental work with an added Scherzo to the normal three-movement form, which brings it “closer to the genre of symphony than any other major concerto of the 19th century,” according to one Brahms scholar. Yet the work has moments of chamber music-like intimacy, and the piano often merges into orchestral fabric rather than the piano and orchestra opposing each other. Brahms himself played the solo part at the premiere in Budapest on 9 November 1881, with Sándor Erkel conducting, and it became one of the works he performed most frequently. The work was dedicated to Marxsen, his first composition teacher.
The first movement opens with a beautiful horn call and the piano responds, leading to a cadenza-like solo. After the orchestra presents the two main themes, the piano joins in and together they weave the themes into a dramatic narrative. The D minor Scherzo, indicated Allegro appassionato, is formed of an urgent first theme and a lyrical second theme, with a new idea introduced in the D major trio section. The third movement is framed by the song of the solo cello; in between, the piano presents an intimate melody accompanied by clarinets and cellos. The Allegro grazioso finale has a bright, skipping figure for the piano as the principal rondo theme, with Hungarian-like music in between.

[Nahoko Gotoh]

It is well known that Johannes Brahms (1833–1897)’s First Symphony (premiered in 1876) took over twenty years to complete, but thereafter he was able to produce his three subsequent symphonies with relative fluency and ease, composing them within a span of eight years.
Much of the work on the Third Symphony was done between May and October of 1883 in the idyllic spa town of Wiesbaden in Germany. It was customary for Brahms to spend the summer months in the resort towns of Germany, Austria, or Switzerland, to relax, go for walks, and concentrate on composing. The symphony was completed after his return to Vienna and premiered there by Hans Richter and the Vienna Philharmonic on 2 December 1883, which was a resounding success.
Clara Schumann wrote to him enthusiastically about the symphony: “What a harmonious mood pervades the whole! All the movements seem to be of one piece, one beat of the heart, each one a jewel! From start to finish one is wrapped about with the mysterious charm of woods and forests.”
It is the most compact of Brahms’s four symphonies, and one could say that the narrative is less straightforward and less dramatic compared to his two previous symphonies. Often the tonality fluctuates between the major and minor, and unusually, the work ends pianissimo—in fact, not only the finale but all the movements in this symphony end quietly.
The first movement, Allegro con brio, opens with a rising motif F–A flat–F in the woodwind, which already suggests a major/minor ambiguity. This motif appears throughout the symphony in various guises. The main theme, launched by the violins, is thought to be a quote from a motif in the first movement of Robert Schumann’s Rhenish Symphony. This is followed by a gentle second theme which is played by the clarinet, then by violas and oboe. All these themes are elaborated in the development section with typical Brahmsian ingenuity.
The pastoral second movement proceeds as a gentle dialogue between the winds and strings. The clarinets and bassoons lead both the chorale-like opening theme and the lyrical second theme.
The third movement is perhaps the best-known part of this symphony. The melancholic melody, introduced by the cellos, appears six times on various instruments, including solo horn and oboe. Clara Schumann memorably described the movement as “a pearl, but it is a grey one, dipped in tears of woe.”
The Allegro finale takes a trajectory from F minor to F major, but it ends not in triumph like his first symphony, but in a mood of retrospection. There is plenty of drama and struggle along the way, but the coda looks back nostalgically to the opening movement and brings the work to a quiet close.

[Nahoko Gotoh]