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o
THE CHAMBER MUSIC
OF

JOHANNES BRAHMS
BY

HENRY S. DRINKER, Jr.

PHILADELPHIA
DECEMBER 1932

SOLE DISTRIBUTORS
ELKAN-VOGEL CO.
PHILADELPHIA
CONTENTS.
PAGE
Foreword 1

Sketch of Brahms' Life 3

The Man and his Music 17

Tabulation of Brahms' Music 33

Distinguishing Musical Characteristics 37

The Principal Books in English on Brahms 43

Notes on the Chamber Music 45

(In the order of their performance, in groups of three, at
the eight concerts constituting the Philadelphia Cen-
tenary Series)

Sonatas for Violin and Piano

G major, Op. 78 49
A major, Op. 100 70
D minor, Op. 108 122

Sonatas for Cello and Piano

E minor, Op. 38 81
F major, Op. 99 98

Sonatas for Clarinet and Piano

F minor, Op. 120, No. 1 61
Eb major, Op. 120, No. 2 91

Trios for Violin, Cello and Piano

B major, Op. 8 55
C major, Op. 87 77
C minor, Op. 101 120

Trio for Horn, Violin and Piano

Eb major, Op. 40 Ill

Trio for Clarinet, Cello and Piano

A minor, Op. 114 45
CONTENTS
PAGE
Quartets for Piano, Violin, Viola and Cello
G minor, Op. 25 73
A major, Op. 26 87
C minor, Op. 60 116

Quartets for Strings

C minor, Op. 51, No. 1 68
A minor, Op. 51, No. 2 96
Bb major, Op. 67 107

Quintets for Strings (2 Violas)

F major, Op. 88 84
G major, Op. Ill 92

Quintet for Piano and Strings

F minor, Op. 34 100

Quintet for Clarinet and Strings

B minor, Op. 115 127

Sextets for Strings

Bb major, Op. 18 52
G major, Op. 36 63

ILLUSTRATIONS.
Brahms at the Piano Frontispiece
Drawing by Willy Beckerath

Facing Page
Brahms and Joachim 5

Brahms as a Young Man 17

Brahms in his Later Years 19

Brahms Conducting 31
Drawings by Willy Beckerath
Brahms and Johann Strauss 38
COPYRIGHT, 1932
BY
HENRY S. DRINKER, Jr.
Philadelphia, Pa.

press OP
ALLEN, LANE & SCOTT
PHILADELPHIA, PA.
The Chamber Music of
Johannes Brahms
FOREWORD
This essay was prepared, in the form of program
notes, for the performance in Philadelphia, on
the centenary of the birth of Johannes Brahms, of
all his works of chamber music. It does not purport
to be original or exhaustive, but merely a sensible
summary of the available material, together with the
first-hand impression, on the part of an enthusiastic
amateur, of the significance of the music.
The sketch of Brahms' life and character includes
only such events as might reasonably have influenced
his music. The analysis of the principal characteristics
of his music is given with the full appreciation of the
impossibility of demonstration.
Brahms' complete works have been tabulated in
groups, so arranged as to enable those wishing to per-
form them, to see at a glance which are adapted to
the performers available.
Following the tabulation is an attempt to point
out the technical features of Brahms' music which
distinguish it from that of other composers. This has
been the most interesting part of the work. It is a
subject as to some features of which all will probably
agree. As to others, however, one may expect and
hope for a delightful and stimulating difference of
opinion among persons whose views are the most
respected.
For the benefit of those wishing to make a further
study of Brahms' life and works, a summary is given
of the principal bibliography.

[11
2 BRAHMS CHAMBER MUSIC

Finally, there is a history and brief discussion of

each of the twenty-four works, in the order of their
proposed performance in the present series. The
object of this is not to give a musical discussion or
analysis of the composition (unnecessary to one who
is familiar with it and useless to one who is not) but
rather to recreate the atmosphere in which it first

appeared, to collect the impressions of the composer's

friends and contemporaries, and to point out musical
features of especial interest or significance.
Brahms producedhis works not by ignoring what
his predecessors had accomplished, but by adopting
from them all that he believed sound and valuable,
consolidating and organizing it for his own purposes.
The precedent of the master has been followed here,
without, however, the pretence of any such addition
as that by which Brahms created music, based on
what had gone before, but nevertheless essentially his
own. All that could be found of interest in the litera-
ture on Brahms, both as to facts and to suggestions,
has been ruthlessly extracted and used in the present
volume, with and without quotation marks. Since no
credit is claimed herein for originality with regard to
anything, specific acknowledgment of each appropria-
tion is considered unnecessary.
When Brahms published the Hungarian Dances
he was careful (in spite of the fact that several of the
tunes were his very own) to do so without Opus number
and with the designation " Arranged by J. Brahms."
Again following the Master, the present essay (which
has in no sense been an Opus) has been merely "Ar-
ranged by a Philadelphia Disciple."
SKETCH OF BRAHMS' LIFE
When Johannes Brahms was born at Hamburg
on May 1833, Beethoven had been dead for
7th,
six years, Schubert for five; Mendelssohn was 24,
Schumann 23, Liszt 21, Wagner 20. Although Brahms'
early youth coincided with the height of Mendelssohn's
popularity, the latter's music had no really permanent
or important effect on that of Brahms, as did the
music of Bach and Beethoven. Nor did the music of
Schumann, except perhaps momentarily. The per-
sonality of Schumann and that of his wife Clara
(Wieck) were, however, the greatest single influence
on his career.
Brahms' ancestors " wrested a frugal sustenance
from a hostile ocean and a meagre soil." He had no
ascertainable musical heredity behind his father, who
was a capable bread and butter contra-bass player,
like hundreds of others. Although the boy's genius
showed itself at an early age (at six he had eagerly
invented his own system of musical notation) he was
not a precocious wonder-child like Mozart, nor ever
exploited as such. At seven his father took him for
piano lessons to Otto Cossel, a competent teacher,
who three years later turned him over to his own
master, Edward Marxen, probably the soundest
available musician within the feasible radius of Ham-
burg. Marxen gave him, without charge, lessons in
piano and later in composition. Johannes' progress
in both was very rapid. He was an indefatigable
worker, with an unquenchable enthusiasm for over-
[3]
4 SKETCH OF BRAHMS LIFE 7

coming difficulties. At ten, we find him playing in

public the piano part in the Beethoven quintet (Op. 16)
for piano and wind, and a Mozart piano quartet. At
fourteen he gave a concert of his own, as a virtuoso,
and played, in addition to the Beethoven Waldstein
sonata, an original " Fantasia on a favorite waltz.
The next six years were devoted to the hardest
kind of work, both at the piano and in composition,
with little school as such, but much reading of many

—
good books, bought second-hand, earning a little by
lessons and by playing at dance halls (with a volume
of poetry on the music stand), with sufficient out-
doors to build up a body which knew no fatigue,
needed but five hours of sleep (obtainable instantly
anywhere and at any hour of the day) and which
suffered no real illness until that which proved fatal
(April 3, 1897, at 64) within less than a year of its
inception,
Brahms had heard Joachim (two years his senior)
play the Beethoven concerto in Hamburg in 1848,
and had heard Schumann conduct his works there in
1850, but did not meet either of them until 1853.
During this summer, Brahms went on a concert tour
with the Hungarian violinist Remenyi, whose fame
rests on his wholly unfounded claim as the real author
of the Hungarian Dances and on the fact that it was
in the course of this tour that, when the piano at
Colle was a half-tone flat, Brahms, without the music,
transposed the Beethoven C minor piano-violin sonata
to C sharp (he later performed the same feat for
Joachim with the Kreutzer sonata). Remenyi was
MEETING WITH JOACHIM AND SCHUMANN 5

also the sole (and most unreliable) authority for the

picturesque story of Brahms having gone to sleep
while Liszt was playing to the two young musicians
and his other guests at Weimar.
At Hanover Remenyi took Brahms to call on

Joachim (a former fellow-student in Vienna) who was

so charmed with Brahms' personality and so im-
pressed with the originality and power of the songs
and sonatas which the unassuming blond boy played
to him with such fire and freedom, that he invited
Brahms to visit him in Gottingen at the close of the
concert tour. There, during the following two months,
was formed the deepest friendship Brahms had with
any man. In spite of a coolness after Brahms took
the part of Joachim's wife at the time of their divorce,
Joachim was always unbounded in his respect and
love for his friend's works and did more than anyone
to make them known in Europe, as conductor, as
soloist in the violin concerto which was written for
and dedicated to him, as a partner with Brahms in
sonata tours, and as leader of the famous Joachim
quartet. For years the two young musicians ex-
changed each day by mail an exercise in counterpoint
or other form of composition, on pain of a cash fine
used by the other to buy books. For Joachim's
musical opinion, Brahms had also the highest respect,
and submitted many of his principal works to him
for criticism and suggestion before publication. " There
is more in J," he wrote Frau Schumann in 1855, "than

in all of us young people put together."

Brahms left Joachim and Gottingen in the middle
of August, on foot, armed with Joachim's cards intro-
6 SKETCH OF BRAHMS* LIFE

during musical friends along the Rhine and with a

letter to Robert Schumann at Diisseldorf, at whose
home he arrived late in September.Both Schumann
and his wife Clara (one of the greatest woman pianists
and musicians of all time) were overwhelmed by the
genius of his sonatas (" veiled symphonies", Schumann
called them) and by his playing of them. Also they
immediately fell in love with him and he with them.
They made him, as it were, a member of the family,
and the following month, after Brahms had returned
to Hanover with Joachim, Schumann published in
the leading musical journal of Germany his famous
article entitled "New Paths", in which he hailed
Brahms as "him that should come, bringing master-
ship, not in process of development, but springing
forth, like Minerva, fully armed from the head of
Jove". Citing piano-sonatas, songs, quartets for
strings, "every one so different from
violin sonatas
the rest that each seemed to flow from a separate
source" he predicted even greater things when this
"highest genius" will "sink his magic staff in masses
of chorus and orchestra."
The modern psychologist will shudder at the
danger to this modest, ingenuous boy, with his long
fair hair and his still high-pitched voice, when thus
catapulted from utter obscurity into the veriest
spot-light of the musical stage. "Before he had well
begun to climb the steep hill of reputation, he found
himself transported to its summit." But this boy's
character was too strong, his independence too assured
and his artistic ideals too unassailable to be harmed
or upset even by premature success. "Neither severe
EARLY WORKS 7

criticism nor unbounded approval turned him from

the straight road to the goal he had before him, nor
hindered him from striving as he went to conquer all

his besetting faults/

Schumann's article probably made, for the time
at least, as many sceptics as friends. Liszt wrote to
Bulow (who 25 years later became Brahms' loudest
and, next to Joachim and Clara Schumann, his most
effective supporter —
he invented the phrases "The
Three Bs" and "The Tenth Symphony") that the
article was costing him no sleep, as Schumann had
said much the same thing fifteen years before of the
genius of Sterndale Bennett.
Brahms wrote Schumann that the public praise
thus bestowed "obliges me above all to take the
greatest care in the selection of what is to be pub-
lished." In spite of the flattering pub-
offers of the
lishers who "offered me all the money which
a I as
poor young man had much difficulty in earning", he
gave them at the time only the two piano sonatas
Op. 1 and 2, the songs Op. 3, and the scherzo Op. 4,
and did not include "either of my trios", a string
quartet in B flat, a duet for piano and cello, numerous
"sarabandes, gavottes and gigues," or the "fantasia
on a popular waltz". A violin sonata in A minor was
to be Op. 5, but was lost by Liszt and Remenyi.
During the next twelve months he published the F
minor piano sonata Op. 5, the songs Op. 6 and 7, and
the B major trio, Op. 8, and then nothing more for
six years except the Schumann variations Op. 9 and
the Ballades for piano Op. 10, devoting himself wholly
to study of the masters and to incessant practice in
S SKETCH OF BRAHMS' LIFE

every form of musical gymnastics, including canons

and fugues by the score, in every conceivable form.
His bedroom was at one time papered with his songs
and with discarded string quartets. "Better", he
said "that I should take them down and burn them
than another."
This remarkable poise and self-restraint is one of
his most important characteristics. His ability to
criticize his own work impersonally was marred only
by his false notion that the excellence of a musical
phrase or idea may best be tested by whether or not
it returns of itself to the composer's mind a second
time after being dismissed when first conceived. This
notion, in which he persisted to the end, doubtless led
Brahms to lose forever many subtle ideas which Bee-
thoven would have noted down, and also, perhaps, to
develop some which might better have been replaced
by those thus forgotten.
Brahms' personal relations with Robert Schu-
mann, though so important a factor in his career and
development, were short-lived. Within five months
Schumann's mental malady brought on an attempted
suicide, after which he was placed in a private asylum,
where he died two years later. During almost all this
period, Brahms practically lived at the Schumann
house, managing the household and caring for the
children during the concert tours which Frau Schu-
mann was forced to undertake to support her family,
and comforting and strengthening her during her brief
home comings. The relation which developed between
them is extraordinary and anomalous. She was
fourteen years his senior, the mother of seven young
CLARA SCHUMANN 9

children, and the wife and later the widow of his

beloved master, benefactor and friend. No one can
read their beautiful letters to each other without being
certain both that this was no platonic love, no merely
maternal or filial affection, and in spite of this that
their relation was very noble and beautiful. Frau
Schumann, without abating any of her devotion to
her husband, was swept away by this impetuous
young demi-god, whose genius she almost worshipped.
Brahms had for her musicianship the deepest respect
and for her personality an adoration which effectively
walled him off from the normal love and marriage that
otherwise might have been his. Apparently there came
a time when he concluded that his life's work would go
on better if he tore himself from this relationship, and he
did so, though it left a scar in his soul that never healed.
After this he had several rather mild affairs
(not to mention Julie Schumann, who was probably
a mere overtone of her mother) but he never went
on with them, either because at the time he did not
consider himself in a condition to marry, or, perhaps,
because he dreaded being "guided" through life.
He did not want to be guided nor to be too much
sympathized with. While he fully appreciated the
—
charm of women "only women do everything quickly
and well at the same time", he wrote Clara Schumann
—
when 21 and while he craved the close companion-
ship which only marriage and children could bring,
he was always unwilling to risk the sacrifice of his
independence and deliberately chose to be "free
though lonely."
From 1857 to 1859, Brahms spent his early
10 SKETCH OF BRAHMS' LIFE

winters at Detmold, where he was Director of the

Choral Society for the local Prince, and had, besides,
the small orchestra to work with, as well as much
chamber-music. There and at Hamburg during this
period and the three following years, he finished the
two serenades (Op. 11 and 16), the D minor piano
concerto (Op. 15), the B flat sextet (Op. 18), and the
two piano quartets (Op. 25 and 26), as well as several
works for womens' voices written for his " Ladies
Chorus" at Hamburg. This " Ladies Chorus" was
one of the happiest events of his life.
The very hostile reception of the Concerto at the
initial performance in Leipsic in January, 1859, did
not in the least shake his confidence, either in the
composition or in his ultimate success.
Brahms' public recognition as a great composer
really began with his first pilgrimage to Vienna, where,
in September of 1862, he went with his two piano
quartets, his new piano variations (Op. 21, 23 and 24),
the two serenades, and particularly the B flat sextet.

His determination to take this trip followed his deep

chagrin at being passed over for conductor of the
Orchestra and Choral Society at his native city Ham-
burg, which he much coveted, and denial of which he
did not quite forgive even when given the freedom of
the City twenty-seven years later. From 1862 on,
his reputation steadily grew until, beginning with the
performance of the Requiem all over Germany in
1868-9, he was recognized by all but a few scoffers as
the leader of living composers of absolute music.
After the notable performance of the Requiem
in the Bremen Cathedral, Clara Schumann, who,
RELATIONS WITH WAGNER 11

with all Brahms' nearest friends, had come for the

occasion, wrote in her diary:

"GoodFriday, April 10th, 1868. The Req-

uiem has taken hold of me as no sacred music
ever did before. As I saw Johannes standing
there, baton in hand, I could not help thinking
of my dear Robert's prophecy, 'Let him but only
grasp the magic wand and work with orchestra
and chorus/ which is fulfilled today.'

It was not with Brahms' assent or approval that

he was hailed by the anti- Wagner faction as their
champion, in the controversy which raged during the
last half of the 19th Century. Brahms was never
actively anti-Wagner, but merely pro-Brahms. He
was always most scrupulous in refraining from any-
thing which might be interpreted as hostile to Wagner,
or as belittling Wagner's music, and never stooped to
reply or to pay any attention to the many venomous
attacks which were launched at him by Wagner, who
referred to him as the " wooden Johannes" and per-
mitted the Bayreuther Blatter to call him the " Eunuch
of Music " Indeed, Brahms' complacent dignity seemed
.

to infuriate Wagner the more. Brahms sincerely

respected Wagner as a musician, realized fully his
tremendous influence on the music of his time, was
intimately familiar with his scores, and frequently
attended performances of Wagner's later works in
Vienna. Recognizing that there was room in the
artistic world both for him and for Wagner, he did
not believe in Wagner's theory of the music-drama,
or in the possibility of continuous music which would
continue to be music. While Brahms fully appreciated
12 SKETCH OF BRAHMS' LIFE

the function of music to supplement an emotional

state, as in a love-song, a requiem, a battle song or
a song of triumph, and occasionally put in a bit of
realism (like the church-bells in Maria's Kirchgang,
Op. 22, or the nightingale in No. 1 of Op. 92) he did
not believe it possible to make a musical phrase
represent a physical fact, or a character or a phase
of one.
Nor did he really like Wagner's music, though
he did his best to understand and to appreciate it.
In spite of the efforts of Specht and Widmann to
make us believe that he did, a letter to Clara Schu-
mann after a performance of the Meistersinger, and
one from Joachim to the latter's wife after he and
Brahms had been to hear Rheingold, would seem to
give us the truth:

"I am not," Brahms writes (in answer to

Frau Schumann's request for a candid opinion
of the Meistersinger "not as to an anti-Wagner-
—
ite") "enthusiastic myself either about this work
or about Wagner in general. But I listen to it
—
as attentively as possible and as often as I can
stand it. It is certainly a subject that lends
itself to discussion. All the same, I am glad that
I have not got to say all I think quite clearly
and loudly, etc. etc."
"The Rheingold", Joachim writes to Amalie,
"did not teach me anything new about Wagner;
it is really almost boring with its eternal mystery
and elaboration. Even Brahms was forced to
agree with me, although he likes to pose as an
admirer of Wagner."
The nearest Brahms came to drama with music
was Rinaldo, which is not one of his great works.
HIS CARE IN REVISING 13

For a long time he searched, or let himself believe

that he was searching, in vain for a suitable operatic
text. We may perhaps be thankful that he was un-
able to find one with which he was satisfied, since
this, coupled with his comparatively mild success as
a pianist and conductor, allowed him to concentrate
all his interest, energy and power on the production

of absolute music.
In the winter of 1863-4, as conductor of the
Vienna Singakademie, and during the three seasons
of 1872-1875, as " Artistic Director' of the Vienna
'

Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Brahms occupied his

final regular positions as conductor. In the fall of
1871 he moved permanently to Vienna, where for his
last twenty-five years the genial, care-free people,
typified by the waltzes of Johann Strauss in which
Brahms never ceased to —
delight , furnished the
environment to supplement his bleak northern heredity.
The greater part of his important compositions were
completed during his long summer " vacations' spent '

in the country. "The few notes which I write during

the winter" he once told Heuberger, "are of absolutely
no importance." At Lichtenthal, near Clara Schu-
mann, from 1864 to 1872, at Portschach (1877-1880),
Murzuzschlag in Styria (1884-1885), Thun (1886-
1888), Ischl (1880, 1882, 1889-1896) and other beauti-
ful places for single seasons, working at his desk in the
morning, walks in the woods and fields during the
afternoon, the evenings with his many friends, music
and talk. His winters were largely taken up with
concert tours at which he conducted his works with
various orchestras and choruses. (Joachim says that
14 SKETCH OF BRAHMS' LIFE

when he came out to bow to the audience, his action

was like that of a swimmer who comes to the surface
and shakes the water from his hair). He frequently
played the piano part of his chamber music both in
public and at the homes of his friends.
One year was much like another, except for the
astounding variety of the works produced, each of
which, however, was the result of much thought and
often of repeated revision. The first two string
quartets (Op. 51) were published in 1873, after (as he
told Widmann) twenty previous attempts at this form
had been completed and destroyed as unsatisfactory.
The First Symphony (Op. 68) was first performed in
November, 1876, although the beginning of the allegro
from the first movement is quoted by Clara Schumann
in a letter to Joachim dated July 1, 1862, telling of
Johannes " growing Symphony"; the body of the last
movement dates back to the early fifties. The well
known theme in C major, given out by the French
horn in the introduction to the last movement, and
by some critics traced to the Westminster chimes, was
sent by Brahms to Frau Schumann from Switzerland
on a post card for her birthday, September 13, 1868,
with the words "Thus blew the shepherds horn today"
and to go with the music:
"Hoch auf m Berg, tief im Thai,
Gruss ich dich viel tausend-mal!"

Although in his early years a remarkable pianist,

in later years Brahms apparently became careless in
his technique. Clara tells in her diary how, on one
occasion, she and Joachim exchanged horrified glances
HONORS IN THE LATER YEARS 15

at his performance of the Schumann E flat piano

quartet,and Ferdinand Schumann relates how his
grandmother protested to the family at his perform-
ance of the clarinet sonatas in public. In her diary
we also find the following amusing entries:

(May 24, 1854) "It is not easy to play with

Brahms [four hands]. He plays too arbitrarily and
cares nothing for a crochet more or less."
(December 29, 1882) "The pity is that
Brahms plays more and more abominably, it is —
now nothing but thump, bang and scrabble."

Despite these outbursts (she always was outraged

when
at her idol's occasional lapses from perfection),
Brahms was in the right mood and had a thoroughly
sympathetic and intelligent audience, he could do
things with the piano possible only for a great master
of the instrument. Indeed, his instrumentation started
from the piano and worked toward the other instru-
ments. We may wish to have been at Hanover one
summer evening, when Brahms and Joachim played
the three violin sonatas for the King and Queen, or
to have heard from his own hands "the confidential
Brahms of the chamber music" at Frau Schumann's
house in Frankfurt, when he brought Joachim and
Hausmann and Muhlfeld to play to her his latest trio
or sonata.
Except for frequent vacation trips to Italy, where
he loved the sunny country, the easy going people and
the works of art, he could never be induced to journey
far from home. He refused the offered degree from
Cambridge University because of the trip and the
16 SKETCH OF BRAHMS' LIFE

formalities involved. Apparently he never crossed the

French border, and not even for a moment considered
a tour in the United States, in spite of the early recog-
nition here of his works, chiefly through the efforts of
William Mason, (who had met him at Liszt's house in
Weimar in 1853) and those of his intimate friend
Henschel, the first conductor of the Boston Orchestra.
Everywhere that he went, however, he was universally
recognized and respected, despite the carpings of the
"New German' clique, who aimed to create poetry
'

and painting in tones instead of making music. In-

deed, the last fifteen years of his life were as replete
with honors as any artist could desire. "You are
honored," Clara Schumann wrote in 1894, "in every
land, and it goes on and on. What a magnificent feel-
ing it must be for you." Typical of his relations with
the world was his status at Meiningen where after his
introduction in 1881 by Bulow to the music loving
Duke, he was a frequent guest, royally entertained,
and where the fine orchestra and chorus, first under
Bulow and then Fritz Steinbach, were always at his
disposal to try his new works.
At the three day music festival in Meiningen in
October, 1895, works by Bach, Beethoven and Brahms
only were heard. Brahms, as Joachim wrote Clara
Schumann, "was honored as one of the Immortals."
"He is indeed to be envied and not the least because
he can say that he has not falsified the prophecies of
his noble predecessor among our masters."
;

:>:fe

iilSS;W
THE MAN AND HIS MUSIC

In appearance Brahms was a typical Teuton.

His straight sandy hair came nearly down to his
shoulders; his light blue eyes, softened by fair eye-
lashes "were wonderfully keen and bright with now
and then a roguish twinkle in them, and yet at times
of almost childlike tenderness.' It was not until
'

1878 that he permanently grew a beard. (He fooled

all his friends on his first temporary appearance with

it in 1866, introducing himself as " Kappellmeister

Muller from Brunswick".) Although careless in dress,
regarding comfort solely and convention not at all,
his linen was always spotlessly clean. When his
trousers were too long for comfort, he cut them off
with the scissors above his shoetops; on a cold day,
he wore three pair, one over the other. Black coffee
and strong cigars were his two inseparables. His
figure was rather short and square (tending later to
stoutness), with a broad chest and herculean shoulders,
a healthy, ruddy complexion indicative of out-doors, a
thick and protruding though genial underlip, and a
powerful head, which he threw back energetically
when playing. "In his countenance/' says Widmann,
"there lay the promise of victory, the radiating cheer-
mind revelling in the exercise of its power".
fulness of a
"His mind," said Joachim of him at 21, "is capable
of grasping the sublimest as well as the tenderest con-
ceptions". "It did not, however, require the tragically
sublime to move him deeply; pure beauty, if ever sa
simply expressed, could do this."
[17]
18 PRINCIPAL TRAITS OF BRAHMS* CHARACTER

The dominating trait in Brahms' character was

the utter purity and singleness of purpose with which
he pursued his artistic ideals. Although certain from
the beginning that public approval would eventually
come, and although often irritated at its absence, the
recognition that he looked for was not of the greatness
of Brahms, but of the music which he knew himself
capable of producing. "He will not" wrote Joachim
in 1854, "make the smallest sacrifice of his intellectual
inclinations". No approval thus secured would have
in the least satisfied him.
If thus relentlessly to pursue a constantly mount-
ing artistic ideal, impelled by a noble passion for
perfection, is Brahms was supremely ego-
egotism,
tistic. As Robert Schumann wrote of him to Joachim,
however, after his first visit, "although always on the
lookout for something to his own advantage, * * *
anything he does seize is only used to help him in
his efforts to become a great artist —
that is saying
much, when one compares him with others."
It is, of course, apparent from his letters and
from the accounts of his behaviour by his contem-
poraries, that he very often allowed his own purity
of purpose, his abhorrence of all that smacked of
sham, his obsession for independence, and his delight
in squelching pomposity, to make him unjustly
oblivious or even cruelly scornful of the motives and
merits of many worthy people. "His ruggedness",
says Eugenie Schumann in her Memoirs, "was in a
perpetual state of defense against suspected attacks
by others on his independence and the privacy of
his existence." "He simply could not endure people",
SIMPLE —PURE —SHY —STUBBORN —MORBID 19

says Heuberger "who showed that they were running

after him/' Much of his apparent brusqueness and
roughness of manner was, however, due merely to
his constitutional want of presence of mind in trifling
matters and to the kind of stubborn shyness which
hides deep feeling behind a wholly inappropriate
rebuff or jest. At heart he was as pure and simple
as the children and animals whom he loved and who
loved him; without envy or arrogance, and free from
all taint of the meaner emotions. "Pure as a diamond,
soft as snow", Joachim said of him. While in his
later years he allowed his admirers to turn him into
a social tryant, he would have none around him who
were merely lion-hunters, but only those who had
for him and for whom he entertained a real regard.
"He had to the last the power of attracting the abiding
love of loyal friends/

In 1858 Brahms wrote to Clara Schumann:

"All of you, particularly you, think me dif-
ferent from what I am. am
never, or very
I
seldom, in the least bit pleased with myself. I
never feel quite happy, but fluctuate between
complacency and depression.
In his later years he said to his friend, Rudolf
von der Leyen:
"Those who meet me in company where I
seem contented and ready to jest with others,
must think me cheerful; to you, I need hardly
say that within myself I never laugh."

Specht thinks that this was the result of his rela-

tions with "Klara," "the only woman whom I ever
really loved". It would seem more likely that it fol-
20 CHARACTERISTIC LETTER TO FRAU SCHUMANN

lowed from his ingrowing nature, which would never

allow him freely to open his sore heart to anyone. He
seemed at times to take a morbid delight in hurting
those whom he loved best. The demon in him he
loosened against the very persons in whose affection
he felt the most secure. Eugenie Schumann tells how
she and her sisters used to suffer at the way he used
frequently and deliberately to wound the feelings of
their mother, whose great heart could never under-
stand this."I am sure", says Eugenie, "that Brahms
suffered more than he made others suffer by his faults."
He was almost always the one, however, to make the
first move and Frau Schumann's
to a reconciliation,
big warm soul was always ready to meet him more
than half-way. Strange it is that his music did not
seem to give him a sufficient outlet to effect serenity.
In the later years, perhaps it did.
Brahms' truly kindly and very lovable self, as
well as his courage and independence and his faith in
the inherent goodness of things are all epitomized in
a letter which he wrote Frau Schumann on her post-
ponement, (because of an accident to her hand at the
Tiergarten) of a visit to him at Vienna:
" Vienna,
March 6, 1865.
•'Dearest Clara

"I send as big a sigh as that to begin with!

"I half expected it, although I have been
spending all these days getting my room tidy,
LETTER TO FRAU SCHUMANN 21

and trying to make everything nice I had —

ordered new coffee-cups, had the plate cleaned
and bought fire-works! preserves! in short had
done all that impatience and loving expectation
could do The lateness of the season is the chief
thing which makes me say yes to your decision.
"I have at once cancelled the engagements
and countermanded the rooms, but I cannot so
quickly and easily cancel my own hopes.
" Above all things, I hope that you will take
the matter, as a whole and in detail, not in the
spirit befitting a Christian who has to regard all
crosses great and small as luxury, but as becomes
a human being who (like yourself) has always done
her duty, and who has a right to expect some-
—
thing from Providence and who, after all, did
not lay out the Tiergarten, and is in no wise
responsible for this misfortune.
"I know that it is easy to preach, but you
must not let your heart be weighed down by the
—
cares of this world and as to the other you have
no need to be anxious
"I should be sincerely glad to hear that you
had simply drawn a thick line through this winter
in your book of receipts, that you do not allow
any little blue devils to argue, and that you think
of bracing yourself with all sorts of edifying things,
such as philosophy. The world is round and it
must turn; what God does is well done; consider
the lilies, etc., or better still, do not think at all,
for things cannot be altered, and a wise man re-
pents of nothing. And so the word is simply
'
forward'; keep your head erect and let none but
beautiful and happy thoughts find a home in it,
as befits a 'splendid specimen of humanity' " * * *
"You see everything so warmly with such
beautiful serenity, first, like a reflection of your-
self; and then, with the same serenity, you give
unto each his due . .
22 PURITY OF ARTISTIC PURPOSE

Brahms' purity of artistic purpose is reflected

throughout his music. From the thundering opening
of the C major Sonata (Op. 1) through the last of the
Vier Ernste Gesange (Op. 121), there is not a note
designed merely to please the audience, without con-
tributing to the expression or development of the
musical idea. Brahms never " showed off". His is
the rugged plain-speaking which in art, as in individ-
uals, is so often misunderstood. He never stooped to
tickle the public ear with amiable babbling. "I have"
he wrote to Clara Schumann "a perfect terror of all
that smacks of Liszt." (This despite his expressed
conviction that Liszt was the greatest pianist of
them all).

He cared little for that rapid passing from color

to color that constitutes so much of the charm of
modern music. His aversion to everything that
fascinates by merely external or transient attraction
eliminated from his music all that is trite and common-
place. That part of the public which is accustomed
to having its artistic food specially prepared and
predigested has therefore considered his music "ob-
scure", whereas it is merely difficult to grasp quickly,
"Obscurity" implies either a vagueness of idea or a
lack of skill in expressing it, whereas the failure to
understand Brahms at first hearing results from
unfamiliarity with his idiom and from the fact that
his musical ideas are so weighty and often so complex
that they cannot be expressed in language of infantile
simplicity. In 1799 a Vienna critic wrote of the three
Beethoven Sonatas, Op. 10:
SELF-RELIANCE OF HIS MUSIC 23

"Mr. van Beethoven goes his own path,

and a dreary, eccentric and tiresome path it is,
learning, learning, and nothing but learning, but
not a bit of nature or melody".

Brahms' music is wholly self-reliant. Its strength

lies in the importance of the musical ideas themselves,
and in the soundness of their relation to one another,
and not in a startling method of presenting them, or
in any relation between them and non-musical ideas.
His music is architectural rather than pictorial. Those
persons will never understand or like Brahms who
require labels, — —
and sub-titles for everything,
titles

and who lean always on the imagination of others.

While Brahms fully understood the proper function
of music to supplement an emotional state, and used
music in this way with supreme skill and understanding
in his songs and choral works, his absolute music is
music and nothing else. The learned German bio-
graphers who labor to discover in his orchestral,
chamber and piano works hidden allusions to events
in his life not only have wasted their time but have
misled many of their readers. Thus Kalbeck's theory
that the opening of the D Minor Concerto describes
poor half-crazed Schumann leaping off the Rhine
bridge at Dusseldorf, is too absurd for discussion.
This Concerto is merely the music which burst from
Brahms at the age of twenty-three, when he was
overflowing with physical and mental vigor, teeming
with musical ideas, and boiling with emotional turmoil
as a result of the catastrophe to his beloved friend
and of his adoration of "dearest Klara."
24 NOT PROGRAMME MUSIC

Almost equally unconvincing are some of the

theories of Niemann and Specht as to certain cryptic
allusions to his various mild love affairs. For Brahms,
art was far too sacred a matter to permit any foolish
attempt at story telling. The Clarinet trio (1891,
aet. 58) does not, as Specht asserts, " sing but of love
alone/ nor is the Clarinet quintet, as Miss May and
'

Niemann would have us believe a "retrospect" filled

with "resignation" and "loving regret" that the
"evening is not far away when no man can work".
It is merely the music that Brahms was interested in
writing after he had heard Muhlfeld, a "stupendous
fellow", play the clarinet, and realized the possibilities
of the instrument in combination with strings. These
critics forget that Brahms was much more interested
in music than in any woman or event or person, in-
cluding himself. Nor do they apparently realize how
the sacred frenzy of creation (which Specht describes
so vividly pp. 306-7) will transcend the unimportant
circumstances which may have started it. Brahms
himself told Henschel that in his young days "the best
songs came into my head while brushing my shoes
before dawn". While it is interesting to know, from

his statement to Dietrich, that the opening theme of

the Horn Trio occurred to him as he emerged into the
sunlight from the wooded heights above Baden, this
theme is not meant at all to describe sunshine or fir
trees or anything tangible, but is merely the musical
idea to which that environment happened to contri-
bute, and which was developed and perfected at his
desk at home. The same idea might just as well have
followed welcome news that a sick friend was on the
OVERANALYSIS BY NIEMANN AND SPECHT 25

way to recovery, a pleasant word from a beautiful

girl, or a satisfactory breakfast.
The German Requiem was much more than a
mere lament Brahms' beloved old mother,
for A
large part of was undoubtedly written during the
it

months following her death in February, 1865, and

while the 5th number was for her, the sketches dated
from 1861, and the second movement, the Funeral
March, was adapted from the third movement (in
C Minor) of an unpublished Symphony written in
1854 and then turned into an unpublished piece for
two pianos.
The utter futility of attempting to attribute to
Brahms' absolute music a meaning related to external
events or even to specific human emotions, is demon-
strated by parallelling the analyses by Niemann and
Specht of the last part of the F Minor Piano Quintet:
26 FINALE OF F MINOR QUINTET

NIEMANN SPEGHT
The " sinister wrestling
and sombre piano quintet"
(115) " mighty and wrath-
Jul" * * * " whose dark-
ness is lightened only by
the melancholy and yet in-
wardly steadfast andante"
(118). "Born of defiant
melancholy (215) it be-
longs to the gloomiest and
greatest music Brahms has
ever written" (216)
The finale * * * in spite The introduction to the
of the minor key * * * is finale * * * leads to a
thoroughly contented and rondo which takes its ease
jovial, inclined to all sorts and yet seems to find no
of amusing little rhythmi- comfort. Restless semi-
cal tricks; and altogether quavers in thirds sue ceeded
,

sportively disposed. by quavers,pulsate through

it, the whole is relentlessly

whipped onward by synco-

pation; the curiously song-
less, exclamatory second
subject, with its jerking
up-beat brings no ray of
light into the movement;
The coda * * * goes The extensive coda
laughing by till it is finally where the themes, dis-
concentrated still more solved into a more and
drastically by means of more precipitate triplet
syncopations. Yet all this motion, chase each other
does not succeed in check- in the manner of a stretto,
ing its joyful mood; and, dashes toward the dark un-
in the concluding lines, it known. The composer's
takes its leave by breaking heart must have been deso-
off abruptly as though late indeed when he wrote
with bright ringing laughter. this study in black (217)
The end of the piano quin- "Painfully born of the
tet is as spacious and serene composer's soul" (273)
as its opening is grave and with its " atmosphere of ex-
full of pathos (289). alted joylessness." (276).
BRAHMS' SELF-RESTRAINT 27

While it is often interesting for one intelligent

listener to describe to another the picture, story or
other tangible impression which a piece of absolute
music suggests to him, recognizing that that suggested
by the same music to another may be quite different,
it is wholly another thing thus complacently to as-

sume that the composer had this particular program

in mind, or anything like it.

Another distinguishing quality of Brahms' music

which has often been misinterpreted
is self-restraint,

as lack of spontaneity. It is true that Brahms never

tears passion to tatters as does Tschaikowsky, nor
indulges in an emotional orgy like Tristan, but this
does not indicate either lack of spontaneity or that
"the craftsman has overshadowed the artist". Much
ofBrahms' music is as spontaneous as Schubert ("How
lovely" in the Requiem, for instance), as inevitable as
Beethoven

"Es klang so alt und war so neu,

Wie Vogelsang in sussen Mai."
Simplicity in art is of two kinds, inherent sim-
plicity, like that of the child or the spring-song of
the thrush, and simplicity by elimination. Homer,
Giotto, Haydn are of the first type, while Shakespeare,
Michelangelo, Rodin and Brahms are of the second.
The first requires genius, the second both genius, con-
summate art and self-restraint. The simplicity of
much ofBrahms' music is appreciated only after re-
peated hearing when one can realize how much has
been said with so few notes or phrases, and how much
28 HIS MUSIC ESSENTIALLY POLYPHONIC

superfluity has been left out, as with a penstroke in

a Rembrandt drawing, or in the last four lines of the
Sonnet on Chapman's Homer. Folk-songs, which were
Brahms' constant joy and inspiration, are of this second
type, constitutingwhat is left after the discard of the
unfit and non-essential through many generations.
Brahms' music is, as a whole, more compact in form
than that of any other composer.

Another reason why Brahms' music is not easily

understood, even by the elect, is that its strength often
lies not so much in the beauty of one idea as in the
relation of several ideas to one another. No aesthetic
satisfaction can exceed a joy such as that experienced
on the two beautiful themes (like
realization that
those in the first of the D minor violin
movement
sonata or in the adagio of the Horn Trio, or in the
first and last movements of the B flat string quartet)

which, when first heard seem wholly self-sufficient,

later are brought together to constitute, in combina-
tion, an new musical idea. Those who have
entirely
intelligently been through this experience will never
again decry counterpoint, in the hands of a genius,
as a dry and unemotional scientific instrument.
It is this quality in Brahms' music, the presence
of so many interesting musical ideas at once, —the
richness of his linings, —that makes it both difficult

to grasp at first, but of enduring interest. There is

no other music which, as a whole, will stand two-piano
arrangement for four or eight hands as will that of
Brahms. Every player has something important to
say on every page. Let any pianist who thinks him-
STRENGTH IN THE RELATION OF IDEAS 29

self entirely familiar with the piano quintet, or with

any of the three piano quartets, try the two-piano
arrangement, and he will at once find beauties, from
the string parts, which he never knew were there.
Wagner made it comparatively easy to follow his
polyphony, first —
by labelling his motifs to recognize
them is a game
sort of with many Wagnerites, entirely
apart from the music, —
and also by repeating them so
many times, though with marvellous variety, that they
cannot fail to be recognized.
The very prevalence, in our time, of the craze
for features, for one tangible idea which can be grasped
and held on to, makes it more difficult for the public
to understand music whose strength lies not so much
in any one feature as in the combination of many.
Brahms was not a great innovator, in spite of
the fact that no composer began with such strength,
originality and daring assertiveness as are found in
the Piano Sonatas, the E flat Minor Scherzo and
the B Major Trio. (In 1853 Berlioz wrote to thank
Joachim for introducing to him "this diffident, auda-
cious young man who has taken into his head to make
a new music")- Brahms began, however, not by
repudiating everything that had gone before, but by
recognizing all that was sound in what his predeces-
sors had discovered and developed. Even in his early
works "the impetuosity of the Minnesinger in him
is allied to the formative organizing power of the

great cathedral builder".

Although Brahms drew freely, from all available
and the method of expression, the
sources, for style —
depth and polyphony of Bach, the serenity of Haydn,
30 THE PROPER FUNCTION OF FORM

the grace of Mozart, the power of Beethoven, the

spontaneity of Schubert and the romance of Schu-
—
mann, he copied or imitated none of them, any-
more than Shakespeare copied Virgil or Boccaccio.
"He was enabled", however, "by the tireless training
to which he subjected his fertile and many-sided genius,
to couch romantic feeling in classic form", and to
discover "how the rugged melodic outlines, the bold
harmonic progressions and the large-spanned phrases
of modern musical thought, could be organized and
brought into that unity in variety which is called
beauty". "Recognizing the wayward beauties of ro-
manticism", he studied and discovered how to "make
them ancillary to that order and fair proportion which
is the soul of music". All of his works have both
balance and unity.
While Brahms thus became a supreme master of
form, he never (some of his critics to the contrary
notwithstanding) used form as an end in itself, but
only as a means of organizing his teeming ideas into
an artistic unit. The disregard of form in art is usually
the result either of laziness or of the lack of sufficient
mentality and application to master it. Like anarchy
it results only in chaos. "Those who make the most
diligent search for new forms in music or for new
structural possibilities, are usually precisely those in
whom the fountain of actual invention runs most
slowly". Brahms' counterpoint rarely "contains a
note which does not strike the ear as the best possible
melodic step in the best possible harmony".
Joachim put it tersely in his address at the Mein-
ingen ceremony after Brahms' death:
i

x<^

-
THE WEALTH OF HIS COMPOSITIONS 31

"For him who dominates all its resources,

form is no binding fetter, but a an incentive
spur,
to new free designs that are preeminently his own."

In 1853, Robert Schumann, who instantly recog-

him the future achievement
nized that this boy had in
of all that he himself had been striving for, wrote thus
of the "young eagle" to Joachim:
"Johannes is the true apostle, and he will
write Revelations the secret of which many
Pharisees will still be unable to unravel even
centuries later."

More and more, as his idiom becomes familiar,

the greatness and beauty of Brahms' music is receiving
continually wider recognition. Of no other composer,
unless it be Bach, can it be said that his works were
at no previous date more popular than they are today.
Brahms never has been nor will be a mere temporary
enthusiasm. With the public, as with individuals, he
is rarely loved at first sight, but gradually more and

more as he is thoroughly known and studied. Those

who still do not enjoy him may reflect on what a wise
critic wrote at the first hearing of Beethoven's Fifth
Symphony :

felt that there was a door that was closed

"I
to mebut that behind that door mighty things
were happening."

Klaus Groth, the poet of the Regenlied, thus

vividly describe the process by which so much of
Brahms' music, which at first seems obscure, becomes
clear on better acquaintance :
32 IMPORTANCE OF THE LESSER KNOWN WORKS

"At first it seems as if I were wandering

through a wilderness. Nothing is recognizable.
Then I find that I am actually on a small foot-
path. Finally, to myamazement, I discover that
it isreally a glorious new highway leading into
the distant land of poetry.'

Comparatively few people realize the great wealth

and variety of Brahms' contribution to enduring music.
While the four symphonies and the Haydn variations
are now all found on the printed fist receiving the high
votes for the request programs, while the violin
concerto and the two piano concertos are in every
repertoire,and while the other orchestral works (the
double concerto,the two overtures and the two
serenades) are gradually becoming known, many of
the choral works, much of the chamber and piano
music, hosts of the solo songs, and practically all of
the vocal duets, quartets and motets for four, six and
eight voices, are wholly unknown except to a few
enthusiasts. Persons who should be wise enough to
know tell us that certain of the latter are "abstruse",

"dull" and interesting only to the technician. The

same was said fifty years ago by critics, equally wise,
of the violin concerto, of the fourth symphony, the
D Minor Concerto and the F Minor Quintet. May
not the modern critics be as wrong as their predeces-
sors, and may it not be well worth while to give more
attention to these little known works, in the hope and
expectation that, unless they were worthy of him,
Brahms would never have left them for us?
TABULATION OF BRAHMS' MUSIC
Brahms' works comprise:
Orchestral: The four Symphonies (Op. 68, 73, 90, 98)
Haydn Variations (Op. 56) ; Two Serenades (Op.
11, 16) ; Two Overtures (Academic Festival, Op. 80,
Tragic, Op. 81); Two Piano Concertos (D minor
Op. 15, B flat major, op. 83); Violin Concerto
(Op. 77); Double Concerto for Violin and Cello
(Op. 102).
Mixed Chorus with Orchestra: German Requiem (Op.
45); Schicksalslied (Op. 54); Triumphlied
eight parts (Op. 55); Nanie (Op. 82); Gesang
der Parzen — six parts, two alto, two bass (Op. 89)
Begrabnisgesang, five parts, two bass (Op. 13,
wind instruments only).
Mixed Chorus with Piano: (all above are arranged
with piano) Geistliches Lied (Op. 30, organ); 3
songs (six parts, Op. 42 piano ad lib); Tafellied
(six parts, Op. 93b); 14 German folk-songs (no
Op. number).
Mixed Chorus a capella: 7 Marienlieder (Op. 22) ; Two
motets (six parts, 2 alto, 2 bass, Op. 29); Seven
choral songs (2 alto 2 bass, Op. 62) ; Two motets
(four numbers, two of which have two alto and
two bass, Op. 74); six songs and Romances (Op.
93a); five songs (three with two alto and two
bass, one with two bass, one four part, Op. 104)
Fest und Gedenkspruche (eight parts, Op. 109);
three motets (four and eight parts, Op. 110).
[33]
34 TABULATION OF BRAHMS* MUSIC

Mens Chorus and Orchestra: (piano arrangement)

Rinaldo, Op. 50, (tenor solo); Alto Rhapsodie,
Op. 53 (alto solo).
Mens Chorus a capella: Five Songs (Op. 41).
Womens Chorus and Orchestra: (piano arrangement)
—
Ave Maria four parts (Op. 12); Four songs
(Op. 17 three parts, with two horns and harp).
Schubert's Ellens zweiter Gesang (three parts)
with four horns and two bassoons (arranged by-
Brahms).
Womens Chorus with Piano: Psalm XIII —three parts,
organ (Op. 27); twelve Songs and Romances
four parts, piano ad lib (Op. 44).
Womens Chorus a capella: Three Sacred Choruses,
four and six parts (Op. 37); Thirteen Canons,
three, four and six parts (Op. 113).
52 Solo Vocal Quartets with piano: Op. 31, 64, 92,
112; Op. 52 (Liebeslieder), Op. 65 (Neue Liebs-
lieder), Op. 103, (Gypsy Songs).
SI Vocal Duets with piano: Op. 20, three for soprano
and alto; Op. 28, four for alto and baritone; Op.
61, four for soprano and alto; Op. 66, five for
soprano and alto; Op. 75, four for "two voices"
(alto and tenor, soprano and alto, soprano and
tenor, two sopranos); Op. 84, five for "one or
two voices"; Op. 52, Nos. 3 and 14, tenor and
bass; Nos. 4 and 13, soprano and alto; Op. 65,
No. 4, tenor and bass, No. 13, soprano and alto;
accompaniments, from figured bass, to Handel
duets for women's voices, (no Op. number).
195 Songs (published in four volumes for high and for
low voice) for solo voice with piano (16 for low
TABULATION OF BRAHMS' MUSIC 35

voice, Op. 86, 94, 105; four for bass, Op. 121;
two songs for alto with viola obligato, Op. 91;
also eight songs in the Liebeslieder Series, Op. 52
and 65, for specific voices; 205 songs in all; also
six books containing German folk-songs and
fourteen children's folk-songs, with original piano
accompaniment.
Chamber Music with Piano: (published in miniature
bound volume); Three violin sonatas (Op. 78,
100, 108); two cello sonatas (Op. 38, 99); two
clarinet sonatas (Op. 120, Nos. 1 and 2); three
trios with violin and cello (Op. 8, original and
revised version; Op. 87, Op. 101); Trio with
violin and french horn, Op. 40; Trio with clarinet
and cello, Op. 114; three piano quartets (Op. 25,
26 and 60); piano quintet, Op. 34; scherzo from
early violin sonata (C Minor).
Chamber Music without piano: (published in miniature
bound volume); Three string quartets (Op. 51
Nos. 1 and 2; Op. 67); two string quintets (two
violas, Op. 88 and 111); two string sextets (Op. 18
and 36); quintet for clarinet and string quartet
(Op. 115).
Piano Music for two hands: (published in two volumes
except Op. 35); Three sonatas, (Op. 1, 2 and 5);
Scherzo, Op. 4; five sets of variations (Op. 9,
Op. 21, Nos. 1 and 2, Op, 24, Op. 35); 35 other
piano pieces (5 Ballades, 18 Intermezzi, 7 Ca-
priccios, 3 Rhapsodies, 1 Romance Op. 10, 76, 79,
116, 117, 118, and 119; Gavotte of Gluck, (with-
out Op. number), 5 Studies and 51 exercises
without Op. numbers.
36 TABULATION OF BRAHMS* MUSIC

Piano Music for jour hands: 10 variations on Schumann

theme (Op. 23), 16 waltzes (Op. 39); 33 Liebes-
lieder waltzes (Op. 52a and 65a), 21 Hungarian
Dances (without Op. number).
Two Pianos: Sonata (Op. 34a), Haydn variations
(Op. 56a).
Organ: 11 Chorale Preludes (Op. 122); Fugue in
A flat minor (without Op. number); Chorale
Prelude and fugue "0 Traurigkeit" (without
Op. number); Fugues in A minor and G minor
(without Op. number)*

Brahms himself made the following additional

arrangements of certain of the above works:
Piano score with words. —Op. 12, 13, 17, 29, 42,
44, 45, 50, 53, 54, 55, 82, 109, 110.
Piano solo. Op. — 39, Hungarian dances.
Piano duet— Op. 11, 15, 16, 18, 25, 26, 36, 45,
51, 55, 67, 68, 73, 80, 81, 88, 90, 98, 111.
Two —Op.
pianos, four hands. 15, 68, 73, 83, 90, 98.
Violin and piano. —Op. 120, Nos. and 1 2.

Solo voicewith piano. — Op. 103, Nos. 1-7, 11.

Orchestra. —Hungarian dances Nos. 1, 3, 10.

Practically all the chamber-music, except the

sonatas, can be had in excellent arrangements (not,
however, by Brahms) for two pianos, four hands, and
the symphonies, overtures and serenades for two
pianos, eight hands.
The clarinet quintet has been arranged as a
sonata for violin and piano; the two sextets for piano,
violin and cello, and the two string quartets, Op. 51,
for piano duet, violin and cello.
DISTINGUISHING MUSICAL
CHARACTERISTICS
Throughout Brahms' music there occur certain
characteristic methods of expression his visiting —
cards —which, while always unique with him,
not
yet occur in his works so frequently and in such
an individual way, as to make it possible for one
familiar with his idiom to recognize it as his.
Perhaps the most prevalent is his use of cross-
rhythms, much more startling in his day than to the
modern world accustomed to jazz. Particularly char-
acteristic are his cross-rhythms in slow time, three
half-notes against four quarters, as in the first move-
ment of the First Serenade, Op. 11, or four half-notes
in 6/4 time, as in the 13th Psalm for Women's Chorus
(Op. 27); or the more frequently occurring three-
quarters against two, or against four eighths, as in
movement of the Third Symphony, the first
the last
movement of the Fourth, the first movement of the
F major quintet (Op. 88) (second theme), or of the
A minor quartet (Op. 51, No. 2), and of the Clarinet
Trio (22nd and 23rd bars). These slow triplet figures
are uniquely Brahms. Practically every work con-
tains a passage where he leaps suddenly out of the
three rhythm into two; see, for example, the Scherzo
of the Horn Trio, Op. 40, and in the third movement
of the F Major Cello Sonata, Op. 99. Often he
brings subtle rhythmic variation by introducing in
triplet rhythm a figure which is essentially two-four
or four-four, as in the piano passage just before the
repeat in the last movement of the Horn Trio, in the
[37]
38 BRAHMS* "VISITING CARDS"

8th, 9th and 10th bars of the first movement of the

B flat quartet, or in the second bar of the C major
Intermezzo, Op. 119. A most striking example of his
mixed rhythms found in the beginning of the second
is

movement of the clarinet quintet (Op. 115) where the

five instruments play in five different rhythms at the
same time.
It is interesting to know from Kalbeck, that
neither Brahms, "the man of rhythm par excellence",
nor his friend Johann Strauss, the "waltz king" could
hold the beat in dancing.
Many of Brahms' most characteristic melodies are
based on successive notes of a common chord. Familiar
examples are the andante of the violin concerto, the
second theme (piano) of the Third Piano Quartet (C
minor, Op. 60), the Sapphische Ode, the trios in the
Scherzos of the F minor piano quintet (Op. 34) and
the C major piano trio (Op. 87), and the opening theme
of the Clarinet Trio. Frequently his melodies are
made by omitting one of the members of the triad,
usually the first or fifth, Min-
as in Feldeinsamkeit,
nelied, the allegro of the First Symphony, or the A
minor string quartet (Op. 51, No. 2), the second theme
of the E minor cello sonata (Op. 38), and the second
theme in the last movement of the A major Piano
Quartet (Op. 26). This fondness for deleted arpeggios
is believed to be what really gives Kalbeck, Specht
and Niemann the material for their labored attempts
to find Brahms' motto F A F (frei aber froh) in his
works. It is true that Joachim in his young days
adopted the motto FAE (frei aber einsam) which he
told Schumann signified "I am not engaged to be
THIRDS AND SIXTHS 39

married", and wrote a little piece based on these notes.

It may
be that the unimportant opening piano accom-
paniment of the Second Ballade of Op. 10 announced
the motto (although F sharp, A, F sharp), but to
attempt to find it in the D minor concerto, or a com-
bination of F A F and F A E in the opening of the
A minor quartet (dedicated not to Joachim but to
Billroth) or to blame on such a trivial idea the noble
opening of the Third Symphony (the A flat in the
middle is pronounced ASS in German) is believed to
be merely conjectural, and wholly inconsistent with
his reverence for his art, which, with him, was far
too holy to permit the indulgence in any personal whim.
Brahms had a special fondness for successive
thirds, sixths, and tenths, both for the piano, cf. the
opening piano passage in the early D minor concerto,
Op. 15, the andante of the Quintet, Op. 34, in the
second theme of the Second Symphony (letter K),
and for strings, cf. the second theme of the A major
Serenade, Op. 16, a very characteristic Brahms pass-
age, and the allegretto in the G minor piano quartet,
Op. 25. His interest in sixths and thirds and his
realization of the importance of their smooth execution
in playing his piano music, was perhaps what led him
to arrange the Chopin Etude in F minor as a study
in sixths and thirds.
Akin to the above is Brahms' habit of making a
melody or a connecting passage in descending inter-
vals of a third, sometimes with another voice a tenth
below, of which the andante of the early F Minor
Piano Sonata is a typical example. Other instances
of this rather unique Brahms trait are the piano
40 BRAHMS' "VISITING CARDS"

passage just before the last return of the principal

theme in the first movement of the D Minor Violin
Sonata (Op. 108), the similar passage preceding the
return of the theme in the C Major Intermezzo (Op.
119), and the piano passage in the middle of the second
of the Four Serious Songs (Op. 121).
A characteristic Brahms musical idiom is his
dove-tailing of the voices to fill the bar. While this
is a frequent melodic device with other composers,

the different voices alternating with one another in

stating the theme, with Brahms, (as sometimes with
Beethoven) it is preeminently a rhythmic rather than
a melodic feature. Illustrative are the two bars just
before the entry of the second subject in the first
movement of the clarinet quintet, the piano passage
at the second statement of the principal theme in
the C major trio (Op. 87), and the similar passage
in G minor about half way through the first movement
of the E flat clarinet sonata; see also the G minor
Ballade for piano, Op. 118.
An example of the method by which Brahms
added the rich romantic ornament to the classic
structure and foundation, is in his treatment of se-
quences, not only in his descending suspended sev-
enths, as in the piano part in the trio of the Scherzo
in the F minor Quintet, in the C major intermezzo
for piano, Op. 119, the passage near the end of the
sixth movement of the Requiem, and at the end of
No. 4 (Fragen) of the Songs for Women's Chorus
Op. 44 (which we can, of course, find in Bach and
Veracini, though not so pungent); but more strik-
ingly where, in the course of the sequence, he modu-
DELIBERATE SPONTANEITY 41

lates momentarily from one key to that of the note

next above, as in the theme of the Andante of the
C Major Trio or in the 9th, 10th and 11th bars of
D Major
the Andante of the Piano Quintet, or the rich
variation in theAndante of the B flat Sextet, or the
passage near the end of the G Major String Quintet.
All great composers have, of course, understood
the necessity and charm of contrast, but have achieved
it in different ways. Brahms' use of contrast is no-
where better illustrated than in the passages by which,
at the end of his development sections, he returns to
the principal theme. Sometimes he does this by a
bold modulation (as in the Andante of the Second
Symphony) from a remote key (last movement of
same), or by rhythmic uncertainty immediately suc-
ceeding a very marked rhythm (as in the Andante of
the Fourth Symphony). Still more individual are

the instances where he deliberately creates a seem-

ingly unsolvable tangle, rhythmically, harmonically
and melodically, which, as if by magic, suddenly
smoothes itself into the serenity of the principal
theme. An example of this deliberate spontaneity is
the passage, already cited, at the end of the long
pedal point on A in the first movement of the D
minor violin sonata, and the descending fantasia-like
duet between the clarinet and cello in the first move-
ment of the Clarinet Quintet, immediately preceding
the return to the simple principal theme in Brahms'
favorite thirds.
Every now and then, Brahms indulges in a sort
of orgy of throwing things in every direction, —
a kind
of musical pillow fight. There is a glorious page of
42 DISTINGUISHING MUSICAL CHARACTERISTICS

this kind in the first movement of the Clarinet Quintet,

another near the end of the first movement of the
Fourth Symphony, and another in the last movement
of the B major Trio (Op. 8).
A number of additional features have been empha-
sized in Brahms' music, such as his use of the harsh
chord of the sixth instead of the tonic, his comparative
avoidance of chromatic progressions, his use, particu-
larly in his later works, of piano arpeggios of successive
diminished sevenths. These can hardly, it is believed,
be called individual Brahms, any more than can his
superb use of pedal points, or his subtle accompani-
ments consisting of the theme in canon or in augmen-
tation, diminution or inversion.
Additional examples of Brahms' " visiting cards"
in the chamber music will be pointed out in the course
of the following analysis of the different works.
THE PRINCIPAL BOOKS IN ENGLISH
ON BRAHMS
(Niemann gives complete Bibliography to 1927)

There are now in English a number of excellent

biographies of Brahms, each of which contains a more
or less elaborate analysis of his complete works, and
all ofwhich have been drawn on without compunction
in the present essay.The monumental and meticulous
treatise by Kalbeck has not yet been translated.
The sanest and most understanding book on
Brahms is believed to be that by Fuller-Mai tland,
which, unfortunately, is out of print. Miss May
gives more detail of his life and contains some charm-
ing personal recollections, she having been his piano
pupil for several months in 1871 at Lichtenthal, near
Baden-Baden. In the discussion of the music she
occasionally gets over-sentimental but not so oppres-
sively as Specht, who was intimate with Brahms in
the later years and for that reason apparently be-
lieved that he could divine exactly what Brahms had
in mind in composing each Opus, although he does
not claim that Brahms ever confided this to him.
Specht's description of Brahms' later environment and
friendsis most interesting and thoroughly worth while.

Niemann's book separates the life from the dis-

cussion of the works. The latter is convenient and
the analyses are learned, but not very instructive
except to an expert, nor as convincing as those in
Professor Tovey's splendid article in Cobbett's Cyclo-
pedic Survey of Chamber Music, which contains much
the most enlightening suggestions as to the manner
of performing the different works. Friedlander gives a
[43]
44 brahms' bibliography on English

history and analysis one and

of each of the songs for
two voices, like that here attempted for the chamber
music. No singer of Brahms can afford to be with-
out it.

Pulver is for the most part a mere succession of

carefully verified dates, and is apparently devoid of
any interest in or real understanding of the music.
Of the Horn "The Horn Trio is perhaps
Trio, he says,
one of the finest compositions employing this intru-
ment in a chamber work." Colles is short and con-
tains some very understanding thoughts on the music.
Erb's little book is mainly quotations from the Reminis-
cences of Dietrich, Widmann, Henschel and Eugenie
Schumann, all of which are now available in English.
These Reminiscences, with the letters to and from the
Schumanns (two volumes) (most of Brahms' to Frau
Schumann he got back from her, with tears, in 1886,
and threw them in the Rhine), the letters to and from
Joachim and the Herzogenbergs (all translated) give
a more correct and vivid idea of the man and his
musical ideals than any biography. Daniel Gregory
Mason's chapter* on Brahms in his small volume
"From Grieg to Brahms" is masterly in extracting
the essence of what Brahms did for music. An
interesting recent character study is that by Paul
Krummeich, of the Music Faculty of the University
of Pennsylvania, in the April, 1932, number of the
General Magazine of the University.
* My —
indebtedness to this chapter, particularly for the
passages which I have quoted in the first half of page 30, and
for the quotation from Thoreau on page 129, —
deserves more
specific acknowledgment than that implied from the disclaimer
in my Foreword.
NOTES ON THE CHAMBER MUSIC
(In the order of their proposed performance in the Philadelphia Centenary
Series)

TRIO IN A MINOR, FOR PIANO, CLARINET AND CELLO, OP. 114

In 1881, Brahms had been introduced by Bulow

(conductor at Meiningen, and after the first Symphony
one of Brahms' staunchest supporters) to the music-
loving Duke Georg and his consort, Baroness von
Heldburg, after which he was often a welcome and
happy visitor at the palace, where a regal suite was
always at his disposal and he was allowed for the
most part to do about as he pleased, in return for
which he cheerfully donned for dinner the much
despised full-dress suit.
Preceding the season of 1890-91 he went through
a period of depression and discouragement. To a
friend he wrote "I have tormented myself to no
purpose lately and till now I never had to do so at
all; things always came easily to me." In March,
1891, he paid a visit to Meiningen, the Duke having
invited as one of the party, at Brahms' request, his
friend Widmann, who, in his Reminiscences, gives a
charming account of Brahms' genial and happy status,
not only with the fine musicians of the Court Orchestra,
but also with the " exalted personages" of the Court
set, before whom Brahms never felt or showed the
slightest embarrassment. During this visit Brahms
became intensely interested in the clarinet, through
hearing the Court clarinetist, Richard Miihlfeld
(originally a violinist, who had taught himself the
clarinet). On March 17th he wrote to Frau Schumann
at Frankfort telling her of a performance of "the

[45]
46 CLARINET TRIO

very fine F minor Concerto (by Weber) for the

Clarinet". "It is impossible/' he says, "to play the
clarinet better than Herr Miihlfeld does here." "He
is absolutely the best I know".(Brahms used whim-
sically to introduce him as "Fraulein von Miihlfeld,
meine prima donna")
At Brahms' request, Miihlfeld gave him a private
recital, playing him one piece after another and dis-
cussing his instrument. There resulted, during the
next May and June at Ischl, the Clarinet Trio and
Quintet.
These two works were firstperformed from manu-
script at a private concert at Meiningen on Novem-
ber 24, 1891, and in public in Berlin on December 12,
where they were received (especially the quintet) with
tremendous enthusiasm. At this concert, Joachim
broke his rule of thirty years standing to permit no
instruments other than strings at his quartet per-
formances in Berlin. On November 25th, Brahms,
from Meiningen, wrote Simrock of the plans for the
Berlin concert, where he proposed, with "Klavier und
Klarinette," to invade "das keusche Heiligtum,"
whereby "das Joachimsche Streichquartett leider
durch mich seine Jungfernschaft verliert". Later in
the winter Miihlfeld came to London for performances
of the two works, which were given there with great
success in March. In 1895 Miss May heard Miihlfeld
and Hausmann play this Trio, with Brahms at the
piano, and Joachim turning the pages.
Fritz Steinbach told Donald Tovey that Brahms
had originally intended the opening theme of this
Trio for that of a Fifth Symphony.
CLARINET TRIO 47

In an interesting magazine article published in

1897, Ferdinand Schumann, Clara's grandson, tells us
that Brahms considered the timbre of the clarinet
better suited to that of the piano than that of stringed
instruments.
This Trio is little known and its beauties are, it

is believed, much underestimated. Miss May calls

it "one of the least convincing of his works". Colles
says that it sounds like a study for the instrument.
Fuller-Maitland (the most ardent Brahman of them
all) characterizes the theme of the Andantino (with
the opening theme of the E flat clarinet sonata) as
the two really "commonplace" melodies in
only
Brahms. Niemann, although praising the slow move-
ment, says that the Trio is outshone by the radiance
of the Quintet.
Specht alone has a good word for it, but considers
that "it sings of love alone."
Although as a whole doubtless ranking below the
Quintet, it is by no means " inferior." There are those,
too, who "prefer Brahms' lean to the fat of others."
The Adagio is a deeply beautiful movement, the
opening reminding one of that in the slow movement
of the D minor violin sonata. The eighth bar, where
the cello comes up to take the theme, is one of the
lovely spots one never tires of hearing. Later, in the
piano part, there comes a striking example of Brahms'
rich modulated sequence. The Andantino (like the
Allegretto in the F Minor Clarinet Sonata) must not
be taken so seriously. It does not "sing of love" or
of anything else important. It is merely a nice tune,
in a sort of Greater Tschaikowsky vein, giving the
48 CLARINET TRIO

clarinet a chance to show off all his pretty tricks,

which Brahms develops in so interesting a way as to
make it fresh each time it is played, and to which he
appends a little extra eleven bar coda which is a
veritable gem, even for Brahms, each note an essential
part in the musical scheme. Except for the Adagio,
the Trio is not nearly as beautiful with the viola sub-
stituted for the clarinet.
The last movement is full of startling and most
interesting rhythmic changes and contains one of his
characteristic themes descending in intervals of a
third, here for sixteen successive notes.
Let the study this Trio until they are
critics first
sure they understand by which time they may
it all,

share Joachim's revised estimate. In preparation for

the first London performance he played the clarinet
part on the viola, before Muhlfeld's arrival, so as to
accustom Miss Davies and Piatti to the work, after
which he wrote Brahms: "I like the piece better and
better."
VIOLIN SONATA G MAJOR 49

SONATA IN G MAJOR FOB PIANO AND VIOLIN, OP. 78

This Sonata, while perhaps not as "popular" as

the Amajor, or as great as the D
minor, is probably
the most beloved of the three; certainly it was by
Brahms' three musical intimates, Joachim, Clara Schu-
mann and Elizabet von Herzogenberg. It is typical
of his serene maturity, in the quiet summer mood of
the clarinet quintet, with none of the "storm and
stress" and bottled-up energy characteristic of such
works as the D minor concerto or the piano quintet.
Although the first violin sonata which Brahms
published, it was the fourth which he completed.
The first (in A minor) was finished before October,
1853, when he wrote Joachim that "Dr. Schumann
suggests" that he publish it as Op. 5. This A minor
sonata was apparently lent to Liszt to play with
Remenyi after the visit at Weimar in August, 1853,
and lost between them. In 1872, Wasielewski showed
Brahms' intimate friend Dietrich the violin part of a
violin sonata, which the latter immediately recognized
as in Brahms' handwriting and believed to belong to
this lost sonata. We may hope that the whole will
still be found. Two other violin sonatas were destroyed
by him as unsatisfactory.
After the G major sonata was introduced to the
public in early 1880 (on a concert tour by Brahms
and Joachim through the Austrian provinces), Joachim
played it wherever he went, with the result that it
brought Brahms more new friends than perhaps any
of his other works. Its effect on both Clara Schumann
and Elizabet von Herzogenberg was to rouse deep
emotion. Elizabet's husband quotes the opening;
50 VIOLIN SONATA G MAJOR

phrase in his first letter to Brahms after her death.

Billroth wrote that "if were played as we hear it
it

with our inner ear, we should be unable to restrain

our tears." After receiving the manuscript, Clara
Schumann wrote to Brahms:
"I must send a line to tell you how deeply
excited I am over your sonata. It came today;
of course I at once played it through, and at the
end could not help bursting into tears of joy
over it. After the first delicate charming move-
ment and the second, you can imagine my rap-
ture, when in the third I once more found my
passionately loved melody with the delightful
quaver rhythm."

Frau Schumann here refers to the fact that both

the principal theme of the last movement and its

piano obligato are taken bodily from the songs

Regenlied and Nachklang, Op. 59, Nos. 3 and 4.
On June 16, 1890, then in her seventy-second
year, she sent a postcard to Brahms at Ischl:

"Joachim was here on the 8th (Robert's

eightieth birthday) and for two days we had a
lot of music. We played the Regenlieder Sonata
again and I revelled in it once more. I always
wish that the last movement might accompany
me in my journey from here to the next world.
Farewell, I hope you are well and happy. Ever
yours, CI. Sch."

The opening of the first movement, (after the 8th

bar) contains typical illustrations, both of Brahms'
cross-rhythms and of his use of arpeggios in the
VIOLIN SONATA G MAJOR 51

piano part, not as a mere brilliant accompaniment,

but as an essential and integral part of the musical
conception.
This sonata is one of several chamber works in
which Brahms introduces the principal theme of the
first movement in the coda of the last (see also the

B flat string quartet, Op. 67, and the clarinet quintet,

Op. 115). Here, indeed, the principal theme of the
finale is a transformation of that with which the
sonata begins. The final coda, which is one of the
most precious bits of Brahms, summarizes the whole
—
work with unbelievable simplicity, simplicity by
elimination in its most perfect form.
52 SEXTET IN B FLAT

SEXTET IN B FLAT MAJOR FOB STBINGS, OP. 18

This comparatively early work (1860) is one of

the few major compositions by Brahms which was
universally liked at first hearing. It dates from his
stay in Hamburg completion of his three
(after the
seasons in Detmold), one of the happiest periods of
his life, the period of the Ladies' Choir in which he
so delighted.
Specht ascribes the choice of the key B flat
(which is B in German, B natural being called H) to
his then enthusiasm, Bertha Porubszky (she afterward
married Arthur Faber and they became two of his
most faithful friends; it was for her, at the birth of
her first child, that he wrote the Wiegenlied). It is
fortunate that in German K,
" Clara" is spelled with a
whereby Specht is deprived of the chance to make
Frau Schumann responsible for all Brahms' gloomy C
minor moods. She first refers to the B flat Sextet in
a letter to Joachim on October 11, 1860, nine days
before its initial performance by Joachim and his
colleagues at Hanover. On November 27th they
played it at the Conservatoire at Leipsic, where Frau
Schumann had gone to hear his A
major Serenade,
She records that it was "exquisitely played and roused
decided enthusiasm."
This Sextet, more than any other work, endeared
Brahms to the Viennese. He took it there (with the
two piano quartets, Op. 25 and 26) on his first visit
in September, 1862, and at its first performance by
the Hellmesberger party, all the skeptical critics were
converted.
SEXTET IN B FLAT 53

Neimann's musical analysis of this Sextet (pp.

295-298) is particularly interesting, pointing out the
homophonic structure as compared with the later and
more romantic Sextet in G major, and also tracing
the classic influence of the Schubert Forellen Quintet
and of the Beethoven Septet and Pastoral Symphony.
The opening theme one of the lovely diatonic
is

melodies, which makes one

simple as a folk-song,
wonder how Brahms can be thought unmelodious.
Originally the movement began at the present bar
eleven, but Joachim suggested the little ten bar fore-
word by the two cellos and viola. It is interesting to
know that Brahms welcomed from Joachim and often
adopted suggestions of substance like this, while he
sometimes refused to listen to criticisms relative to
the technique of the violin, —ways to make the string
music more playable —from supreme master
this of
the instrument. Particularly striking is the sudden
modulation to the second subject, pianissimo, in A
major. The movement depends for its charm largely
on the tossing about of the different ideas between the
six instruments and is less interesting in the arrange-
ment for two pianos than other works which are less
successful in the original form.
The Andante and Variations was originally for
piano solo and so performed frequently by Clara
Schumann. Brahms himself played it for Miss May
in 1871. His version in this form has never, however,
been published. Especially beautiful is the variation
in D major with its characteristic rich modulation F
major, G minor, E minor, D minor. There is also an
amusing little music box variation following it.
54 SEXTET IN B FLAT

Of the Scherzo, Clara Schumann writes, after a

most enthusiastic performance by Joachim in London,
"Was it your idea that it should be played extremely
fast? I but severe." The Trio of the
like it fast
Scherzo one of the places referred to in the general
is

description of Brahms' music, where he throws things

in every direction, uncontrolled and uproarious.
In the last movement Brahms turns his sextet of
instruments into two string trios, treated antiphonally.
This movement, with its beautiful long round themes,
each growing out of that which precedes it, never
fails to please, and the spirited ending always pro-

vokes a storm of applause.

B MAJOR TRIO 55

TRIO IN B MAJOR FOR PIANO, VIOLIN & CELLO, OP. 8

Through this Trio we see Brahms for the one

and only time actually at work. He wrote it during
the winter of 1853-4, before he was twenty-one, and
rewrote it in the summer of 1889 when he was past
fifty-six. Both versions are published, though the
early one (Augener) is harder to get. Their comparison
gives us the best possible insight into what Brahms
believed he had learned during the intervening thirty-
five years. (The revision of the A major Serenade is
not so instructive).
In the middle of March, 1854, Dietrich wrote to
Naumann from Dusseldorf to tell of Schumann's
attempted suicide three weeks before, adding " Brahms
has written a wonderful new trio." In Clara's diary
we find the following vivid passages
"Sunday 26th (March, 1854). In the even-
ing Brahms played me his wonderful new trio,
at Frl. Leser's, but I do not entirely understand
it. I cannot quite get used to the constant change
of tempo in his works, and besides he plays them
so entirely according to his own fancy that to-
day, for example, though I was reading the
music, I could not follow him, and it was very
difficult for his fellow players to keep their places.
But there are some splendid things in this piece.
Brahms was not very polite; it seems to me that
he will be spoiled by the tremendous idolatry
with which he is treated by the younger genera-
tion, for he often expresses himself in a way
which I never heard my Robert, for instance. I
am afraid that he will often 'put his foot in it'
as they say. I am very sorry for this, but I
should not have the courage to tell him of it."
"April 17th * * * Joachim and Hermann
56 B MAJOR TRIO

Grimm [son of one of the fairy-tale brothers]

paid me an unexpected visit this morning * * *
We at once played the Brahms trio, which Joachim
did not know yet. How he played it at sight,
without one mistake! Now, for the first time,
one really heard the trio properly. * * * In the
evening we repeated the trio, and now everything
in it is clear to me."
" November 21st. Later Brahms played his
trio (B major). It leaves nothing to be wished
except another first movement; I cannot get to
like this one, though I think the opening mag-
nificent. The second, third, and fourth move-
ments are quite worthy of his genius."

The first public performance of this trio was in

New York, by William Mason, Theodore Thomas and

Carl Bergmann, on November 27, 1855.
Hanslick, the distinguished Viennese critic and
ardent Brahms enthusiast, censured this first version
as " immature workmanship." Apparently there
smouldered in Brahms' soul both a secret love of this
work and a consciousness that it was not what it
should be. On September 3, 1889, he writes from
Ischl to Frau Schumann at Baden:

"With what childish amusement I whiled

away the beautiful summer days you will never
guess. I have rewritten my B major trio and
can call it Op. 108 instead of Op. 8. It will not
be so wild as it was before, but whether it will
be better ?"

On September 20th he came to Baden.

" September 21st. Brahms played me the
B major which he has been rewriting
trio * * *
The Trio seems to me much improved."
B MAJOR TRIO 57

In November she wrote suggesting that he play

the Trio at the coming Museum concert, and he
answered

"How gladly would I play my trio there, for

it would be a sign that it still pleased me a little.
Unfortunately, however, it does not please me at
all, —
not in the least, and as I have not this
pleasure I must renounce the other one."

Three months later, however, we have another

lettershowing what a child he really was:

" Vienna, February 23rd.

Dear Clara:
From the enclosed letter from Hanslick,
which be obliged if you would kindly
I should
return to me some time, you will see that yester-
day there was a rehearsal and performance of
my B major trio. I had already thrown the piece
to the dogs and did not want to play it. The
fact that it seemed inadequate to me and did not
please me means little. When it came to be
discussed, however, no curiosity was expressed,
but everybody, even Joachim and Wullner, for-
instance, started off by saying how much pleasure
they had in playing the old piece quite recently,
and had found it full of sentiment and romantic
and heaven knows what else.
And now am
glad that I did play it after
I
all. It was a very
jolly day, for Billroth, too,
was able to be there in the evening.
I only feel sorry that I have not played it to
you also, that is to say that I did not accept the
Chamber Music Evening. I suppose it is too late
now? Otherwise I should feel tempted * * * * "
58 B MAJOR TRIO

After receiving the new version, Elizabet von

Herzogenberg writes:
U feel that you had no right to intrude your
I
master touch on this lovable, if sometimes vague,
production of your youth.

In March, Frau Schumann wrote a friend:

"We expect Brahms on the
21st of this
month when he to play his newly rewritten
is
Trio in B major at a quartet evening. It has
been a great success in Buda-Pest and Vienna.
Most of the motifs remain, but the way in which
7
they are worked out is quite different.'

From the Diary:

"Monday, March 17th. Brahms arrived
* * * He
seems in very good spirits and there is
every reason why he should be."
"18th. He rehearsed his rewritten Trio,
Op. with Heermann and Becker. I felt rather
8,
desperate, his playing was so wanting in clear-
ness, and there were also many things that I
could not follow."
"19th. He rehearsed again at the Sommer-
hoffs and today I understood it better. I was
particularly pleased with the first movement, but
it does not carry me away as the C minor Trio
does."
"March 22nd. Quartet evening at the
Museum. A Brahms evening * * * the audi-
ence was very animated; in the Trio, the scherzo
roused most enthusiasm * * * The whole Trio
strikes me as much better proportioned than it
was but I do not altogether like it. * * * the
second subject of the last movement seems to me
quite horrible. The first subject of the same
B MAJOR TRIO 59

movement is heavenly, and then the second with

ironhand suddenly hurls one down from the
skies.'

The principal changes are for compactness. The

original firstmovement, especially, was long-drawn
out, with two elaborate fugal development sections.
In the revised version the three original themes are
condensed to two, the only one of the three retained
being the first, one of the most lovable of Brahms'

diatonic tunes. The second theme in this revised

movement (G sharp minor, beginning with three de-
scending steps of a third) is one of the weird haunting
kind that characterizes his later period. If you like
it, you like Brahms, if you do not, you may some day.

It is superbly developed to a grand climax after which

he slides back into the recapitulation of the principal
theme imperceptibly and unexpectedly, with the
uncanny skill of Brahms' full maturity. There fol-
lows a lovely new coda with triplet figures in the
piano ending with Brahms' favorite plagal cadence.
The Scherzo is scarcely altered in the new ver-
sion, except for a new coda which disintegrates into
its atoms and evaporates into nothingness, —
different
from anything else in Brahms, but clearly Brahms
nevertheless. The trio of the Scherzo is a Brahms
tune which one cannot hear too often, —as inevitable
as folk-music. The Adagio is greatly condensed, the
second theme (a deliberate quotation, says Kalbeck,
from Schubert's Am Meer) omitted, as well as the
middle section, and a new melodious cello theme,

with queer halting piano passages, inserted new. The

60 B MAJOR TRIO

weird passage of high triplets on the piano is not late

Brahms but taken bodily from the original version of
1854. The movement most drastically dealt with is
the finale in B minor, from which Brahms has elimi-
nated the beautiful singing cello theme of the original
and substituted, with much condensation, the robust
bumptious second subject to which Frau Schumann
so strongly objected. The working out of this move-
ment, with its hammering principal theme, is superb
and it reaches an utterly satisfying conclusion, the
struggle triumphant, like the end of the D minor
violin sonata.
CLARINET SONATA F MINOR 61

SONATA IN F MINOR FOR CLARINET AND PIANO OPUS 130, No. 1

During the summer of 1894, Brahms returned to

the Clarinet (the Trio and Quintet dating from his
introduction to the instrument by Muhlfeld in 1891),
and composed the two sonatas comprising Opus 120,
which were said to have been written for " Piano and
Muhlfeld" rather than for "Piano and Clarinet".
In November he came to Frankfurt with Muhlfeld on
purpose to play them to Frau Schumann and Joachim.
She tells in her diary of her delight in hearing both of
them four times during this visit.
Specht thinks "he is not wrong in assuming"
that both clarinet sonatas are obituary love poems to
Elizabet von Herzogenberg, (who had died two years
before), but does not say that Brahms told him this,
in which case he would have been sure of it. What
there is in either sonata to suggest one calling "woe-
fully and bitterly into the void" it is difficult to
imagine.
The first sonata in F minor, begins in the serious
mood of the Piano Quintet, with a noble theme,
the big sweeping skips of which are peculiarly suitable
to the clarinet. Particularly noticeable in the first

movement is the rhythmic tangle about three-quarters

way through, where against the clarinet's three
quarter-notes the piano has four dotted eighths, with
four arpeggio sixteenths to each clarinet note and
three to each in the piano melody. This combination
of the rhythmic 3/4, 4/4 and 9/12, produces a unique
effect, causing an involuntary catching of the breath,
followed by a sigh of relief as it untangles itself on
the last beat of the third bar. At the close of this
62 CLARINET SONATA F MINOR

movement is one of Brahms' incomparable codas,

perfectly adapted to the clarinet.
The Andante in A flat Major is wholly different
from anything else in Brahms. It is essentially for
the clarinet, and loses most of its individuality when
played on the viola. It is futile to attempt to de-
scribe it.

The wonder of the Allegretto is that at sixty-one

Brahms could write as freshly and joyously as at
twenty. Like the Andantino of the clarinet Trio it

isnot intended to be serious or important, but light

and amusing. Note the canon between the clarinet
and the hand of the piano after the first
left repeat,
followed by two piano bars of 2/4 rhythm in 3/4
time, also Brahms' favorite thirds in the Trio section.
The last movement, vivace, is a rondo, built
around three Fs in half-notes on the piano, followed
by a rollicking tune, mingled with typical Brahms'
slow triplets. The middle section furnishes another
example of simplicity by elimination, so much said
with so few notes. Toward the end are passages
strongly reminiscent of the opening of the D minor
violin sonata, and of the last movements of the C
minor piano quartet and the A major violin sonata.
The movement ends brilliantly and conclusively.
Brahms knew always when and how to stop.
SEXTET IN G MAJOR 63

SEXTET IN G MAJOR, FOR STRINGS, OP. 36

While the First Sextet (Op. 18, B flat major) may

always be the most popular, being the easiest to grasp
quickly, the Second is generally conceded to be the
greater of the two; its possibilities for new pleasure at
each new hearing or performance are unending.
At one movement of this Sextet (the Adagio)
least
was originally in the form of a string quartet, com-
posed early in 1855, almost ten years before the Sextet
was completed. On February 7, 1855, Brahms, from
Dusseldorf, wrote to Frau Schumann (on a concert
tour in Holland): —
"This evening I wished to copy
the whole of the Adagio from the Quartet, but I can-
not finish it. I must stop in order to write you a few
words". Then follows four bars of music, on one
staff, constituting (but for a few unimportant notes)

the first violin and first viola parts of what subse-

quently became the opening of the Adagio of the
Sextet.
Frau Schumann got back from Rotterdam on
February 10th and Brahms must have played her the
new quartet. Almost ten years later, on New Year's
day 1865, she writes to him acknowledging with de-
light her receipt from him, two days before, of a
manuscript which, from her comments, was evidently
the G Major Sextet.

"To think", she says, "of a big work like

that and that I had no suspicion of it"
"The theme [quoting the murmuring viola quaver
figure on G and F sharp which continues through
the first movement] might easily be stolen from
you, but what could anyone else do with it, who
did not understand, as you do, how to surround
it with charming and expressive motifs con-
64 SEXTET IN G MAJOR

stantly interplaying and forming themselves into

a chain of delightful thoughts. I particularly
like the tone of this movement, it is so soft and
delicate. The development has once more de-
lighted me —one can always look forward to this
with special pleasure in your work. It is not
with you, as it is with others, a medley of skillful
combinations by which emotion is driven more
or less into the background; with you it seems
as if only then did all the motifs find their warmest
and truest expression, and that is what is so
delightful. I also like the Scherzo very much,
it is fresh and interesting from beginning to end.
The first theme in the Adagio at once struck me as
—
familiar in times gone by in which of your pieces
had you it before? ....... "

Joachim next had the manuscript and wrote Frau

Schumann an interesting letter about it on February
3rd. "The Adagio", he says, "looks heavenly and
typical of Brahms"
On July 26, 1865, she writes from Baden to Her-
mann Levi:
"Johannes came with his Sextet which he has
—
arranged for four hands It is quite charming;
full of spirit and delicacy". (This does not refer
to the First Sextet, of which she had received the
four-hand arrangement from Brahms May 29,
1861, having played it with him three weeks
before.)

Although privately given both for strings and in

the four-hand version (Billroth writes in April, 1866,
that we "purged" ourselves with it after hearing
Liszt's Symphonic poems on two pianos), this Sextet
was not publicly performed until early in 1867, when
Hellmesberger gave it in Vienna. It was wholly unap-
SEXTET IN G MAJOR 65

predated. It is amusing to compare the following

contemporary criticisms with that of Beethoven's three
Sonatas (quoted supra p. 23) and again with Frau
Schumann's understanding comment just given:
" Brahms may be called a virtuoso in the
modern development of the quartet style
but only that can reach the heart which proceeds
from the heart, and the Sextet comes from the
hand and the head, whilst the warm pulsations
of the heart are to be felt only at intervals.'
$ $ $ $ £
"Weare always seized with a kind of oppres-
sion when the new John in the wilderness, Herr
Johannes Brahms, announces himself. This
prophet, proclaimed by Robert Schumann in his
darkening hours makes us quite dis-
consolate with his impalpable, dizzy tone-vexa-
tions that have neither body nor soul and can
only be products of the most desperate effort.
Such manifest glaring, artificiality is quite pecu-
liar to this gentleman. How many drops of
perspiration may adhere to these note-heads?"

As a result of a letter to Hartels by a "donkey"

(Clara Schumann to Brahms, December 22, 1866)
who said that the Sextet was "too mad" for him,
Hartels, the publishers, returned it and Brahms sent
it to Simrock.

"They [Hartels] must" Clara continues,

"already be savage about it and he must be feel-
ing ashamed I feel less angry over
the stupidity of such people than over their
infamy in thus passing sentence of death upon a
work on which a composer has spent all the
strength of his soul. But fortunately, it has not
succeeded and the tide is now turning."
66 SEXTET IN G MAJOR

Joachim persisted with the Sextet and finally

the public began, as FrauSchumann had predicted, to
understand it. Fuller-Maitland instances the per-
formance of this Sextet by Joachim and his fellows as
the perfection of chamber music, suggesting " peren-
nial youth".
In the letters of Theodor Billroth, the distin-
guished Viennese surgeon and Brahms' intimate
friend, there is an amusing allusion to this Sextet
which strikes a sympathetic note for allamateur
performers of Brahms' chamber music. Brahms had
been asked to a music party at Billroth's house in the
summer of 1866 to hear a performance of the new
Sextet. Billroth, who was a fine musician, both
pianist and violinist, was to take the second viola
part, but at the last moment the presence of the
composer so unnerved him that he surrendered his
viola to his teacher, Eschmann, who was in the in-
vited party, to Brahms' great amusement.
This Sextet has come in for its full share of senti-
mental analysis by reason of the fact that it was com-
posed shortly after Brahms abandoned the idea of
marrying Agathe von Siebold, the attractive daughter
of a professor at Gottingen. Brahms himself ad-
mitted that the recurring phrase in the second theme
group, A G A H E, was intentionally a farewell to her,
but to say that, because of this little phrase the whole
is a " sadly sweet remembrance grown into serenity"

—
or to contend that the E flat B flat in the third and
fourth bars of the main theme represent " intertwin-
ing" Es (or S) for Siebold, and B for Brahms, is
wholly fanciful. The only movement which might
reasonably be imagined as " sadly reminiscent" would
SEXTET IN G MAJOR 67

be the Adagio, which as we have seen, Brahms had com-

posed ten years before in the form of a string quartet.
The truth about Agathe seems to be that while,
for a time, she was an attractive possibility, after the
very hostile reception of the D
minor concerto in
Leipsic, Brahms decided that he was too much a failure
to consider marriage (see the Widmann Reminiscences).
In a letter from Frau Schumann to Brahms dated
February 5, 1860, she reveals the situation:
"I was very miserable in Cassel. I could not
get poor Agathe, and many other things, out of
my head. I kept on seeing the poor lonely girl,
and I felt all her grief. Ah! dear Johannes, if
only you had not allowed it to go so far!"

The first movement is in the " morning joy"

mood of the G major violin sonata and the clarinet

quintet, and is one of the most wonderful movements
in chamber music, with the subtlest touches through-
out. Much of the perfect mastery of form in this
movement (as well as the depth in the Andante) we
would have expected to find only in a later work.
The second theme in D major is one of the most woe-
dispelling in Brahms, and the trio of the delightful
Scherzo is one of the most carefree of his tunes, a
rollicking waltz. The Andante Hanslick wittily and
inappropriately called " Variations on no theme". The
last movement (not in notes merely, but in the whole
idea and in all the themes) is remarkably like
Tschaikowski's Serenade for Strings, Op. 48, written
in 1880, fourteen years after the publication of this
Sextet. This is interesting in view of Tschaikowski's
aversion to Brahms' music, which he considered the
work of a mere learned pedant.
0$ STRING QUARTET IN C MINOR

QUARTET IN C MINOR, FOR STRINGS, OP. 51 No. 1

The two quartets, in C Minor and A Minor,

Op. 51, were published, as Brahms told a friend,
Alwin Cranz, only after he had written and discarded
twenty others.
In Brahms' letter to Joachim in October 1853,
relative to the works which Schumann recommends
him to publish, he specifies a Quartet in B flat. Kal-
beck, however, says that Schumann wanted him to
publish as Op. 1 a quartet in B minor. We have
already noted the Adagio in E minor from the quartet
written in 1855, and subsequently turned into the G
Major Sextet.
In Frau Schumann's diary for October, 1856, she
speaks of Johannes having " composed a wonderfully
beautiful Adagio for his C sharp minor quartet full—
of tenderness." This, however, may have been what
subsequently became the C Minor Piano Quartet (see
infra p. 116). In the dairy in August, 1866, she re-
cords Johannes having arrived with a full beard (at
which she is most indignant, "it quite spoils the
refinement of his face") and having "played me some
magnificent numbers from a German Requiem and
also a string quartet in C Minor. I am most moved
by the Requiem. ..."
The two quartets were not finished and given to
the world until 1873. They are dedicated to Theodore
Billroth, Brahms' surgeon-viola friend in Vienna. That
in C minor is one of his most pitiless though one of
his most profound works. In the first movement there
is no compromising. If Brahms were all like this he
might be termed harsh. This movement, however,
STRING QUARTET IN C MINOR 69

(which is supremely difficult to play smoothly) repre-

sents but one phase,and is not at all typical of his
music as a whole, which is full to overflowing with
humanity. It is only occasionally, as in the first and
last movements he seems to crush
of this quartet, that
down all tenderness. This is very great music, but is
not the work with which to begin the study of Brahms.
The Romanze is at times very reminiscent of that
in the piano quintet. The Scherzo is full of Brahms'
delightful entanglings (unmistakably characteristic)
with a lovely tune, (seemingly simple, but only so by
elimination) in the trio; the figure in the second violin,
alternating on the open and stopped A, gives a wierd
effect.
Niemann contends that the key of C minor means
to Brahms "hard, pitiless struggle and defiance", but
fails to reconcile the last movement of the C minor

piano quartet, the allegretto of the G minor piano

quartet, and that of the Third Symphony.
70 VIOLIN SONATA IN A MAJOR

SONATA IN A MAJOR, FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO, OP. 100

This Sonata is commonly knownas the Thun

Sonata, because written at Thun where Brahms spent
the three summers 1886-7-8, near his friend Widmann.
It is also sometimes called the Meistersinger Sonata,
because of the similarity, (seized and insisted on by
the anti-Brahms crowd with wholly unnecessary acri-
mony), of the first three notes to the first three in
Walter's Prize Song. The latter resemblance is merely
superficial,and certainly accidental. The similarity
is no more striking than the resemblance of the next

phrase of the Prize Song to bars 21 and 22 of the C

sharp minor fugue in the second book of the Well-
Tempered Clavichord, which apparently has never
been held against Wagner. Brahms used to be ex-
tremely irritated whenever some pedant remarked on
these chance similarities. "Any ass could see that"
he once said to one who "regretted" that the C major
theme at the end of his First Symphony was like the
Joy theme in Beethoven's Ninth. When Dessof
once apologized to him for the resemblance of a theme
to one of Brahms' symphonies, Brahms wrote him:

"Plagarism one of the stupidest topics of

is
stupid people. You have made
into one of your
freshest themes what was only an accessory detail
in my work."

F major Cello Sonata (Op.

This Sonata, with the
99) and the C
minor trio (Op. 101), was written in
the summer of 1886, and had its first performance at
Widmann's house at Berne, near Thun, where Brahms
used to spend practically all his week-ends during
VIOLIN SONATA IN A MAJOR 71

these summer sojourns, walking over with a knapsack

of books which he had borrowed on the previous
Monday, enveloped, on rainy days, in a huge shawl ;

fastened in front by a large pin. Widmann wrote a

fairy ballad about the Sonata which Miss May trans-
lates in full (Vol. II p. 224) and with which Brahms
was much pleased, often later writing to Widmann for
additional copies.
From Frau Schumann's diary of June, 1887, a
period of suffering for her both from physical ailments
and from anxiety for her son Ferdinand:

"God be thanked there was some music

again on the 18th, at the Heermann's [leader of
the Heerman quartet at Frankfurt]. I played
Johannes' A Major Sonata with him for the first
time. It was a pleasure which made me forget
all my misery for one evening. This Sonata is a
beautiful, noble work. I like the first and last
movements best, the theme of the last is drawn
out in the most heavenly way. The Adagio does
not seem to me to have enough genuine feeling,
it is more reflective". (How could she say this
about the last section, just before the coda?)

The Thun Sonata is the best-known of the three,

and the easiest to grasp at first hearing. The first

movement is a thoroughly comfortable and con-

in
tented mood. It typifies the skill with which Brahms
welded his violin and piano parts together. The
second theme gives an echo of the song Wie Melodien
Op. 105, No. 1, and the last of Auf dem Kirchhofe
No. 4 from the same Opus (composed before the
Sonata).
72 VIOLIN SONATA IN A MAJOR

The second movement combines the usual slow

movement and scherzo by alternating with the quiet
meditative mood of the opening theme in F major, the
sprightly vivace in D minor, with
its dainty dialogue.

The coda is
little Heinrich von
utterly satisfactory.
Herzogenberg, Elizabeths worthy and pedantic hus-
band, had the temerity to suggest to Brahms that the
vivace theme was reminiscent of Grieg's G Minor
Violin Sonata.
The last movement gives us the most ecstatic
tune in Brahms' chamber music, a broad, luscious
theme of easy spaciousness and saturated intensity.
Its full freshness does not survive repeated hearing,
however, as does that of the Andante of the minor,D
and the version of the theme for the piano, with the
staccato notes in the left hand, cannot be made to
sound as it was evidently conceived.
It does not
"come off This last movement was origi-
the page".
nally longer, the coda having been materially cut
down by Brahms, (so he told Joachim who told Miss
May) leaving for us another of his matchless sum-
maries. What treasures are the last ten bars of each
of the ten movements of the three violin sonatas!
PIANO QUARTET IN G MINOR 73

QUARTET IN G MINOR FOR PIANO, VIOLIN, VIOLA AND CELLO,

OP. 25

The two piano quartets Op. 25 and 26 in G minor

and A major were composed, according to Niemann,
as early as 1856, but like the other works of the period,
were held back and polished and repolished, and pub-
lished only in 1863, after repeated public performances.
When tried over with Bargheer and two others of the
Detmold orchestra they found the original string parts
of the G minor quartet ungrateful and sometimes
unplayable, resulting in considerable alteration.
It was with this quartet that Brahms made his
bow to Vienna. Shortly after his arrival in Septem-
ber, 1862, he went to
on the kindly, generous and
call
"My name is Johannes
ever youthful Julius Epstein.
Brahms", he said as he entered. Epstein, who was
well acquainted with his already published works,
hearing that he had with him two new piano quartets,
at once summoned Joseph Hellmesberger, the leading
quartet player in Vienna, to a rehearsal, followed by
breakfast, (in the house where Mozart wrote Figaro).
At the conclusion of the G minor, Hellmesberger
young Brahms by
startled on his neck, ex-
falling
claiming "This is Beethoven's heir", and announcing
that they must play the quartet at their next concert,
which they did on October 14th, arousing great in-
terest, considerable praise, some scorn, much discus-
sion pro and con, —an auspicious beginning for Brahms'
Vienna career.
From that time on, the G minor quartet has been
a prime favorite with the public, being much the most
frequently heard of the three. With the B flat Sextet,
74 PIANO QUARTET IN G MINOR

and the A major violin Sonata, it is the easiest of

—
Brahms' chamber works to use Brahms' own phrase
to "hear at sight".
Clara Schumann did not wholly approve of it.
She WTote him a rather extended criticism in July,
1861:—
"There is much in the movement of the G
—
minor quartet that I like and much that I care
for less. The first part seems to me too little
G minor and too much D major, and I think
that owing to lack of the former, it loses
clarity
"It is so beautiful where the piano joins in
triplets .... I cannot help thinking that if
you had me in mind at all when you were writing
it, you must have known that I should be charmed

with the scherzo in C minor. In fact, I should

hardly call it a scherzo at all. I can only think
of as an allegretto. But it is a piece after my
it
own heart You are certainly smil-
ing at me and thinking that I am not aware of
the higher value of the first movement. Cer-
tainly I am; but in the C minor part I find
myself so tenderly transported to dreamland that
it is as if my soul was rocked to sleep by the
notes."

From the diary:

"Nov. 14, (1862)
"A rehearsal of Johannes' G minor quartet"
"Nov. 16th—
"A soire& of mine — I was frightfully nervous.
It may have been anxiety about the quartet,
which I had so much at heart. The fiddlers
scratched away or slept, although I put my
whole heart into it. The last movement took the
PIANO QUARTET IN G MINOR 75

audience by storm. The quartet only partially

satisfies me, there is toounity in the first
little
movement, and the emotion in the Adagio is
too forced, without really carrying me away.
But I love the Allegretto in C minor and the last
movements

This quartet is essentially fresh and vigorous,

full of vitality. Niemann's musical analysis points out

most interestingly in what Brahms departs from the
methods of the classic masters (see his p. 279). Of
especial interest, in the first movement, is the introduc-
tion of the second theme in D minor prior to its sub-
sequent full statement in D major, giving an impres-
sion of lavish richness; also the evaporation to noth-
ingness after the climax. The Andante recalls a
super-Mendelssohn. The middle section, in C major,
is reminiscent of the spirit of the trio of the scherzo
in the B major Piano Trio. The Intermezzo abounds
in Brahms' favorite sixths, thirds and tenths.
The last movement is the famous " Rondo alia
Zingarese", riotously brilliant, with its astonishing
imitation of the dulcimer; perfectly direct, with no
puzzling entanglements, wayward rhythms or baffling
syncopations. In 1858 Joachim had made a great
success with his Hungarian Concerto. Generous soul
that he was, he told Brahms that with this Rondo
Brahms had " beaten him on his own ground ". Dating
from his tour with Remenyi, Brahms had a special
passion for the gypsy music and used to sit for hours
while the gypsy bands delighted to play to him. The
first of the Hungarian dances were written before
October, 1858. Illustrative of his fondness for Hun-
76 PIANO QUARTET IN G MINOR

garian folk music and its influence in his works are,

besides the Gypsy Songs (Op 103 and the last four of
Op. 112), the piano variations on a Hungarian theme,
Op. 21, No. 2, the last movement of the A major
quartet Op. 26, several numbers in the Waltzes for
four hands, Op. 39, the B minor Capriccio in Op. 76,
the Andante of the C major Trio, Op. 87, the last
movement of the B flat piano Concerto, Op. 83, the
finale of the G major string quintet, and the middle
section of the Adagio of the clarinet quintet.
C MAJOR TRIO 77

TRIO IN C MAJOR, FOR PIANO, VIOLIN AND CELLO OP. 87

It is understand why the C Major

difficult to
Trio is so little known and
so seldom played It fully
merits a better acquaintance. Of the three, it seems
the brightest and most joyous, and contains little of
the " heaven storming Johannes''. The gloomy
Specht, however, calls ita " personal confession" (of
what?). Niemann, a most learned and thorough
musician, prefers it to the C minor.
When Clara Schumann received the manuscript
in August. 1882, she was " delighted with it."

"A yours was a real musical tonic

trio like
How
would love to hear it properly
I
—
played All I have is a poor little upright piano.
I love every movement and how wonderfully it
is developed. I am so charmed with the way in
which one motif grows out of another, and phrase
follows phrase. The scherzo is exquisite, as is
also the andante with its lively theme which
must sound quite original in the placing of the
double octaves. How fresh the last movement is,
and, moreover, interesting in its thoroughly
artistic combinations."

She then begs permission to mention a "few

small points", one of which Brahms apparently
adopted, but another (the elimination of the two
turns by the violin in the coda of the first movement)
he ignored. Strangely enough, she did not like the
trio of the Scherzo, "It does not seem to me imposing
enough, coming after the scherzo."
On December 29th it was played at one of the
Museum concerts in Frankfort.
78 C MAJOR TRIO

From the Diary:

"Thursday, December 21st (1882)

"I had invited Koning and Muller to come
in, so that we might get to know Brahms' new
trio in C major —
Who surprised us at it? He —
himself. He came from Strasburg and is going
to stay with us for Christmas
"December 25th.
"Wetried over the trio, but although I am
delighted with some things in it, I am not really

with it as a whole, except for the andante,

satisfied
which is wonderful. It is a pity he does not
always polish his work nor cut out dull pass-
ages .

"In the evening when my pupils came and

we lit up the tree I was quite carried out of my-
self. —
They were all very merry Brahms was in
the best of humors"

At the concert the new F major string quintet

was enthusiastically received, the piano trio not so
well. "It is a pity that Brahms plays more and more
—
abominably it is now nothing but thump, bang and
scrabble."
Earlier in the diary we find an allusion to the be-
ginnings of a trio which was probably this one, and
also to another in E flat, which was never published.

"Berchtesgaden, September 13, 1880 [her 61st

birthday]
"Johannes was in a particularly nice and
friendly mood, so that I was really able to enjoy
his visit. He played me the first movements of
two new trios, of which I liked the one in E flat
major best."
C MAJOR TRIO 79

Both trios are also referred to in a letter from

Billroth to Brahms in June of the same year.
The first movement of the C major trio is grandly
and boldly planned, in the spirit of Beethoven. The
rather involved chromatic passage immediately follow-
ing the complete statement of the principal theme, as
well as the later theme for the piano in G major, are the
kind that have given him his reputation for obscurity.
If you like Brahms, you like them. The little second
theme in the piano with its delicate triplet accompani-
ment, its weird beginning and surprisingly simple
denouement, is one of those which only he could write.
It is interesting to compare it with the second theme
(in the piano) in the first movement of the clarinet

trio (Op. 114). The coda with its rolling piano figure,
the accent first up and then down, and then its bold
modulations, brings us back to a triumphant statement
of the opening theme.
The second movement, a theme and variations,
is the most interesting and enduring, with its haunting
old Scotch (Compare the C major horn theme
J-]..
in the First Symphony, the second upward jerking
theme in the finale of the F minor piano quintet, and
the last movement of the G major sextet). Observe
also its ingenious combinations of rhythm and its de-
lightful ending, with the extra long bar just before
the close. particularly how in the harmoniza-
Note
tion of the sequence before the return of the opening
phrase of the theme, Brahms gives us the D
sharp, a
momentary modulation to E minor, one of the rich
linings which makes his counterpoint and develop-
ments so warm.
80 C MAJOR TRIO

It is difficult to appreciate either the beauty or

the ingenuity of the scherzo merely by listening to it

played at speed. One must study it bar by bar. It

is also difficult to understand how Frau Schumann
thought the trio "not imposing enough". Perhaps
Brahms changed it after she wrote thus.
The last movement does not purport to be so im-
portant, merely jolly, allegro giocoso. In Eugenie
Schumann's Memoirs she tells how, whenever Brahms
went to the piano to practice, he began by pressing
down his two little fingers at the top and bottom of
the piano, followed by a rush of arpeggios in contrary
motion. Hence, perhaps, the piano figure in this
movement.
CELLO SONATA E MINOR 81

SONATA IN E MINOR, FOB PIANO AND CELLO, OP. 38

This was the first of Brahms' published Sonatas

for piano and another instrument. First came the
three sonatas for piano solo, Op. 1, 2 and 5, (1853)
then this cello sonata, Op. 38 (1865), then the G
major violin sonata, Op. 78 (1879) then the F major
cello and the A major violin sonatas, Op. 99 and 100
(summer of 1886), then the third violin sonata, Op.
108, (1888) and last the two clarinet sonatas in 1894.
There is apparently no record of any other cello
sonatas lost or destroyed, as in the case of the early
violin sonatas, although a duet for cello and piano
which he had composed under the name Karl Wurth,
was played by him in public when he was but eighteen.
This E minor sonata, which was composed in
1865, was dedicated to Brahms' friend, Josef Gans-
bacher, " esteemed as a teacher of singing and feared
as a cellist". Gansbacher had been the moving spirit
in Brahms' election as conductor of the Singakademie,
and had also procured for Brahms a number of Schu-
bert manuscripts, including the Wanderer, which he
prized very highly, and in gratitude for which he
dedicated the Sonata, and also himself played it with
Gansbacher for their friends. In the course of this
performance Brahms played so loud that the worthy
Josef complained that he could not hear his cello at
—
all "Lucky for you, too", growled Brahms, and let
the piano rage on.
Gansbacher was the lover and teacher of the
phenomenal singer, Marie Wilt, who sang the soprano*
solo in the Requiem under Brahms. She was so
82 CELLO SONATA E MINOR

enormous that their friends used to discuss a "voyage

around the Wilt in eighty days".
From Frau Schumann (then age 71) to Brahms,
March 2, 1890:

"I had invited a few people to my house

yesterday and Hausmann, [cellist of the Joachim
quartet] who is here, had promised to play your
E minor Sonata with me; but owing to a severe
cough I had to put them off the day before, for
talking was too painful for me. As I could play,
however, I begged Hausmann to come alone for
a little while with his cello. And so yesterday
we played your Sonata, and I have not had such
unsullied bliss for a long time. He played the
Sonata beautifully, and I had practiced it well.
It is really too magnificent."

The E minor Sonata, although the first of the

two cello sonatas, is more comfortable for the cello
than the second. It begins with a beautiful long
singing theme starting with the three notes of the
E minor triad. The second theme contains three of
Brahms' " visiting cards", the momentary adaptation
of a 3/4 rhythm to a 4/4 bar, the dovetailing of the
voices to fill the bar with eight successive quavers,
and, (at the end of the statement of the second theme
and before the beautiful passage in B major) an in-
stance of the use of two of the three members of the
triad. If the sonata were in D minor, Kalbeck and
the rest would here hail another F. A. F.
The Allegretto quasi Minuetto is one of the move-
ments which it would seem impossible not to enjoy
at once. The growth of the theme of the Trio out of
CELLO SONATA E MINOR 83

that of the Minuet is also typical of Brahms. The

third movement is a glorious fugue. Miss May warns
against taking it too fast. As she is sparing in such
comments, she may have heard it from Brahms when
she was his pupil at Lichtenthal in 1871 during Frau
Schumann's absence on tour.
84 STRING QUINTET IN F MAJOR

QUINTET IN F MAJOR FOB STRINGS— OP. 88

It is extraordinary that this quintet, with its

clear and compact structure, and its wealth of beauti-
ful warm, care-free music, is not oftener heard. While
this may be partly due to the necessity of the extra
viola, the piano quintet, which also calls for an out-
sider, is given ten times to one of either this quintet
or its later companion in G major. Nor is its neglect
due to lack of appreciation by the public. It was
from the beginning both in
enthusiastically received
Europe and in England and has grown in popularity
ever since.
The F major Quintet was composed at Ischl during
the spring of 1882. nicknamed it "Fruhlings
Billroth
Quintet" from its fresh and joyous mood. Specht
says that it was intended as a congratulation on the
betrothal of Brahms' friend Ignaz Brull. Perhaps it
was merely coincident therewith.
On July 27, 1882, Brahms wrote Elizabet von
Herzogenberg, "I am sending you a little ditty",
enclosing the manuscript, hoping to "earn another
letter", and asking its return on the 1st. She sent it
back on the 2nd and on August 6th wrote him a long
letter about the first three movements, with copious
extracts from the music (all from memory, as there
are frequent minor inaccuracies). While we may infer
that the fair Elizabet was showing off, we may never-
theless marvel at an amateur pianist who could thus
master a work for strings in so short a time. Specht
is sure that Brahms was in love with her all the

time. He first met her as a pupil in Vienna, before

she married Heinrich, and unaccountably sent her
STRING QUINTET IN F MAJOR 85

back to her former teacher after a few weeks, possibly

through fear of falling in love with her.
At the same time that he sent the quintet to
Elizabet, he sent the C major trio to Frau Schumann
with a note that he had done " something else that
is better", referring apparently to the quintet.

Writing to Frau Schumann in October, Billroth

said:
"To me what seems distinctly novel in this
quintet the treatment of the two violas. I
is
cannot see how he has done it, but one is under
the impression of listening to a sextet with two celli,
and every player is always playing with the firm
conviction that he has the most important part."

At Christmas 1882, Brahms came to Frankfurt

for the first performance of this quintet and the C
major trio (see supra p 78).

"Dec. 24th. A nice pleasant festival made —

all the nicer by Brahms' friendly humour . . .

We ended the evening with champagne.

Dec. 25th. Practice of the quintet, as yester-
day. The first and second movements are mag-
nificent, but the 3rd (and last) does not appeal
to me much."
Like the B major trio, the B flat sextet and the
A major Violin Sonata, it starts off at once with a
lovely tune, simple as a folk-song, friendly from the
beginning, in the same mood as the Beethoven F
major quartet Op. 59, No. 1. The second theme,
with its slow triplet quarter-notes against the 4/4
quarter notes of the second viola and the eighths of
the first violin, is unmistakable Brahms.
86 STRING QUINTET IN F MAJOR

As with the later A major Violin Sonata, the

second movement combines the usual Andante and
Scherzo (Siciliano) in one movement. The last move-
ment is a glorious big fugue. It is again amusing to
compare Niemann's analysis of it (p 285) with that
of Specht. The former calls the fugue the "crown
of this work", — " Joyous, wildly excited and full of
Dionysiac ecstasy", * * "a wild transport of exul-
tation, —while still allowing its place to the enchanting,
pleasantly musing and melodious second theme —and
then at the close gradually leads us back to a peaceful
—
evening mood all so irresistible and natural" -.

Specht, on the other hand, says of it that, though

vigorous, it "no longer speaks of emotion, but only
of the composer's pleasure in a contrapuntal feat"
which he says recalls the exercises exchanged with
Joachim. The second subject, although "a dark red
bud, gloriously unfolded," "wearily sheds its petals
after only four bars." He suggests that Brahms in-
tended this severe movement to convey to the "young"
bridegroom (Ignaz Brull) an "exhortation not to be
content with warbling like a singing bird, but to
strengthen his own music by a solid foundation of
workmanship in the manner of Bach."
That two such learned experts who apparently
agree on the "clarity" of this work, so radically disa-
gree in interpreting its spirit, may encourage the less
learned of us each to find his own interpretation, with
the assurance that even Brahms himself was not con-
scious of all the beauties which his genius put into
his music, or of a fraction of the pictures, whether of
sunshine or of storm, which they may suggest.
PIANO QUARTET IN A MAJOR 87

QUARTET IN A MAJOR FOR PIANO, VIOLIN, VIOLA & CELLO,

OP. 26

This quartet, like its companion in G Minor,

already discussed, is attributable to the period of
intensive discipline following the Schumann article in
1853. Niemann from 1856, but it was cer-
dates it

tainly completed at Frau Rosing's house at Hamm,

near Hamburg, where Brahms lodged in 1860-2.
"Contrary to his custom", Brahms played Dietrich
"some sketches" from it there in October, 1861. The
first reference to it in the Schumann letters is hers
of July 29, 1861, (already quoted supra p. 74),when
she had apparently received the A
Major Scherzo at
the same time as the whole of the G Minor quartet.
She remarks on the similarity of the second theme to
a passage in Robert's string quartet, and says: "I
—
think it is the same with this piece as with many
—
others of yours one only gets to like it when one
knows it thoroughly and has heard it often."
On July 10, 1863, however, she writes from
Baden :

"Both Kirchner and I are fascinated by your

—
quartet I have played it at two parties at my
house, the last time with excellent players, Jean
Becker, Jaquart (cellist) and Koning, an excel-
lent viola player. Rubinstein heard it on both
occasions, but does not yet understand it; how-
ever, Lachner from Mannheim, was very appre-
ciative (which means a good deal for an old
Kapellmeister). Then there were Levi and lastly
Kirchner, who did not lose a note even the first
time. To my mind, it is a wonderful work,
except for a few passages which seem to me harsh
or dull (e. g. the close of the trio in the scherzo),
and we have greatly enjoyed it. I must confess
88 PIANO QUARTET IN A MAJOR

you were right after all, it is more beautiful than

the G Minor, and finer altogether; the first
movement is far more finished.'

After the favorable reception in Vienna of the

G Minor piano quartet in October, 1862, (see supra
p. 73) Brahms took courage to give a concert of his
own, at which the A Major quartet headed the pro-
gram, followed by his Handel Variations (Op. 23)
and numbers by Bach and Schumann. Brahms was
at his best, sensing the sympathy of the audience.
Strangely enough, the Variations were applauded much
more enthusiastically than the Quartet, which the
critics (Hanslick) thought "dry and flat", "the themes
not musically important". Brahms' delight at his
success is reflected in his letter home :

"Dear parents;
"I was very happy yesterday, my concert
went quite excellently, much better than I had
hoped. After the quartet had been sympatheti-
cally received, I had great success as a player.
Every number was greatly applauded, I think
there was real enthusiasm in the room
"I played as freely as though I were sitting
at home with friends; one is certainly influenced
quite differently by this public than by ours.
You should have seen the attention and seen and
heard the applause 1 am very glad I gave the
concert
"Tell the contents of this letter to Herr
Marxsen [his teacher]
"Did you sit together on Wednesday [his
mother's birthday] over the egg punch? Write
to me about it and anything else
"How about the photograph of the girl's
quartet? Am I not to have it?"
PIANO QUARTET IN A MAJOR 89

Frau Schumann later writes Brahms repeatedly

of the enthusiasm which this quartet evoked when
she played it, at Hamburg, Frankfurt, London and
other places, though in her diary in 1865 she says:

"June 10.

"Wehad Robert's D Minor Trio and

Johannes' A
Major Quartet, which he played
himself and which gave me great pleasure, al-
though my old fears that it will never be generally
popular, returned. There are some beautiful
things in it."

This quartet, says Colles, is " unique in Brahms'

chamber music for the variety of material and for the
mastery in knitting it together". The opinion of the
experts apparently is, however, that the scherzo and
the last movement are unnecessarily drawn out. Both
the second theme of the movement and the
first

opening theme of the scherzo are stated first by the

strings without the piano, a device which Brahms
used not infrequently. The recapitulation of the
second theme and the unusual (for Brahms) chro-
matics in the coda (just after the familiar thirds and
sixths) are noticeable. The Adagio is one of Brahms'
great movements. The opening eighth-notes on the
strings in unison with the melody of the piano in
quarter-notes, give a strange effect, —
as if the strings
—
were lost for a moment as does the presence of the
mutes on the strings against the piano tre corde. The
mysterious piano arpeggios are likened by Fuller-
Maitland to a "cold wind blowing over a deserted
graveyard;" by Kalbeck to a lovely spring evening
90 PIANO QUARTET IN A MAJOR

with nightingales in full song. The little extra en-

largement which Brahms gives the theme in the coda
is a very high spot. The last two movements are both
cruel to amateur performers.
CLARINET SONATA IN E FLAT 91

SONATA FOR CLARINET AND PIANO IN E FLAT MAJOR, OP. 130,

No. 2

This Sonata was written as a companion piece to

that in F minor which has already been discussed
(supra p 61). It is in a less serious vein.
The opening theme has been criticized by some
of Brahms' staunchest adherents as "commonplace".
Hanslick, however, characterizes it as a theme "fallen
direct from heaven", and because of it prefers this
sonata to that in F minor. The theme in question is
perhaps neither as noble, as compact, as inevitable or
as perpetually fresh as most
Brahms' principal of
themes. Its treatment, real Brahms, as is
however, is

the second theme and the delightful coda. Of the first

movement Professor Tovey says " Players who cannot:

make of this movement one of the most mellow products

of all chamber music should leave Brahms alone."
The second movement is marked allegro appas-
ionata. It is suggested that a better title would be
allegro energico. It boils with explosive energy. This
movement is certainly not the work of one who gently
floats toward the end of life's stream, mourning a lost
love, as Specht would have it.
The last movement is an andante with variations,
peculiarly suited to the clarinet. The final variation
in E flat minor, with bits of striking rhythmic
allegro,
originality, leads to a coda in E flat major, tranquillo.
The rhythm in the six bars following the two upward
diminished sevenths is bewildering until we see that
each phrase begins on the last beat of the bar and
carries over through the third beat of the next, without
any steadying voice to hold the beat, requiring great
artistry in performance to keep the hearers orientated.
92 STRING QUINTET IN G MAJOR

QUINTET IN G MAJOR FOB STRINGS, OP. Ill

It is noticeable that so many of Brahms' chamber

works go in pairs, the one direct and joyous, the
second serious, compact and overpowering. Whether
this merely followed his development or was the de-
liberate result of his appreciation of contrast, we can-
not be sure; perhaps both. The two clarinet sonatas,
the two string quartets, op. 51, the two sextets, the
two string quintets, the two overtures, op. 80 and 81,
the Schicksalslied op. 54, and the Triumphlied, op. 55,
the C major and C minor trios (op. 87 and 101) and
the A major and D minor violin sonatas (op. 100
and 108).
It is idle toattempt to choose any of Brahms'
chamber works as the greatest. For one it may be the
piano quintet, for another the horn trio, for a third
the G major sextet or quintet, for a fourth the clarinet
quintet, for others one of the sonatas or string or piano
quartets or other works. Each is entitled and welcome
to his own best love. All Brahms' critics and friends,
however, unite in agreeing that this G major quintet
is one of his greatest w orks. It teems with lovely and
r

ever fresh melodies. In it Brahms has attained ab-

solute command of form without the least strain.
"His new quintet," Frau Schumann wrote in her
diary, "is exquisite".
Elizabet von Herzogenberg to Brahms (Oct. 9,
1890):

"The 'old' quintet, the F major, affected me

so powerfully again recently that the new one
only found a footing with difficulty (old friends
are the fondest!); but my
heart soon surrendered
STRING QUINTET IN G MAJOR 93

to the new-comer, and is prepared to admit its

possibly greater beauty and benignity, its riper,
sweeter vintage. Yet why compare them, when
they are so eminently worthy to stand side by
side!" * * * *
"The very opening charmed me * * * How
it meets one's comprehension half way by its
exquisite proportions, its compactness! How
clear is the frame-work, thanks to the absence of
everything superfluous, and how perfectly each
part fulfils its allotted function! * * * I could
kiss the second subject [of the finale] and allthe
sweet tangle after it. It is so pretty the first
time it comes, clever the second, and irresistible
after the development (which one wishes had
been longer) where it comes twisting again
upon D. * * * The person who invented it all
cannot but have felt very light-hearted. One
feels you must have been celebrating say your —
thirtieth birthday!"

"It is almost with consternation", says Specht,

"that one sees the sexagenarian inventing more richly,
more easily, naturally and captivatingly, than he had
ever done in his youth.'
"Of all the composer's works," says Niemann,
"the second String Quintet is the one which most
revels in tonal effect, themost passionate, the freshest,
and the most deeply inspired by nature."
Kalbeck maintains that this quintet was originated
in a Fifth Symphony, which Brahms began but never
finished. It was one of Brahms' own favorites. After
a rehearsal some one once suggested to him, as a title
for it "Brahms on the Prater", to which he instantly
replied, with a twinkle in his eye "You've hit it! and
all the pretty girls there, eh?"
94 STRING QUINTET IN G MAJOR

On January 2, 1897, three months before Brahms'

death, Joachim and his colleagues gave a public per-
formance of this quintet in Vienna. Though Brahms
was so weakened and emaciated with his disease
(cancer of the liver) that he could scarcely go out, he
attended both the rehearsal in Joachim's rooms, and
also the public performance. Four months later
Joachim, who also considered this one of his friend's
"most beautiful works" wrote Ernst RudorfF
"I often think sadly of the last pleasure it
was in our power to give him and to which he
responded with unusual gentleness. 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."

The opening of the first movement sweeps all

before as the cello soars up out of the shimmer of

it,

the others. This passage gave rise to much argument

and discussion on the part of Joachim and his col-
leagues, and also of the members of the Rose quartet
(which gave it its first performance in Vienna in
November The cellists, Hummer in the Rose
1890).
group and Hausmann in the Joachim, (each famous
for his big tone)had trouble in surmounting the forte
of the rest, and they suggested subduing the latter,
but Brahms was obdurate. After the performance in
Berlin in December, Joachim wrote Brahms, in answer
to the latter's request for his opinion:

"And now the desired report as to the open-

ing passage. After trying it in various ways, we
came back to your original version, except for a
slight modification of the forte from the end of
the second bar, increasing the tone later."
STRING QUINTET IN G MAJOR 95

At this first performance, in deference to the

irrepressible enthusiasm, Joachim, contrary to his
practice, repeated the allegretto, and thereafter always
had to do so to each succeeding audience.
"The opening of the development/' wrote Eliza-
bet von Herzogenberg after the Berlin performance,
"is indescribably fine, with its powerful Bach-like
progressions: F, E flat, D flat, E flat, D.
C, and G, F,
How Joachim and Hausmann looked at each other
there, and what a blissful moment it was for us all."
The Adagio, which Joachim so admired, stands
beside those in the horn trio, the A major and C
minor piano quartets, the C major piano trio, the
D minor violin sonata, the F major string quintet, and
the clarinet trio and quintet, as representing his most
profound and enduring slow movements.
The finale is another instance of the influence on
Brahms of the Hungarian folk music, ending with a
frisca. Niemann calls attention to the position of this
quintet between the two groups of gypsy songs, Op.
103 and 112.
96 STRING QUARTET IN A MINOR

QUARTET IN A MINOR FOE STRINGS, OP. 51, No. 2

In July 1867, Joachim wrote Clara Schumann

that " Brahms has promised to send me some string
quartets", and in June 1869, she records that
" Johannes brought me two exquisite movements
for a quartet, the first and last", the latter "hochst
geist- und schwungvoll; the first would require some
change to suit my taste; perhaps he will alter it,

since he himself does not seem entirely satisfied with

it." The two finished quartets (Op. 51) were not
forthcoming until four years later, when she writes
Joachim (August 29, 1873) that she has received " two
quartets of the greatest importance."
Both quartets are dedicated to Billroth, the dis-
tinguished Viennese surgeon and Brahms' most inti-
mate amateur musical friend, in whose beautiful music
room many of his chamber works had their first per-
formance. As has been noted, Kalbeck's theory was
that the first four notes of the A
minor quartet repre-
sent a combination of Joachim's motto F A E with
Brahms' F A F (here A F A) and hence a veiled dedi-
cation to Joachim. Although all the biographers seem
to accept this theory, none of them purports to ad-
vance it on the authority of Brahms. In October 1873,
Brahms wrote Joachim telling of his pleasure at hear-
ing that Joachim was to play the A minor in public
and saying: " Neither of them were really meant for
your violin". * * *
Apropos of these quartets, Billroth writes in
January, 1875:
STRING QUARTET IN A MINOR 97

"Brahms desires very moderate tempi

throughout as otherwise, owing to the frequent
harmonic changes, the music cannot become
clear".

Brahms was very open minded about his tempi,

and for this reason omitted metronome marks, believing
that the performers should have considerable latitude
to suit their mood. Henschel records a most inter-
esting talk with him on this subject. Miss Fanny
Davies once heard Brahms say: "Machen Sie es wie
Sie wollen, machen Sie es nur schon".
Of the two, the A minor quartet is the most
pleasant and inviting. Specht characterizes the first

movement as "one of the most ingratiating pieces ever

written by Brahms, who here forgets all his asperities".
Elsewhere, however, he describes it as "a work that
might be written by a Schubert who has read and
painfully experienced Schopenhauer". The charac-
teristic slow triplets and the prevalence of mixed
rythms mark this movement as unmistakably Brahms.
The Andante and Minuet are both gracious, although
not (for Brahms) extraordinary, the Minuet fore-
shadowing the Liebeslieder Waltzes, (Op. 52). The
finale, with its displaced syncopations, and its thor-

oughly characteristic coda, is true Brahms.

98 CELLO SONATA F MAJOR

SONATA IN F MAJOR, FOB PIANO AND CELLO, OP. 99

"Are you expecting Hausmann?" Brahms in-

quired carelessly of his friend, Frau Fellinger, on his
return from Thun to Vienna in the fall of 1886. Sus-
pecting that something lay behind the question, she at
once telegraphed the great cellist, and on the very
new F Major Sonata was tried
night of his arrival the
at her house,and again later at a large party given by
Billroth on the day before its public performance at
Hausmann's concert on November 24th.
An amusing reference is found in Elizabet von
Herzogenberg's comments on this sonata (after playing
it with Hausmann on his return) to Brahms' habit of

grunting uncouth noises into his beard as he played

audible to the first half dozen rows in concert halls:

"So far I have been most thrilled by the first

movement. It is so masterly in its compression,
so torrentlike in its progress, so terse in the
development, while the extension of the first sub-
ject on its return comes as the greatest surprise.
I don't need to tell you how we enjoyed the soft,
melodious Adagio, particularly the exquisite re-
turn to F sharp major, which sounds so beautiful.
I should like to hear you play the essentially
vigorous Scherzo. Indeed, I always hear you
—
snorting and puffing away at it for no one else
will ever play it just to my mind. It must be
agitated without being hurried, legato in spite of
its unrest and impetus."

Niemann says that the F Major Sonata was written

especially forHausmann, having in view the unique
features of his cello playing. He apparently had a tone
so big and luminous that it could rise, even here, above
CELLO SONATA F MAJOR 99

the piano fortissimo, or, as in the G major quintet,

above the other four strings. It is a tremendously
difficult work to play, but a most satisfactory one
when mastered. One need not, without question,
accept Niemann's assurance that the sonata " speaks
in accents of suffering passion rather than of soft
lamentation'', or agree that "it does not, on the whole,
quite come up to the level of the first" (E minor, Op.
38). Miss May says that in it "the emotions are
reached through intellectual imagination," whatever
that means.
The first movement, with its seething and heaving
tremolo on the piano and its sudden outcries from the
cello, anticipates the mood of the G major Quintet.
Comment has been made on the fact that the Adagio
leaps to the remote key of F sharp major. One of
Haydn's piano sonatas (No. I Vol. 1 of Schirmer Ed.),
however, does the same thing, the first and last move-
ments being in the key of E flat major, and the Adagio
in E major.
100 PIANO QUINTET

QUINTET IN F MINOR, FOB PIANO AND STRINGS, OP U

Except for the violin sonatas, the piano quintet
is the best known and most frequently heard of all
Brahms' chamber-music. It would be difficult to
choose any more representative work. It constitutes
the climax to his first maturity.
Its evolution illustrates clearlyBrahms' unerring
instinct for and mastery and effective
of the proper
use of musical material. He has left us no symphonies
for the Violin alone, like the Bach Chaconne.
The quintet was first written for five strings, with
two celli. then recast as a sonata for two pianos (which,
fortunately, we still have as Op. 34a) and finally
reduced to its present form for piano and four strings.
It was composed, as a string quintet, during the
summer of 1862, at Minister and Hamm, and the
first three movements sent in manuscript to Frau

Schumann. On September 3rd, she writes from

Lucerne:

"I hardly know how to tell you calmly what

a joy your quintet is to me. I have played it
through several times, and my heart is full of it.
Your things seem to grow more and more splendid,
more and more glorious. What strength, what
richness, there is in the first movement, and how
the first theme takes hold of one at once! How
beautifully it is scored for the instruments! I
can see them bowing. You ought to send yourself
with each of your compositions so that one could
discuss every bar properly with you ******.
At the close that dreamy passage and then the
accelerando and the wild passionate ending —
cannot tell you how it moves me and how it has
taken hold of me. And what an adagio! How
PIANO QUINTET 101

rapturously it sings and rings from beginning to

end! I keep on beginning it over again, and
wished it would never stop. I like the Scherzo,
too, very much, only the trio seems to me a little
short, and when is the last movement coming?"

Joachim was "hoping" to get the manuscript in

October from Brahms, who had taken it with him on
his first visit to Vienna.

The "last movement" came to Frau Schumann in

December and delighted her. "It sums up the whole
thing", she writes on December 18th, "and is full of
go * * * In fact, it is quite masterly. If only I
could hear it, for playing it at the piano is so trying
and unsatisfactory. Did you hear it in Vienna?"
As a matter was played for
of fact the quintet
him form for five strings, by
there, in its original
Heller, Bachrich, Goldmark, Lackenbacher and Gans-
bacher. Brahms certainly had misgivings about the
work — (the strings being insufficiently sonorous to
cope with mighty climaxes). He took it with him
its

on his visit to Dietrich at Oldenburg at Christmas,

and on May 1, when he went to visit Joachim in
Hanover to meet "Jusef's" fiancee, Amalie Weiss, he
asked Joachim to try it over for him. On May 26th,
1863, Joachim writes Frau Schumann:

"I was able to have his quintet played for

him. It is a great pity that the general effect of
this piece, in spite of so much that is remarkable
in it, should be unsatisfactory, and I was glad
that Johannes, on hearing it himself, wished to
alter it. A man of his strong character cannot
accept anything on hearsay."
102 PIANO QUINTET

A year later, on March 10, 1864, she writes

Brahms:
"I cannot quite understand what you have
written me
about your Quintet. Did you pro-
duce it and was it a frost? And did you, on that
account, turn it into a Duet? If this is so, you
cannot have been satisfied with it yourself in its
original form or pleased with the way it sounded.
Could you not have altered it quite easily and
yet have left it as a Quintet? Surely there were
only a few passages which did not sound well and
much of it at least gave the impression of being
a quartet?"

On April 4 Brahms wrote her from Vienna (where

he was directing the Singakademie) of the plans for
an extra concert on April 17th of "only Brahms", at
which they were to do the Ave Maria, the Marienchor,
the motets (Op. 29) and the solo quartets (Op. 31)
the B flat sextet "and finally my sonata for two pianos
which I shall play with Carl Tausig."
While the concert as a whole was a great success,
the sonata, strange to say, fell flat. On July 19, Frau
Schumann wrote from Baden thanking him "for the
duet" which she had "practiced hard for two whole
days."
"I had wanted to play it with Rubenstein,
and, as there was only one part written out, I
had to play it from your first score, which was
really not easy. However, I was richly rewarded
by the pleasure I found in playing it, and Ruben-
stein too, grew quite enthusiastic about it."

She then goes on to say that, while it delights

her, there are some "small things" she would like to
PIANO QUINTET 103

suggest, and asks that he do not print it " until we

have played it here a few times. And then perhaps
one thing or another may occur to you yourself."
Three days later, after she had studied the sonata
further, she again wrote:

" After the happy hours which I have spent

with Levi over your Sonata, dear Johannes, I
must add something about it which I have very-
much at heart. The work is on a wonderfully
grand scale, its skillful combinations are interest-
ing throughout, it is masterly from every point
—
of view, but it is not a sonata, but a work whose
— —
ideas you might and must scatter, as from a
horn of plenty, over an entire orchestra. A host
of beautiful thoughts are lost on the piano, and
are recognisable only by a musician, the public
would never enjoy them at all. The very first
time I played it, I felt as if it were a work ar-
ranged for the piano, but I thought I was preju-
diced and so I did not say anything. Levi,
however, said the same thing, very decidedly,
without my having said a word. If only I could
point out all the passages which delight me one, —
the change into 6/8 time, seems to me more
striking than words can say. I felt after it as if
I had been reading a great tragedy. But please,
dear Johannes, for this once take my advice and
recast it. If you do not feel fresh enough to do
so now, lay it by for a year and then take it up
again. Surely, the work will come to give you
great pleasure."

What with the Vienna failure and Frau Schu-

mann's advice, Brahms apparently went to work at
once again to recast the work and on November 3rd,
she writes acknowledging the "glorious quintet",
104 PIANO QUINTET

which Levi and David (the Carlsruhe Kapellmeister

and Koncertmeister) "sit copying out as if nailed to
their seats and Levi tells me how wonderful the in-
strumentation is." On November 10th she again
writes to tell of their delight in playing it several
times. "You have made it all exquisite."
During Brahms stay at Baden near Frau Schu-
mann in July and August 1864, they had played the
sonata privately for Princess Anna of Hesse, who had
been much impressed with its beauty. Brahms ac-
cordingly asked her permission to dedicate it to her,
and on its completion as a piano quintet, and dedica-
tion also in this form, Frau Schumann, ever on the
lookout, managed to seize the opportunity to suggest
that the Princess buy, and donate to Brahms, the
manuscript of Mozart's G minor symphony, then
apparently offered for sale. "The moment was so
propitious that she commanded me to buy it then
and there; you will realize with what joy I did this
when you see it. * * * How triumphant you must
have felt over the erasures". (Frau Schumann here
alludes to Brahms' habit of rubbing out his mistakes
with his wet thumb).
While we all rejoice in having the Piano Quintet,
we also rejoice that the Sonata has been preserved to
us (Op. 34a) since there is no more glorious or satis-

factory work two pianos.

for
A small volume might easily be written on the
musical structure of this quintet. A few points of
interest stand out.
The first movement, which dominates the whole

work, shows us the "heaven-storming Johannes",

PIANO QUINTET 105

now guided by a master-hand. The wealth of material

and imaginative power which pervades it defy analysis.
The opening commands instant attention, heightened
by the dramatic pause on the dominant, followed by
the rushing piano and the hammer blows from
the
strings, which precede the statement of the first
full

theme. Particularly noticeable is the way in which

the piano suggests the second theme in the cadence
preceding it. Throughout the work we find constant
Brahms' power of fertilizing his themes
illustrations of
and extracting from them new material, giving to his
works an extraordinary coherence and solidity. Miss
May suggests an enlightening analogy between this
quality in Brahms' music and the secret force that
governs all natural organic development.
The first movement contains four independent
theme groups. The rhythms in this movement are
of themselves a subject for an essay. Its conclusion,
from the poco sostenuto for the strings alone, with
the glorious awakening and triumphant end, gives
one of Brahms' most precious moments.
The Andante (would that we could hear it for the
five strings too) is filled with Brahms " visiting cards",
thirds and sixths, rich modulating linings in the
sequences, cross-rhythms in slow triplets, veiled mys-
tery preceding refreshing clarity, and ending in the
favorite plagal cadence with the F flat in the viola.
The scherzo, boiling from the beginning and
growing in momentum until it tumbles gloriously
down to the C major chord at the end (really the
dominant minor ninth of F minor leading to the last
movement) is, with the final presto, the most exciting
106 PIANO QUINTET

work to play that can be imagined. The stately trio,

with its parenthetical asides for the piano, its baffling

rhythms and its sequence in Brahms favorite sus- 7

—
pended sevenths, pungent as the wood-smells on
—
a cloudless Canadian morning, gives to the riotous
scherzo an effective foil. With the savage D flat, C,
at the end of the scherzo, already alluded to, it is
interesting to compare the end of the Schubert C major
quintet for strings.
The finale opens brooding, with slow triplets and
ever mounting figures leading to the real movement
about whose interpretation Niemann and Specht so
radically disagree (supra p. 26). An interesting feature
of this movement is the way in which the Allegro, after
the full statement, begins all over again. The 21 bars
(Tempo I) constituting the little interlude to give us
breath, before the final 6/8 presto, make one of the
most sublime spots in all chamber music.
STRING QUARTET IN B FLAT 107

QUARTET IN B FLAT MAJOR, FOR STRINGS, OP. 67

The Third String Quartet, often called the Pas-

toral from the " hunting calls" of the first theme and
in the doppio movimento, is the most joyous of the three.
In this form alone, Brahms has made the later work the
least sombre.
Although not apparently completed or given even
to Frau Schumann and Joachim until May 1876, it
was composed during the spring of 1875 at Ziegel-
hausen on the Neckar, where Brahms was staying with
Hanno, the portrait painter, and where he was very
happy. "I am delightfully lodged," he wrote, "and
pass my time delightfully". Here, also, he finished
the third (C minor) piano quartet, which the biog-
raphers consider "so sinister" and "feverishly agi-
tated". (Query, whether music is more likely to
reflect the composer's present mood than to be a
means of escape from it; compare Mozart's clarinet
quintet, wholly joyous music, written when he was
sick, hopelessly in debt, just after Constanze announced
another prospective baby).
On May 22nd, Joachim wrote Brahms:
"You have never written better chamber
music than the D minor movement and the
Finale, the former full of enchantment and
romance, the latter full of grace and sincerity of
feeling."

From the Diary:

"Berlin, May 23rd (1876). Such a surprise
—
yesterday! a new quartet by Brahms (string
quartet in Bb major) which Joachim played to
me. He and his quartet had come to play it
108 STRING QUARTET IN B FLAT

through, as well as some other new works. I

had told him of the quartet's existence and he
sent for it secretly. That was Joachim all over!"

On the same day she wrote

( l
Dearest Johannes :

I must send you a word of thanks, today

after the happy hours we spent over your quartet,
yesterday and the day before. Joachim set to
work at it at once, so that it grew into an exquis-
ite clearness —
not easy either to understand
it is
or to play. The third and fourth movements are
my special favorites, and I really do not know
which I delight in most, the sweet tones of the
viola in the third, or that charming theme and
the way it is interwoven. The theme is too
fascinating for words, with its delightful, mocking
conclusion. I hope Joachim will play it again
this week."

From the Diary:

u
June 4th. Matinee at Joachim's. Brahms
F minor quintet which gives me more pleasure
each time I hear it .... a piece in which I
revel from beginning to end. Brahms Bb major
quartet. The 1st, 3rd and 4th movements are
beautiful. The adagio (2nd movement) seems to
me not to have enough weight for Brahms."

This quartet was dedicated to Brahms' friend,

Dr. Engelmann, who beside being professor of Physi-
ology at Utrecht, was a good amateur cellist and
husband of Emma Brandes the pianist. Brahms
wrote him in August 1876:
"I am about to give birth to another string
quartet and shall need the help of a medical man
STRING QUARTET IN B FLAT 109

as in the case of the two others", (dedicated to

Dr. Billroth). "This time I do not think forceps
will be necessary". (Brahms had travailed with
his two first quartets for more than seven years).

"I need not now," Dr. Engelmann wrote in reply,

" worry somuch about immortality!".
In October Brahms wrote to Simrock complaining
good-naturedly of the delay in publication and saying

"For a fee I am asking only a paltry 15,000

marks. From this amount, being a natural born
scoundrel, you will at once deduct 3,000 marks;
for delay 1,500; for additional delay in the four-
hand arrangement 1,500; because there are only
two flats in the key, 750; for cigars, tobacco,
eau de cologne etc. 2250; by flim-flamming the
accounts you will skin me out of 3000 more;
and you having already lent me 600, leaves a
balance to me of 2400; * * * To this I must
add; because the Adagio is such a short one 45;
because I am sending the MSS for each move-
—
ment 7}/2 pf 30; for sketches of the tender
movement, 2 Gulden."

The quartet revels in changes and combinations

of rhythm. 6/8 and 2/4, 4/4 and 5/4, and finally
2/4 and 6/8.
The third movement, agitato, was a particular
favorite with Brahms, who told Henschel (at Sassnitz
on the island of Rugen, where they spent the summer
of 1876 together) that he considered this movement
"the most amorous, affectionate thing he had written".
Specht, however, who finds passion and love in fugues
and motets, does not like it. In this movement the
110 STRING QUARTET IN B FLAT

viola takes the prominent part, its three companions

being muted throughout.
In October 1876, after having heard Joachim and
his colleagues play the quartet in private, Brahms
wrote Joachim a most interesting letter containing
specific suggestions regarding the tempi. He points
out that the passage in the Scherzo (at letter B in the
Eulenberg score) after the retard "is not marked
scherzando"

"There should be no change' he goes on,

'

"in the mood of the music and the indication

poco a poco in tempo primo (up to about the
3rd bar) must not be neglected. You will excuse
me, as you probably did not credit me with such
finesse. I always imagine my own renderings to be
very rough, but in writing, I have all sorts of
refinement and delicacy in my mind. * * * Are
you entirely ignoring my request that you should
alter some of the notes in the more difficult
passages, especially in the first movement? The
necessity for fingering is proof of bad writing" * * *

The final variation in the last movement brings

back the opening theme of the first, as in the G major
violin sonata and in the clarinet quintet, both later
works.
HORN TRIO 111

TRIO IN E FLAT MAJOR FOR PIANO, VIOLIN AND WALD-HORN,

OP. 40

Each of the four movements is a master-piece.

Any one of them may properly be chosen as the
favorite, or even one on one day, another the next.
The most examination from one end to the
critical
other, will disclose no weak spot. It is hard to find a
serious musician who does not like The Horn Trio.
There is but one such work.
Brahms himself played the horn when a boy in
Hamburg and was always fond of it. It has often,
with him, the decisive word, as in the Requiem, the
beautiful three part chorus (Op. 17) for women with
two horns and harp, the D major Serenade, the open-
ing of the Second Symphony, the B flat concerto, and,
best of all, its radiant entry with the Swiss shepherd's
call in the finale of the First Symphony.
There had been a splendid horn player, August
Cordes, at Detmold, during Brahms' three years stay
there.
When he wrote this Trio during the early summer
of 1865, Brahms had few modelsfor the unusual
combination of piano, violin and horn, there being
no previous horn trio and no sonatas for horn and
piano other than the Beethoven Op. 17, in F major
(usually played by the cello) and unknown sonatas
by Lessel and Bernsdorf.
Brahms intendedthis work for the wald-horn and
not for the ventil horn, believing that the natural
notes of the former have a fuller quality than those
produced by the valves. "If", he says in a letter to
Richard Heuberger, "the performer is not obliged by
112 HORN TRIO

the stopped notes to play softly, the piano and violin

are not obliged to adapt themselves to him and the
tone rough from the beginning."
is

After the first private performance at Carlsruhe

on December 7th, 1865, Brahms wrote to his friend
Dietrich, director of the orchestra at Oldenburg,
apropos of his proposed visit for a concert:

"For a quartet evening I can with good

conscience recommend my Horn trio, and your
horn player would do me a great favor if he
would do like the Carlsruhe man and practice
the French [natural] horn for some weeks before-
hand, so as to be able to play it on that."

Westermann did so practice on the hand horn

and the public performance was apparently a great
success. Of it Dietrich says in his Reminiscences:

" Every onewas deeply impressed by the

horn trio and by and romanticism.
its originality
Some years later, when we were wandering to-
gether on the wooded heights above Baden-Baden,
Brahms showed me the spot where the theme of
the first movement of this work came into his
mind."
"I was walking along one morning", he said,
"and as I came to this spot the sun shone out
and with it this theme ". (Dietrich to Miss May)
...

An interesting item in the history of this work

was its performance at Basle on March 26, 1867, with
Brahms and violinist Abel, by Hans Richter, later
the great Wagner conductor, who began his career as
a hornist.
HORN TRIO 113

Although Kleinicke at Vienna played it on the

wald-horn, Frau Schumann's hornist at Frankfort
could not be persuaded to do so.

"I had meant to write to you from Leipsic,"

she writes Brahms from Coblenz on December 22,
1866, "the day after the quartet evening when I
played your horn trio, but I left Cologne the next
morning and all these last days were one wild
rush. We had studied your trio (I had begged
it from Simrock) very well, and the horn player
was excellent. I do not think he spluttered once,
and that says a great deal; though it is true that
he played on a ventil horn. He would not be
induced to try a wald-horn. The Scherzo was
applauded most energetically, and next to that,
the last movement, which went as if fired from
a pistol."

From the Diary, January 19, 1870:

—
"I played Johannes' Horntrio it
went very well,but was not at all favorably
received, — and that pained us greatly on his
account. The people did not understand this
truly spirited, and thoroughly interesting work,
in spite of the fact that the first movement, for
example, is full of the most ingratiating melodies,
and the last movement, teeming with fresh life.
The Adagio, too, is wonderful, but indeed hard
to understand on first hearing."

Little can be said to supplement the music of

this work. It is one of those in which Brahms rose
above himself to that universal expression which is the
rare privilege of the great alone. A few points in its
structure are interesting.
114 HORN TRIO

An important feature of all Brahms chamber

music is his choice of themes adapted to each of the
instruments participating, and not suitable merely for
one of them. This is especially noticeable in the
themes of the Horn Trio, which sound equally well
on horn, violin and piano, a most difficult problem,
solved so simply that the original difficulty is wholly
forgotten.
The first movement is not, as usual, in sonata
form, but in that of the old divertimenti, with no
development section. Almost at once Brahms' favorite
cross-rhythms make their appearance, triplets in 6/8
against the syncopated 4/4 in the first section, and
seconds against the triplets in the 9/8 (animato). Still
another rhythmic surprise comes later in the piano
part with the syncopated triplets just before the G
minor section preceding the return to the first theme.
The coda of this movement is pure Brahms, as is that
of the Adagio.
Particularly noticeable in the Scherzo are the
sudden injection of one, two or more bars of 2/4
rhythm interrupting the galloping 3/4. Also the
startling modulations, enharmonic changes and aug-
mented sixths (again in the last movement). When
in the Trio of the Scherzo (written in the unusual key
of A flat minor and reminiscent of the similar move-
ment in the first piano sonata Op. 1) Brahms gives
the direction molto meno allegro, he means molto.
He who is searching for pure beauty, direct from
the creator of all things, need look no farther than
the two solo bars for the horn announcing the second
theme of the Adagio nor is there, in all music, a more
;
HORN TRIO 115

beautiful passage than that where this theme in the

violin combines with the first theme in the piano, to
express a musical thought obviously different from
each of the two. Another immortal moment is where
the piano part (two bars before the restatement of the
second theme by the others) slips in the B double
flat. This modulation to the sub-dominant just at
the end, while one of the effects taught to all students
of composition, is used by Brahms with supreme
mastery. We find it again at the end of the Andante
of the D minor violin sonata (C natural in the D
major) and still again, (although less striking) in the
last movement of the G major sextet.
Frau Schumann's description of the last move-
ment ("shot from a pistol") does not mean that it
must be hurried. Again we have the baffling rhythms,
3/4 against the 6/8. No music could be more satisfy-
ing than the triumphant re-entry of the first theme
on the violin, after the retard and accel. to tempo by
the horn and piano in their dialogue at the end of the
little development section.

When, (as usual) a competent horn player is not

available, the horn part may be played on the viola
or cello. While one critic prefers the viola, to most
the cello is the more satisfactory, the viola tone not
being big enough to fill up the passages intended for
the horn, which can always be heard pianissimo-
116 PIANO QUARTET IN C MINOR

QUARTET IN C MINOR, FOR PIANO AND STRINGS, OP. 60

Miss May rates this Third Piano Quartet as " de-

cidedly below its glorious companions, Op. 25 and 26",
and as much the popular of the three, although
least
"the easiest to grasp at first hearing". Colles, on the
other hand, describes it as "one of the best loved of
Brahms' works". Specht and Niemann both con-
sider one of his strongest and most moving compo-
it

although the latter says that it is "esteemed

sitions,
and admired rather than beloved and popular". Miss
May, who preferred the original B major trio to the
revised version, apparently had an ineradicable preju-
dice in favor of the works written before she studied
with Brahms in 1871. Both her conclusions would
seem open to question. Certainly there is nothing
"inferior" about this quartet. The Andante and
Scherzo rank with his best, and the second theme in
the first movement is one of his most precious.
The quartet has a long history. The greater part
of it unquestionably dates back to the middle 50's
when Brahms was in the midst of the turmoil of soul
over Schumann's illness and death and his struggle
with himself over "Clara". The origin of the Scherzo,
however, the most tumultuous and explosive of the
four movements, dates behind that, since it is said to
be the offspring of the Scherzo written by Brahms for
the Sonata to surprise Joachim in October 1853, for
which Schumann (under the caption F. A. E.) wrote
the first movement and Dietrich the last, and which
Joachim gave to the Brahms Gesellschaft for publica-
tion in 1906. An examination of the early Scherzo
PIANO QUARTET IN C MINOR 117

would not seem to bear out the statement by the

biographers that that of the Quartet was a "revision"
of it. They are rather two different Scherzos from the
same hand, the first a beginner (the trio of the old
Scherzo is terrible) the second a master. Apparently
the first movement of the C minor quartet, (as well as
the Adagio), was conceived in the middle 50s and laid
aside to be taken up again and the whole finished in
1873 or 1874. When Brahms played Dieters the
sketch of the first movement in 1868, Brahms said:
"Now think of a man who is just going to shoot him-
self,because there is nothing left for him to do," ex-
plaining further that while this feeling was not in-
tended consciously to be portrayed by the music, the
music was the outcome of such feelings at the time it
was conceived.
In his letter to Simrock when he sent it for publi-
cation:

"This Quartet is both old and new, and so

the whole fellow is good for nothing. * * *
furthermore, you may place a picture on the
title page, namely, a head —
with a pistol in front
of it. This will give you some idea of the music.
I shall send you a photograph of myself for the
purpose! You may also make use of a blue
frock-coat, a yellow waist-coat and top boots, as
you appear to be fond of color prints."

It is because of the latter allusion that this is

sometimes called the Werther Quartet.
Specht calls the beautiful Adagio his "farewell to
Clara", Widmann " Brahms' avowal of love ". Kalbeck
tells us that the first movement was originally in the
118 PIANO QUARTET IN C MINOR

key of C sharp minor. In Frau Schumann's diary for

October 18th, 1856, is the following:
"Johannes has finished his Concerto. We
have played it several times on two pianos. He
has composed a wonderfully beautiful Adagio for
his C sharp minor quartet—full of tenderness."
"Tuesday 21st. Johannes left. I went to
—
the station with him as I came back I felt as if
I were returning from a funeral."

In December he writes her that he "is painting

away at a gentle picture of you, which will be an
Adagio/
On August 5, 1859, she also writes "And what
about the quartet? I heard that you played it with
Reimers at Frau Peterson's". The reference to
Johannes' playing implies a piano quartet.
Although the experts all thus connect this quartet
conclusively with Frau Schumann and the stormy
days of 1855-56, it is puzzling to explain her own
complacency with regard to it when she heard it in
its completed form in 1875. In July of that year we
find her writing to Brahms
"With heartfelt content I look back on our
pleasant afternoon with you, and your music has
—
been a real refreshment to me I ought to have
pleasures of this sort frequently, as I realize only
too well.
I have been thinking about the quartet a
great deal, and the last three movements have
—
taken quite hold of me, but if I may say so
the first does not seem to me on the same level,
it has not the same freshness —though there is
freshness in the first theme. I should have liked
to hear it once more, that I might be quite clear
PIANO QUARTET IN C MINOR 119

why did not make me enthusiastic. Could

it
not you —who
often carry a movement in your
—
head for ever so long manage to alter it, or to
write a new movement? You have already
proved many a time how easily you can slip into
the same train of thought again, and to what
splendid effect. Forgive me, perhaps all this is
quite stupid/

If the quartet had in fact sprung directly from her

relations with Brahms, might we not expect her to
have known and to have remembered
of this in 1856,
it in 1875? Women never forget these things.
An interesting feature of the structure of the first
movement is the reservation of the full restatement of
the first subject for the coda. The second subject
section of this movement consists of a little set of varia-
tions on the first piano theme.
The splendid Scherzo and Adagio have already
been referred to. The former is as exciting as the
Scherzo in the Piano Quintet and the latter, with its
delightful rhythmic tangles, is equally fascinating.
Specht thinks that the piano figure which pervades the
last movement contains an intentional allusion to
"Fate knocks at the door". Interesting if true. When
some stupid pedant called Brahms' attention to the
similarity between this piano figure and the opening
of the Mendelssohn C minor trio, he said: "Das —
sieht jeder Narr." While he was spending the summer
with Henschel at Sassnitz in 1876 Brahms referred to
this chance and specious resemblance, pointing out
that what with Mendelssohn constituted the theme
itself, was with him merely an accompanying figure.
120 TRIO IN C MINOR

TBIO IN C MINOR, FOB PIANO, VIOLIN AND CELLO, OP. 101

This trio was the third of the triology written at

Thun during the happy summer of 1886. It is uni-
versally considered one of his most powerful works.
"No previous work of Johannes/' says Clara of it
in her diary, "has so completely carried me away."
"Oct. 27th. Rehearsal of Brahms' trio. I
owe hours of bliss to this work."
"Oct. 28th. The trio (Brahms') went mag-
nificently. We had worked at it well together
and I played it with the greatest enthusiasm.
The audience was quite carried away; we had to
repeat the second movement and they wanted
the third as well * *
"We were all together in the evening when
Stockhausen came in. There arose a great dis-
pute over Handel, and Woldemar got quite
excited. Brahms was silent at first, and then
became rude. Stockhausen, when he had nothing
left to say, began to sing, thus silencing all op-
position."

"The C minor trio", says Specht, "is a self-

portrait if ever Brahms created one, amazingly con-
centrated —an extract ofhis whole nature compressed
into thirty-six pages. In the first bar the principal
theme is hurled down in chords like thunderbolts, and
we can see the master at the piano, throwing back
his head with a mighty jerk, with flashing eyes, a
grey-blond mane and a full awe-inspiring beard, and
we seem to hear his curious grunting and panting as
he plays."
A striking resemblance has been noted between
the opening of this trio and that of the Third Grieg
TRIO IN C MINOR 121

Violin Sonata in the same key. Each work was com-

pleted before the other was published, and so the
resemblance was a clear coincidence on both sides.
The Andante, a duologue between the piano and
the strings, goes back to the folk song for its rhythm,
one bar 3/4 with two 2/4, while the second subject
varies between 9/8 and 6/8.
The second (muted) movement (presto) Frau
Herzogenberg considered the " pearl among them all."
"Its ghost like figures are so tangible in their beauty."
Of this trio she wrote after her receipt of the
manuscript at the end of 1886:

"Few things, I imagine, have ever been so

perfectly proportioned as this trio, which is so
passionate and so controlled, so powerful and so
lovable, so terse and so eloquent. I suspect
your feelings as you wrote the last bar were very
much those of Heinrich der Vogler in his prayer
'Thou gavest me a goodly catch, for which I
thank thee, Lord.'
* * •*

"The Trio is better than any photograph of

you."

"I wager", Joachim wrote to Brahms in July,

1887, "that not even you have often written any-
thing more beautiful than the Trio in C minor."
122 VIOLIN SONATA IN D MINOR

SONATA IN D MINOR, FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO, OP. 108

Schumann on October 19th,

In a letter to Frau
1888,Brahms spoke of "a little violin sonata" and
on November 2nd wrote to her:

"The violin sonata which I mentioned the

other day I have sent to the Herzogenbergs, and
I have received such an unexpectedly kind letter
about it, that I am wondering whether it might
not please you too. * * * Forgive me for not
having sent you the sonata first, but you will
never believe my chief reason for not having
done so. The truth is that I can never do a piece
the credit of believing that it will please anybody.
I feel the same about this one * * * If the
sonata does not please you when you play it
through, do not try it with Joachim, but send it
back to me."

The above, as well as the similar depreciation of

the revised B trio, was not prompted by any
major
falsemodesty, nor, it is believed, by Brahms' failure
to appreciate the soundness of his work, but from the
fact that his ideals constantly outstripped any pos-
them. Nothing that he ever could
sible realization of
do came up to what he would do, and so long as he
tested his productions merely by his own conceptions
he was dissatisfied. Only when his friends judged
them by their standards, did they appear master-
pieces.
Frau Schumann promptly sent for the sonata, and
though unable to play it herself owing to neuralgia,
she heard it from her daughter Elise and Koning and
was overjoyed with it.
VIOLIN SONATA IN D MINOR 123

"What a wonderfully beautiful thing you

have once more given us* * *. I marvelled at
the way everything is interwoven, like fragrant
tendrils of a vine. I loved very much indeed the
third movement which is like a beautiful girl
—
sweetly frolicking with her lover then suddenly
in the middle of it all, a flash of deep passion,
only to make way for sweet dalliance once more.
But what a melancholy atmosphere pervades the
whole! The last movement is glorious * *
*"

By December 8th her hand allowed her to play

and she gave a "party for musicians", at which she
and Koning played. "I enjoyed the sonata enor-
mously * * * they were all enthusiastic."
"Jan. 7. Brahms arrived * * * On the 8th
B tried the sonata with Heermann. He played
it as I have always imagined it, except that he
took the adagio slower"

Soon after that Joachim came and she had another

"party of musicians" at which she and Joachim played
the sonata "twice running."
Johannes to Clara: (then in her seventy-first
year)

"Vienna, Nov. 1889 * * * The thought of

my D minor sonata wandering along gently and
dreamily under your fingers is too pretty and
pleasant. I actually laid it on my desk and in
my thought went gently stealing through the
organ-point shrubbery with you. You always
at my side, and I know no greater happiness than
when I sit by your side, or, as now, walk beside
you."
124 VIOLIN SONATA IN D MINOR

Clara (aged 74) to Johannes:

" Frankfort, Feb. 1, 1894. We also had
Joachim with us for an evening and he played me
a quartet by Robert and then played your third
sonata with me. That was a joy such as one
seldom has! In the first movement, with its
singing harmonies melting into each other, I
had constantly the feeling that I was floating on
the clouds. I cannot tell you how I love this
sonata; —
every movement of it who knows
whether it is not the last time I shall ever play it!"

Johannes to Clara —Vienna, February 8th.

"How delighted I am when you write as
kindly about my music as you have this time
about my third violin sonata; I went straight away
and took it up tenderly and played it to myself."
In view of the foregoing from Frau Schumann, who
with Joachim understood Brahms' music as perhaps no
one else ever will, what matters it that Miss May and
Specht, as well as Landormy, Brahms' French biog-
rapher, dismiss this glorious sonata with a few curt
words! Niemann, at any rate, thinks it the greatest
of the three, but that it contains "more reflection than
spontaneity."
The "letter from the Herzogenbergs", which
Brahms mentions in the first letter quoted, was really
from Elizabet and contains an extraordinarily dis-
cerning appreciation of the work, too long to quote
in full (see pp.360-362 of the Herzogenberg Letters).
She describes vividly how the manuscript arrived
early in the morning and how they rushed half-dressed
to awake Amanda Rontgen (violinist), Elizabet and
Heinrich fighting to play the piano part.
VIOLIN SONATA IN D MINOR 125

"Our eyes flew from bar to bar, our zeal and

delight grew from page to page, our fingers
tackled every difficulty with such success that I
hardly knew myself" * * *
"At the opening of the development we quite
held our breath. How new it is, with that exquis-
ite pedal note absorbing everything! How our
surprise and delight grew and grew as the A
showed no sign of giving way, but held its own
through all that glorious tissue woven above it!
How my left thumb revelled in the pressure it
had to exert! And that F sharp minor on that
Proteus A and the gradual ebbing until the
theme's subdued return molto legato. 0, my
friend, that was indeed one of your moments. " * * *
"What delights me so in this sonata is its
wonderful unity. The four movements are so
unmistakably members of one family. One pur-
pose dominates them; one color scheme embraces
them all; yet their vitality finds expression in
various ways." * * *
"I rejoice to find the Adagio undisturbed by
any middle part * * * How comical (in the best
sense, for one laughs for pleasure) is the Presto
in its breathless hurry, and how rich in every
line * * * The finale has in the highest degree
—
the one quality essential to a finale an irre-
sistible impetus. It tears along like Aurora's
steeds in the glorious picture."

"One day," Eugenie Schumann writes in her

Memoirs, "he [Brahms] played the piano part in his
violin sonata in D Minor at our house. Mamma
used to say that there was one bit, marked 'tranquillo'
at the end of the third movement, where one walked
on eggs. Marie and I were most anxious to hear how
he would manage to get safely across. When it came,
126 VIOLIN SONATA IN D MINOR

he took the tranquillo so excessively slowly that noth-

ing could happen. We smiled at each other.
i
There
he goes, tip-toeing over the eggs', we thought".
Elizabet von Herzogenberg suggested that the
violin chords at the opening of the Scherzo be taken
pizzicato. Brahms adopted this in the repetition, but
made a special legato mark against the violin chords
in the beginning. Of the finale, she says:

"The more I play the Finale, the more hope-

lesslydo I fall in love with it. I hardly know
anything else that tears along with such spirit
* * * How
glorious it must be to feel that it has
lost none of its original power in the process of
development from that first conception to its
present elaborately worked out form!"
CLARINET QUINTET 127

QUINTET, IN B MINOR, FOE CLARINET AND STRINGS, OP. 115

There is believed to be no more profound,

masterly and lastingly enjoyable work of chamber-
music, than this quintet. Were it alone, it would
make Brahms immortal
The occasion for its composition has been de-
scribed in the discussion of the Clarinet Trio (supra
p 45), written at the same time. With the Trio it
was privately performed at Meiningen by Muhlfeld,
Joachim, Hausmann and two members of the orches-
tra in November, 1891, and publicly in Berlin in
December. During the rehearsals Brahms wrote
Hanslick that the Adagio was played "as long and as
often as the clarinetist could hold out". At the
concert this movement was repeated in deference to
the enthusiasm which would have had all four move-
ments a second time. Immediately after the Berlin
performance, Joachim wrote (in English) to Sir
Charles Villiers Stanford, to arrange for a perform-
ance in England of the Quintet, "one of the sublimest
things he ever wrote". Brahms, he says, will giv6
the manuscript only on condition that they engage
Muhlfeld "a stupendous fellow", there being "too
much Gypsy-stile" in it for an English clarinetist.
Thanks to the generosity of an English admirer
(Alfred Behrens) who had offered to finance tke first
English performance of the German Requiem and
who laterbequeathed Brahms £1000, Muhlfeld was
engaged and two performances were given in London
with progressive enthusiasm by both performers and
audience, since when it has been received with both
reverence and affection whenever and wherever ade-
128 CLARINET QUINTET

quately heard. While the clarinet part may be played

on the viola, no one who has heard it only in this form
can fully understand its beauty. It is really a different
work.
One wonders how anyone with understanding
(such as G. B. Shaw, a chronic scoffer at Brahms)
knowing this work, can assert that Brahms' music is
all "harsh" and "unmelodious". From all four move-
ments the loveliest melodies are continuously bursting.
Somewhat less incomprehensible, but misleading
nevertheless, is the tendency on the part of the apprecia-
tive to call it a sort of swansong, "flooded with the
last red glow of an artist's evening." While it may
possibly signify "quiet and painfully agitated resigna-
tion" or "gentle regret" to those looking for regret
and resignation, forothers it may have a wholly
different message. What Brahms was thinking when
he made it we will never know, nor does it matter.
The music speaks to each in his own language.
In a short article in The Musical Times for
July 1, 1926, Mrs. Carl Derenburg (Ilona Eibenschutz)
a pupil of Clara Schumann, who as a young girl had
often been present at Brahms' visits to her in Frank-
fort, vividly describes a performance of this quintet:

"Miihlfeld (Clarinetist) came to Ischl for

one day to visit Brahms and played Brahms'
Clarinet Quintet with the Kneisel Quartet. This
was the most wonderful performance I ever
heard. It took place at Kneisel's house, the
audience consisting of Brahms, Herr and Frau
Steinbach, Herr and Frau Nikisch, and myself.
Miihlfeld played marvellously on his clarinet, and
when they had finished playing this heavenly
CLARINET QUINTET 129

work, we were all so moved that nobody found a

word to say. But Nikisch fell on his knees be-
fore Brahms, and that exactly expressed our
feelings/

Thoreau says that the singer "can easily move

us to tears or laughter, but who ishe who can com-
municate a pure morning joy?" ThoSau never heard
this quintet, nor the opening of theTj major violin
sonata, nor the beginning of the G major sextet, nor
Feldeinsamkeit, nor the Andante of the Second Sym-
phony.
The Quintet as a whole epitomizes the treatment
of noble musical ideas with perfect balance and unity.
The first movement opens with Brahms' favorite
thirds and throughout is filled with his individuality.
One never tires of it and new beauties appear at each
new hearing. Even Joachim required some time to
get "quite used to the C sharp and F major" in the
development section.
The Adagio is unique in music, both in variety
and depth of the material and in mastery of construc-
tion. Its opening is a perfect example of Brahms'
rhythmic originality and complication. The clarinet
sings a beautiful quiet tune in simple 3/4 time, while
below it each of the other four instruments weaves its
separate path in a wholly distinct rhythm from all

the others, —a great bird soaring above a busy city

with the people going their separate ways below.
Then comes the famous middle section where the clari-
net is allowed to show off all that he can do, saying
something, however, all the while. After each bravura
130 CLARINET QUINTET

passage is finishedby the clarinetist, the first violin

quietly explains what he has really been talking about.
The third movement is again in the " morning
joy" mood, with a presto middle section furnishing a
striking contrast. The last movement consists of
variations on a musical idea, done in Brahms' incom-
parable variation style. Particularly interesting is the
music-box variation; also the change to 6/8 time and
the reintroduction of the theme and mood from the
first movement. Best of all are the last lovely de-
scending notes of the clarinet, repeated from the end
of the first movement.

"Thus falls a star, and thus it is extinguished."

Date Due
SEP 2 8 1954

MAY 17
v

MfH r
• .Hi

'

Library Bureau Cat. no. 1137

785.7 B73d
MUSIC

n 3 5002 00218 54S7

° ° HD '
Drinker. Henry Sandw.th
The chamber music of
Johannes Brahms,

HT 145 . B72 D8

Drinker, Henry Sandvith,

iaao-1965.

The chamber music of

Johannes Brahms

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