Brahms & Barber: Knoxville

Johannes Brahms | Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 (1855-1876) | Length: 45 minutes

ORCHESTRATION: Orchestration: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, and strings

WORLD PREMIERE: November 4, 1876, in Karlsruhe, Germany, with Otto Dessoff conducting

U.S. PREMIERE: The Los Angeles Philharmonic, October 21, 1921, Walter Henry Rothwell conducting

In 1853, Robert Schumann wrote a laudatory article about a 20-year-old composer from Hamburg named Johannes Brahms, whom, Schumann declared, was the heir to Beethoven’s musical legacy. Schumann wrote, “If [Brahms] directs his magic wand where the massed power in chorus and orchestra might lend him their strength, we can look forward to even more wondrous glimpses into the secret world of the spirits.”

Few great works of music have taken so long to get from sketch to finished product. Certainly, Brahms had his reasons for delaying publication of his first symphony, but his colleagues began to wonder if he might leave an unfinished symphony in the attic. In 1870 Brahms declared he would never complete the piece. Then, Brahms’ publisher Fritz Simrock wrote: “Aren’t you doing anything more? Am I not to have a symphony from you in ’73 either?” But there was no symphony in 1873, just as there had been no symphony any year since 1854, when Brahms first set out to write one. Brahms did have a symphony in process. As early as 1862, he sent a completed first movement to Clara Schumann. Although Brahms certainly took his time, he proved to an impatient musical public that there was still music being written that was worth the wait. 

When Brahms sent his completed first movement to Clara Schumann in 1862, it didn’t begin with the fierce and arresting introduction we know, but took off like a rocket from the headlong Allegro. When he played the entire symphony for Clara more than a dozen years later, it began with the powerful, measured drum beat and chromatic unfolding that now lead straight into the Allegro. Even though it was written after the fact, Brahms’ introduction offers a preview of what follows: The opening violin line rising by half steps and the falling thirds in the winds will both be expanded upon elsewhere. The Allegro is conceived on the largest scale. The retransition leading to the recapitulation is stretched to incredible lengths and then resolution is further delayed by a daring descent into a remote key. Brahms’s slow movement, in the unexpected key of E major, is intimate and modest, with lovely woodwind solos and a magnificent one for violin at the end. The third movement is not a scherzo, but instead an intermezzo, as warm and ingratiating as Brahms’s piano pieces of the same name. With the finale we arrive at a Beethoven comparison, partly because any symphony that begins in C minor and then forges triumphantly into C major like Beethoven’s Fifth, and partly because Brahms’ robust allegro melody suggests nothing more than the great song of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” When the likeness was pointed out, Brahms simply said, “Any ass can see that.” 

The strength of Brahms’ symphonic conviction is apparent everywhere, and his instinct for the scope and power of the form derives from Beethoven (notably the rhythmic motif of the Fifth Symphony). The entire first movement is highly dramatic, nowhere more so than in the extended, slowly building passage leading to the recapitulation. Here, Brahms’ sense of dynamic expansion is definitive; this is as grand a symphonic movement as he ever conceived.

The two central movements present the other side of Brahms’ musical persona: Charming lyricism and soaring expressiveness in an Andante that closes with those elegant violin solos that must have inspired his Violin Concerto; gentle Schubertian reminiscences contrasted with a powerful Allegretto that is Brahms’ personalized version of a Beethoven scherzo.

The Finale’s introduction, incorporating fragments of the ensuing Allegro, is more extended than the first movement’s and evolves a fearsomeness bordering on terror. This dark emotional tone is finally pierced by a radiant horn call, and by a solemn chorale that speaks of deliverance and peace. Then, that theme begins which has been called Brahms’ version of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy theme in the Ninth Symphony. In its reappearances this grand melody is a source of deep comfort, and in its radical transformations a nucleus for the imposing grandeur that unfolds on the way to blazing, unrestrained triumph.

An unusual paradox became apparent in reactions to Brahms’s music from about the period of the German Requiem. Even as he was acknowledged as a master, and his works entered the standard repertory and then the canon, there were strong reservations about his music. His technical prowess was never in doubt, but his music was felt to lack true originality and expressiveness. These views were held even by such staunch allies as Hanslick and Kalbeck. Beethoven was the yardstick against which Brahms was constantly measured. For Louis Köhler in 1880, Brahms would never rise above epigonal status; without spiritual qualities he could be ‘no kind of Beethoven’. In 1918 Paul Bekker advanced one of the main theories of Brahms reception, which had already been adumbrated as early as 1879 by Wagner: Brahms was essentially a composer of chamber music. For Bekker, Brahms’s was a small-scale, bourgeois mentality, incapable of the ‘society-forming’ (gesellschaftsbildend) impulse that led Beethoven to write the Ninth Symphony. Brahms’ symphonies were to Bekker no more than ‘monumentalized chamber music’.

Some years later, Theodor Adorno, and after him Carl Dahlhaus, radically inverted the Wagner-Bekker characterization from a defect to a virtue. The chamber-music qualities of Brahms’s symphonic music were now deemed to be the most forward-looking aspect of his work. According to this view, the intricate textures and continuous motivic variation were harbingers of 20th-century music, especially that of the Schoenberg school. For Adorno, writing in 1940, Brahms’s music represented the first time in Western music that the ‘subjective’ elements of thematic development determined ‘objective’ formal structures.

His works continue to be mainstays on the concert stage and in recordings. There have been impressive achievements in documentary, historical and analytical research, and in performing practice, partly resulting from activities of the Brahms anniversary years 1983 and 1997. All this activity suggests that the special combination of beauty and integrity in his music continues to exert considerable appeal in a postmodern age.