Johannes Brahms was the chief acolyte of the conservative stream of musical Romanticism, the movement that was born from the loins of Beethoven and that burst into flower throughout Europe in about 1830. As a young composer Brahms sought out Robert Schumann, one of the first generation of musical Romantics, appearing unannounced on his doorstep in Düsseldorf in 1853. Schumann was hugely impressed by the young man’s talent, and on October 28 of that year he published in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik an effusive article titled “Neue Bahnen” (“New Paths”), which acclaimed Brahms as a sort of musical Messiah, “destined to give ideal presentation to the highest expression of the time … springing forth like Minerva fully armed from the head of Jove.”
Brahms fulfilled Schumann’s prophecy and became the figure who most fully adapted the models of Beethoven (via Mendelssohn and Schumann) to the evolving aesthetics of the mid-to-late–19th century. He did not achieve this without considerable struggle, and, aware of the burden that fell on his shoulders, he was reluctant to sign off on works in the genres that invited direct comparison to Beethoven, such as string quartets and symphonies. He did, however, manage to bring his First Piano Concerto to completion in 1859, and he published it four years later. He would not follow up with his considerably more serene Piano Concerto No. 2 (1878–1881) until two further decades had passed.
The Piano Concerto No. 1 is a stormy work of essentially “pure,” tumultuous Romanticism, closely related in its expression to Schumann’s ideals. This is not surprising in light of the fact that it was completed only a year and a half after Schumann’s death, which followed a suicide attempt and two and a half years of decline in an asylum near Bonn. Lacking his elder to provide counsel, Brahms instead sought a musical confidante in Schumann’s widow, Clara, an eminent pianist and close friend. Important support and advice also came from their friend Joseph Joachim, the violinist, who would serve as the first conductor of this concerto.
In 1854, Brahms had written at least three movements of a Sonata in D Minor for Two Pianos, one of many of his works that would not be completed but instead would be recycled into a piece for strikingly different forces. By April 1856, some of the sonata’s music had morphed into a preliminary version of this piano concerto (without changing key), and Brahms began sending bits of it to Joachim for his comments. Joachim proved to be a patient and insightful editor and coach, and Brahms took many of his ideas to heart. The composer was characteristically loath to let go of his piece, however, leading the frustrated Joachim to write, “I beg of you, please, for God’s sake let the copyist get at the concerto”—which is what Brahms finally did a couple of months later.
Joachim was then serving as concertmaster at the Hanover Court Orchestra. He mustered his orchestra for a read-through of the new work on March 30, 1858, and then oversaw the premiere 10 months later. The premiere was at least politely received, but that was not the case when the concerto was aired in Leipzig five days later, with Julius Rietz conducting the Gewandhaus Orchestra. “No reaction at all to the first and second movement,” Brahms wrote to Joachim, adding,
At the end, three pairs of hands tried slowly to clap … For all that, one day, when I’ve improved its physical structure, this concerto will please, and a second one will sound very different.
Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra towers as one of the summits of 20th-century symphonic music, but it is something of a miracle that the piece was written at all. Bartók had been trained at the Budapest Academy of Music, had immersed himself in the traditional music of Hungary and the Balkans (and of regions as distant as North Africa), and had found liberation in the harmonies and orchestration of contemporary French composers. While his distinguished countryman Zoltán Kodály drew on folklore to develop a distinctly Hungarian “classical” style, Bartók used the same influences to transcend borders, to achieve a sort of idealized universality.
There was a price to pay for this, and Bartók often complained of being underappreciated by audiences and of experiencing financial trouble. He grew increasingly desperate as National Socialism overtook Central Europe in the 1930s, but he felt compelled to stay in Hungary to look after his adored mother. When she died, in 1939, Bartók wasted little time in preparing his exit, and in the fall of 1940 he and his family arrived in New York, where he spent the five years that remained to him.
The 59-year-old Bartók felt depressed and isolated in his new surroundings. He lacked energy and was plagued by ill health, the first symptoms of the leukemia that would kill him. He gave some concerts and received a grant from Columbia University to carry out research on Slavic folk music, but he became convinced that his career as a composer was over. Others gave in less easily. His English publisher, Ralph Hawkes, proposed that Bartók write a series of concertos for solo instruments and string orchestra along the lines of Bach’s “Brandenburg” Concertos, but nothing came of that suggestion until the summer of 1943. By then, Columbia’s grant money had run out and Bartók was in precarious health, confined to a hospital.
At the instigation of two similarly displaced Hungarian friends, conductor Fritz Reiner and violinist Joseph Szigeti, Serge Koussevitzky (the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a champion of contemporary music) dropped by the hospital to offer the composer a $1,000 commission for a new symphonic work. This was obviously an act of charity: Bartók’s weight had fallen to 87 pounds, and he was all but bankrupt. Resistant to handouts, Bartók refused on the grounds that he doubted he could deliver the piece. But Koussevitzky, without missing a beat, improvised the white lie that his foundation required him to give Bartók a check for half the amount in order to secure the commission—a risk they wanted to assume—and that the remaining half would wait until the piece was completed. Bartók accepted the plan and the much-needed check, and during the summer and early fall of 1943 he rallied to write the entire Concerto for Orchestra at a rural mountain getaway at Saranac Lake, in upstate New York.
It is ironic that Koussevitzky should have been the instigator of the piece, since he had not been a particular aficionado of Bartók’s music. The new work converted him. What Koussevitzky got for his money was a splendid showpiece for his orchestra—for many of the solo wind players and percussionists, as well as for the ensemble as a whole.
Bartók provided this comment: “The general mood of the work represents, apart from the jesting second movement, a gradual transition from the sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious death-song of the third to the life-assertion of the last one.”
These three movements are the “big” sections of the piece, with the second and fourth movements being more lightweight intermezzos.
Bartók attended the premiere in Boston against his doctors’ advice, and the enthusiastic cheering would be a highlight of his career. “It was worth the while,” he reported succinctly. After the premiere he revised his Concerto for Orchestra, lengthening the Finale (which he considered too abrupt) and bringing this masterpiece into the form in which it is nearly always presented today.
—James M. Keller
Former New York Philharmonic Program Annotator,
The Leni and Peter May Chair