“Seldom if ever,” wrote Eduard Hanslick in his 1876 review of Brahms’s First Symphony, “has the entire musical world awaited a composer’s first symphony with such intense anticipation.” Even coming from Brahms’s most passionate advocate, this was not an exaggeration. (H. L. Mencken later called the premiere “as memorable an event as the first performance of the ‘Eroica.’”) Brahms was already 43, the anointed symphonic successor (by Schumann and others) of Beethoven and the scourge of the Wagnerians. Behind him were the D-Minor Piano Concerto, Ein deutsches Requiem, and the Haydn Variations.
Brahms struggled with this symphony; friends reported that for more than a decade he carried the manuscript with him, often in his pocket, terrified of letting it go. Prone to self-deprecation and self-doubt, Brahms regarded the symphony as the supremely difficult form, inextricably tied to Beethoven; in an often-quoted phrase, he dreaded hearing “the tramp of a giant” behind him. It could not have helped that even his friends dubbed his First Symphony “Beethoven’s Tenth.”
In short, here was a symphony with everything—yet it pleased hardly anyone, including Brahms himself, who thought it “long and not especially amiable.” Brahms’s enemies immediately panned the work after its premiere in Karlsruhe, and even his friends came close to accusing him of plagiarizing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” theme for the big string section in the finale. (When Brahms was confronted with the resemblance, he replied, “Any ass can see that.”) The symphony garnered praise often tempered with chilly politeness; Hanslick, for example, praised the symphony’s “admirable craftsmanship,” but complained that Brahms “seems to favor too one-sidedly the great and the serious” at the expense of “heart-warming sunshine.” The symphony developed the odd reputation of being cerebral and modern even while being lambasted by Wagnerians as reactionary.
Brahms’s First Symphony was the product of a seasoned artist, yet ideas for the piece went back so far (to 1854, according to Brahms scholar Karl Geiringer), that large chunks of the piece sound—in the best sense—like the composer’s early work. The powerful introduction, with the strings swirling ever upward against the contrary motion of the winds and the hypnotic repetitions of the timpani, pulls the listener into the stormy vortex of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto, as does the passionate surge of the symphony’s closing pages.
Yet the architecture is as sophisticated and “mature” as anything in the Brahms canon, with all manner of subtle symmetries: The stark opening motif is the germ not only for much of the first movement, but also for the heavenly opening tune of the second; the bleak opening of the finale turns out to be the nucleus of the famous C-major theme that later is heard in the strings, a melody of striding optimism as unlike its premonition as could be imagined; and the somber brass chorale near the end of the finale’s introduction becomes, in the coda, a climactic exaltation.
The orchestration is similarly rich and complex, combining Brahms’s characteristically dark sonorities with brightly sensuous moments that take the listener by surprise. The soaring violin solo near the end of the second movement is one such instance; the horn’s simulation of an Alpine shepherd’s call over shimmering strings in the introduction of the finale is another. The overall sound has a density not found in Beethoven, even though Brahms did not favor the increasingly large orchestras that came into vogue during his lifetime.
In the long run, the work has become regarded as perhaps the greatest of all first symphonies. But in the short run, Brahms—a pragmatist who probably would have concurred with John Maynard Keynes that “in the long run we are all dead”—probably saw his neurotic fears validated. Fortunately, his next two pieces, the Second Symphony and the Violin Concerto, were as easy to write as the First Symphony was difficult, as if he had finally outpaced the giant tramping behind him.
Brahms was a painstaking craftsman who fussed over details and often took forever to complete a work. “Music gets yanked out of me,” he once told Clara Schumann. “How lucky is the man who, like Mozart and others, goes to the tavern one evening and writes some fresh music.” For Brahms, the quintessential perfectionist, composition was an arduous, often torturous process. His First Piano Concerto took five years to complete, his Requiem took 10, and his First Symphony close to 20. The Second Symphony, however, was a happy exception. He didn’t toss it off in a tavern, but he did write it in four months on a summer vacation in the town of Pörtschach in southern Austria, obviously an inspiring location: Brahms quickly wrote his Violin Concerto there the next year, describing Pörtschach as “a place with so many melodies flying around, one doesn’t know how to catch them.” The First Symphony finally behind him, Brahms apparently felt such a relief that the Second soared out of his imagination with effortless spontaneity.
The music certainly reflects a confident frame of mind. In contrast to the jagged tension and heroic struggle of the First Symphony, the Second is a continuous flow of lyricism, so much so that Sir Donald Francis Tovey and other early scholars took pains to point out that the ingenious transformation of the work’s opening reveals a rigorous formal design, including adherence to Classical sonata form in the first and last movements. Others have declared the rollicking but tightly written finale to be in the tradition of Haydn’s “London” symphonies.
By the 1877 Vienna premiere, Wagner was all the rage, and Brahms’s classicism was considered old-fashioned. The most memorable advocacy of the symphony—still quoted and anthologized—came from Eduard Hanslick, the vociferous Wagner hater and Brahms promoter, who wrote of the genial, serenade-like quality of the first, third, and fourth movements; the “broad, singing” Adagio, a movement “more conspicuous for the development of the themes than for the themes themselves”; and the “golden sincerity” of the finale, so “far a cry from the stormy finales of the modern school … Mozartean blood flows in its veins.”
Hanslick’s caveat about the Adagio reveals the discomfort of the conservative wing with the ambiguity of Brahms’s slow movements. Today, this Adagio is celebrated precisely for its mysterious, enigmatic atmosphere; its refusal to deliver obvious “themes”; and its sudden tragic outburst toward the end. The dark growlings of the brass in the development section of the first movement also belie the symphony’s reputation for unrelenting sunniness.
Nonetheless, this symphony lifts the listener into a decidedly upbeat mood that keeps rising as the work progresses. The orchestration is transparent and colorful, without the heaviness we stereotypically associate with Brahms; the third movement in particular has delicate, sparkling woodwinds and a chamber-like clarity. In the finale, Brahms leaves a powerful final impression with a triumphant trombone-powered coda that blows us out of our seats—the closest this meticulous craftsman ever came to a bacchanal.
—Jack Sullivan