By the time Brahms’s Third Symphony had its Vienna Philharmonic premiere on December 2, 1883, the bitter feud between “radical” Wagnerians and “traditional” Brahmsians had become an institution in musical life, one with predictable scenarios and rituals. The Wagnerians showed up dutifully to hiss after every movement, just as the Brahmsians came to cheer. At least one duel was agreed to be fought after the concert, though it never materialized. Brahms himself managed the subtle stroke of quoting what many commentators think is a passage from Tannhäuser in the first movement, thereby placing himself sublimely above the fray.
Brahms could not have been entirely unhappy about the commotion: This is the kind of controversy that is good for business, even when the short-term push-back is contentious. When the symphony was played in Boston in 1884, for example, hundreds of people walked out. Ironically, some regarded the piece as too “modern.”
Brahms’s champions heaped all manner of Beethoven parallels on the Third Symphony, just as they had on the first two. The First had already been compared with Beethoven’s Fifth, and the Second had been dubbed the new “Pastoral.” Since this was Brahms’s Third, it was perhaps inevitable that it would be called the new “Eroica”—although unlike Beethoven’s Third, it had no funeral march, no scherzo, and featured two slow movements in a row and four quiet endings.
To be sure, Brahms’s Third does have its share of “heroic” music, especially the stirring opening motif and first subject, as well as much of the finale. But even the famous first subject is transmuted into something profoundly gentle and unassertive, both at the end of the first movement and the end of the symphony (one of the most serene conclusions in all of Brahms). And even the heroic, assertive music in the development sections of the first movement and finale are part of an emotional context that includes a slow movement mellow even for Brahms and a Poco allegretto so haunting it threatens to steal the show.
Eduard Hanslick, Brahms’s most passionate public advocate, went along with the “Eroica” thesis, but he also delivered a succinct and sensible commentary on the Third in relation to Brahms’s earlier symphonies: “Many music lovers may prefer the titanic force of the First, others the untroubled charm of the Second. But the Third strikes me as artistically the most perfect. It is more compactly made, more transparent in detail, more plastic in the main themes. The orchestration is richer in novel and charming combinations.”
The “heroic” label was by no means the only one pasted on the symphony. Clara Schumann was convinced the Third was a forest idyll; Joseph Joachim heard a symphonic depiction of the story of Hero and Leander; W. F. Apthorp thought the first movement contained a character sketch of Shakespeare’s Iago.
This sort of thing is so unfashionable with contemporary music commentators that it seems quaint, but these “program music” speculations were commonplace in Brahms’s era. Now the symphony, Brahms’s shortest, is admired for its compactness and tight construction, especially the subtle transformation of the opening motif throughout the symphony, which opens the work with a gruff outburst and ends it with a mellow shaft of light. Indeed, Clara Schumann said in 1884 that “all the movements seem to be of one piece, one beat of a heart.”
“A choral work without text” is how Brahms described his Fourth Symphony. The remark is characteristic of Brahms’s self-deprecation (he also described the Fourth to Hans von Bülow as “a couple of entr’actes”), but it does get at the hymn-like solemnity of this final, most formally perfect Brahms symphony.
By the time the Fourth Symphony premiered in 1885, with Brahms himself conducting von Bülow’s Meiningen orchestra, the bitter feud between “radical” Wagnerians and “traditional” Brahmsians had become an institution in musical life, and one with predictable scenarios and rituals. The Fourth inspired even more hyperbole than usual, with the anti-Brahmsians denouncing even the symphony’s home key of E minor as “pale” and “wan.” “Just like the good Lord,” declared Hugo Wolf when the Fourth was presented in Vienna, “Herr Brahms is a master at making something from nothing.” George Bernard Shaw took up the war cry in England, comparing the British public’s “in-churchiest expression” during a performance of the Fourth to “the yokel in As You Like It quailing before the big words of the fool.”
The Brahmsians, just as predictably, immediately declared the Fourth to be a Godlike masterpiece, the ultimate fulfillment of Beethoven’s symphonic legacy. Eduard Hanslick, Brahms’s influential champion, wrote that the Fourth represented the most consummate “craftsmanship” of the age (a statement actually not far off the mark) and compared the passacaglia finale to “a dark well; the longer we look into it, the more brightly the stars shine back.”
Hanslick and his camp also declared the initial performances of the Fourth to be “a series of triumphs,” but the truth seems to be that the work was relatively slow to catch on. It may well be that the very qualities its champions admired—its formal mastery and “autumnal” restraint—were not necessarily endearing to a late–19th-century audience. Hanslick himself admitted that the beauties of the Fourth are not “apparent at first glance; its charms are not democratic.”
In fact, the great irony of this symphony is that one of its most passionate admirers turned out to be Arnold Schoenberg—hardly a musical traditionalist—because of its architectural complexity. It was Schoenberg who first pointed out that the pattern of falling thirds that opens the piece not only permeates and generates much of the first movement, but is even expanded in the penultimate variation of the finale—one of countless structural intricacies in the work. Since Brahms is now one of the most beloved of all composers, it is easy to forget that in his time he was often regarded as too cerebral for large audiences.
As Lawrence Gilman has pointed out, too much has been made of the “tragic” and “pessimistic” quality of this symphony. The Fourth is actually far more reticent about its Romantic melancholy than any number of other works of the period, including earlier minor-key pieces by Brahms himself. Especially hard to comprehend are the “cries of pain” once heard by commentators in the plushly contoured first movement, with its rich profusion of interlocking melodies. As for the Andante moderato—arguably the most beautiful slow movement in Brahms’s symphonies—its stately, increasingly soulful variations are hardly depressing, any more than the sprightly energy of the scherzo third movement (Brahms’s first use of this Beethovenian form in a symphony).
Only in the passacaglia finale, the most written-about movement of all four symphonies, does Brahms sound notes of authentic tragedy. For many years, a controversy stirred over whether the form of this movement is a chaconne instead of a “true” passacaglia, but as Edward Downes pointed out, the argument is silly “since musical scholars and composers differ with each other and among themselves as to which name belongs to which form.” Whatever one chooses to label it, this monumental yet concise structure consists of 32 variations on a majestic progression of forte chords sounded at the beginning by wind and brass. With its air of solemnity and final things, it is a moving conclusion to Brahms’s career as a symphonist.
—Jack Sullivan