This concert opens and closes with overtures to Wagner operas that had troubled beginnings, but eventually became two of the composer’s most beloved works. The airy, delicate beauty of Lohengrin—which unites arias, ensembles, and chorus—was a turning point in music, marking the beginning of the leitmotif system. Richard Strauss asserted that it heralded the beginning of a new species of opera. Earlier, Liszt—who conducted the premiere in 1850—proclaimed that, “With Lohengrin, the old world of opera has come to an end.”
The opera depicts Lohengrin, the son of Parsifal and one of the knights of the Holy Grail, who sails in a boat drawn by a swan to rescue Elsa, the ward of Count Telramund, a young woman who is falsely accused of murder. The Prelude to the first of the three acts is a miracle of light and color, evoking a vision of the Grail floating to earth. It opens with strings shimmering in the highest registers, gradually forming the serenely mystical melody that becomes a central motif in the opera. The music builds subtly, incrementally, to a sumptuous climax proclaimed by huge brass chords and dramatic percussion, then winds down to a whispered ending.
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.”
Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 54, perhaps the most intimate of the great Romantic piano concertos, is the work of a composer who had fundamental problems with the concerto form. Like Schubert (who wrote no concertos) and Grieg (who wrote only one, modeled very much on Schumann’s), Schumann was essentially a lyricist who shied away from the extraordinary demands of concerto writing. “I cannot write a concerto for the virtuosi,” he once complained, and the difficult genesis of this piano concerto bears witness to his lament. The first movement, composed in 1841, was originally labeled a “Phantasy [sometimes spelled “Fantasy”] for Piano and Orchestra.” Clara Schumann—who earlier had composed her own piano concerto—played it in two private run-throughs, writing at the time, “Carefully studied, it must give the greatest pleasure to those who hear it. The piano is most skillfully interwoven with the orchestra; it is impossible to think of one without the other.” Schumann tried to publish it as a separate piece, but no one would buy it.
Rather than abandoning the Phantasy, Robert revised it four years later as the first movement of a piano concerto, adding two more movements. Clara finally premiered the entire work in 1845, with Felix Mendelssohn conducting.
Despite Schumann’s difficulties completing the work, the concerto has come to be regarded as one of his most attractive large-scale pieces, one with a delicacy and poignance more suggestive of late Mozart than of a typical 19th-century concerto. Rather than heroically competing with the orchestra, the soloist caresses and converses with the ensemble, often in the manner of chamber music. A dreamy conversation between clarinet, whispered strings, and piano in the development section of the first movement is a particularly ravishing example. The first movement cadenza, written by the composer, is notably restrained (or “nobly polyphonic,” in the words of Gregory Mason). The orchestration—so often a point of contention in Schumann criticism—has been universally praised for its transparency and subtlety.
The entire piece has a sense of subtle unpredictability, especially the opening movement: The piano jumps in at the beginning with a dramatic statement (which reappears later in the work), one that quickly vanishes as winds announce the famous, melancholy first tune, a happier variation of which forms the basis for the main theme of the finale. The movement then proceeds on its way without an orchestral exposition. Unusual touches continue, with cellos stating the dreamy second subject in the fragile Intermezzo slow movement, threatening to steal the show. A variation on the opening piano statement magically leads directly into the lively finale, which has a rhythmically displaced second subject, a wispy fugato, and an extended, galloping coda that is the closest Schumann comes to an overtly virtuosic gesture.
Schumann’s original designation of “Phantasy” for the first movement is a fair description of the whole piece. Despite its careful formal structure, the piece is Romantic in the deepest sense. In the words of Sir Donald Francis Tovey, “It attains a beauty and depth quite transcendent of any mere prettiness, though the whole concerto, like all Schumann’s deepest music, is recklessly pretty.”
In an essay from 1841, Wagner described an overture as “a musical artwork entire in itself,” providing “a sense of the opera’s argument through the interweaving of thematic materials drawn from the opera to follow.” A particularly thrilling example is the Overture to Tannhäuser, written in 1845, though Wagner was compelled to revise the opera for a Paris production in 1861.
The music combines massive power and airy delicacy. The intense spirituality of the pilgrims’ theme for brass and winds opens the piece, building in power and setting up the tension between purity and sensuality that is at the heart of the opera. In Wagner’s words, “the chorus approaches, swells to a mighty outpouring, and finally passes into the distance.” Wagner describes the sexy yet evanescent middle section, full of chromatic leaps and dives, as a series of nocturnal apparitions: “As night falls, magic visions show themselves. A rosy mist swirls upward, sensuously exultant sounds reach our ears, and the blurred motions of a fearsomely voluptuous dance are revealed. This is the seductive magic of the Venusberg, which appears by night to those whose souls are fired by bold, sensuous longings.” At the end, the opening music returns, building to a sonorous climax, delivering a near-delirious ecstasy.
—Jack Sullivan