On the night of October 3, 1943, shortly after the beginning of an intense, 15-month-long air campaign against Munich that would leave much of the city in ruins, Allied bombs destroyed Richard Strauss’s beloved National Theater, a major landmark and one of Germany’s greatest opera houses. Though in general Strauss was—somewhat notoriously—unconcerned with current affairs, politics, and almost everything extramusical, the loss of the National Theater was the great tragedy of his life and forced him to come to terms with the devastation of Europe. The German culture in which he had thrived for so long and to which he had contributed so much had first been perverted by the rise of the Nazis and now was being torn to pieces by war. Despondent, the 79-year-old composer poured out his grief in a letter to his biographer:
The burning of the Munich Hoftheater, the place consecrated to the first Tristan and Meistersinger performances, in which 73 years ago I heard Freischütz for the first time, where my good father sat for 49 years as first horn in the orchestra—where at the end of my life I experienced the keenest sense of fulfillment of the dreams of authorship in 10 Strauss productions—this was the greatest catastrophe which has ever been brought into my life, for which there can be no consolation and, in my old age, no hope.
It was in this state of despair that Strauss began working on a piece called Mourning for Munich, which, after much revision and expansion, emerged in its final state in April 1945 as Metamorphosen. By the time of its completion, the great opera houses in Berlin, Dresden, and Vienna—cradles of the glorious German musical tradition of which Strauss was arguably the last living member—all had joined the Munich National Theater as legendary artistic casualties of the Second World War.
One of Strauss’s last completed works and one of the great masterpieces of his career, Metamorphosen is scored for 23 strings, each with an independent part, and is essentially an elegiac, densely polyphonic adagio broken only briefly in the middle by a yearning agitato section. The work uses as its motivic basis the second phrase of the funeral march from Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, an allusion that is clear and persistent beginning with its introduction in the ninth bar. Strauss claimed that the phrase unconsciously “escaped from [his] pen” and that he did not realize what he had done until midway through composing the piece. Even then, he embraced the connection, continuing to intensify the clarity of the tune until finally, nine bars before the end, the cellos and basses state the entire theme verbatim, beneath which Strauss wrote the notation “In memoriam.” A crushing tribute to all that was so senselessly lost during the darkest period of modern civilization, Metamorphosen is a powerful reminder that art is never more relevant than at times when it might seem inconsequential.
—Jay Goodwin
Throughout his life, Brahms struggled to reconcile the essentially percussive nature of the piano with the sustained, singing voices of the violin, viola, and cello. This contrast in sound and character is central to many of his greatest chamber works, from the first version of the B-Major Piano Trio, composed in 1854, to the two sonatas for clarinet (or viola) and piano of 1895. Late in life, having written a brace of masterpieces for keyboard and strings in various combinations, Brahms came to believe that the clarinet, with its unique ability to blend and stand out in mixed company, was “much better adapted to the piano than string instruments.” This conviction bore fruit in his masterful Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano of 1891.
The difficulties Brahms encountered in integrating piano and strings were compounded by his unsparing self-criticism. The B-Major Trio, Op. 8, conceived by a precocious 20-year-old, underwent a comprehensive overhaul some 35 years later. Both the Piano Quartet in C Minor, Op. 60, and the Piano Quintet in F Minor, Op. 34, had similarly protracted gestations. The latter originated in 1862 as a string quintet modeled on Schubert’s sublime Quintet in C Major for two violins, viola, and two cellos. Opinion among Brahms’s artistic confidants was divided, with the pianist Clara Schumann pronouncing the first incarnation a masterpiece, while the violinist Joseph Joachim criticized it as lacking in “charm.” Brahms subsequently recast the now-lost string quintet as a Sonata for Two Pianos (catalogued as Op. 34b). When Schumann objected that the sonata was “so full of ideas” that only a full orchestra could do it justice, Brahms responded by reworking the piece once again, this time as a quintet for piano and strings. In this form, musicologist Donald Francis Tovey wrote, “the rhythmic incisiveness of the piano is happily combined with the singing powers of the bowed instruments.”
The Op. 34 Piano Quintet has been described as a felicitous marriage of Beethovenian drama and Schubertian lyricism. As such, the work illustrates Brahms’s lifelong effort to strike a balance between Classical restraint and Romantic freedom, formal rigor and expressive abandon. The critic Adolf Schubring highlighted this creative tension when he observed that Brahms “understands how to be Classic and Romantic, ideal and real—and after all, I believe he is appointed to blend both these eternal oppositions in art.” Beethoven’s characteristically dynamic energy is reflected in the quintet’s protean themes and the visceral vitality of its rhythms. At the same time, the work’s rich store of melodies and subtle harmonic shadings recall Schubert’s mastery of song and tonal chiaroscuro. Schubert occupied a special niche in Brahms’s artistic pantheon. “My love for Schubert is a very serious one, probably because it is not just a fleeting fancy,” he told Schubring in 1863. “To me he is like a child of the gods, who plays with Jupiter’s thunder, albeit also occasionally handling it oddly. But he plays in such a region, at such a height, to which the others are far short of raising themselves.”
Notwithstanding its convoluted history, the Piano Quintet ranks among Brahms’s most powerful and fully realized conceptions. The expansive melody that opens the Allegro non troppo, played in unison by the piano, first violin, and cello, is almost immediately compressed into 16th-note passagework of mounting urgency and intensity. The first theme returns in the strings, louder and more majestic than before, above a cascade of falling arpeggios in the piano. A second subject of a milder and more lyrical character emerges, only to be swept up in an undercurrent of ominously rumbling triplets. Henceforth, elements of these two basic ideas are combined, taken apart, and reassembled with astonishing ingenuity as the movement works toward a thunderous climax. The gently swaying rhythms of the Andante, which Schumann described as “one long melody from start to finish,” signal an abrupt change of pace. Although the quintet’s inner movements share the tonality of C minor, the tautly wound Scherzo is much the darker of the two. Its tense, demonic quality is only slightly tempered by the C-major radiance of the central Trio section. High drama returns in the Finale, which alternates between languid, mysterious reverie and outbursts of almost savage vehemence.
In the end, Brahms’s instincts about the Piano Quintet were vindicated. As the conductor Hermann Levi told him, “Anyone who did not know the earlier forms of string quintet and [two-] piano sonata would not believe that it was not originally thought out and designed for the present combination of instruments ... You have turned a monotonous work for two pianos into a thing of great beauty ... a masterpiece of chamber music.”
—Harry Haskell