A student of history and collector of the original manuscripts of his greatest musical forebears, Brahms was painfully aware of where he fit in the musical tradition and the responsibility that therefore rested on his shoulders. He was anointed at a young age by the public and by critics as Beethoven’s awaited successor, and his work was mercilessly and microscopically dissected and compared against the greats. Early in his career, this sense of expectation and his fear of never being able to fulfill it paralyzed him, with the result that he was a late-blooming composer—Mozart, Mendelssohn, Schubert, and Chopin all died at a younger age than Brahms was when he finally completed his First Symphony.
By the time he matured as a composer, however, Brahms turned this reverence for the past into his greatest strength, writing works that applied the forms, techniques, and wisdom of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven to the new Romantic idiom. Brahms’s critics derided this as uninspired conservatism. “The real Brahms is nothing more than a sentimental voluptuary,” said George Bernard Shaw. “He is the most wanton of composers ... only his wantonness is not vicious; it is that of a great baby, rather tiresomely addicted to dressing himself up as Handel or Beethoven and making a prolonged and intolerable noise.” This criticism is difficult to understand from our vantage point, and history has proven how widely it missed the mark. Brahms’s music teems with originality and genius, and though many of his contemporaries successfully blazed new paths to greatness, Brahms proved that there was still untapped potential in the “antiquated” forms of Classicism. Even Schoenberg, perhaps the most revolutionary composer of all time, recognized Brahms’s achievements and gave a series of lectures in 1947 entitled “Brahms the Progressive.”
Brahms’s beloved Violin Concerto is one of several works the composer wrote during his summers in the lakeside Austrian resort town Pörtschach am Wörthersee, the kind of environment that immediately lifts the spirits and makes living a joy—a feeling familiar to anyone who has visited one of the many similarly idyllic Alpine locales. Naturally, Brahms himself described Pörtschach in musical terms, calling it a place with “so many melodies flying around that you have to be careful not to tread on them.” Happily, Brahms captured a good number of those melodies—first in 1877, when he wrote the Symphony No. 2 in D Major, and then the following summer, when he turned out the lion’s share of his Violin Concerto, in the same cheerful key.
As a pianist with no experience whatsoever playing the violin, Brahms needed some expert assistance to make sure his concerto would be practical for the soloist, and he had the perfect collaborator close at hand: Hungarian virtuoso Joseph Joachim, one of his closest friends. Joachim was not only among Europe’s finest violinists but also an accomplished composer in his own right, and he happily provided copious advice. But in the end, Brahms ignored much of Joachim’s input, and as a result, the concerto makes few accommodations for the soloist’s comfort. With its structural rigor, heavy orchestral textures that threaten to overpower the violin, and paucity of showy virtuosic displays, the concerto quickly earned a reputation for unfriendliness to performers. Henryk Wieniawski deemed the piece “unplayable,” conductor Hans von Bülow famously described it as a concerto against the violin rather than for it, and Pablo de Sarasate refused to perform it, grousing that he could not be expected to “stand in front of the orchestra and listen while the oboe plays the only melody in the entire piece.” Joachim, though, effectively championed the new concerto, and soon the genius of the music overpowered the initial resistance, allowing the work to join Beethoven’s own Violin Concerto—a major and audible influence on this work—at the top of the genre’s pantheon.
Brahms’s ambition is immediately clear in the rhapsodic opening movement, which begins with a sprawling double exposition. The pleasant yet weighty musical material is first introduced and explored by the orchestra and then reimagined by the soloist, who makes a dramatic entrance indeed, catapulted into action by massed strings that swirl with increasing intensity before suddenly falling away, their transferred energy launching the violin forth in full flight. The soloist returns the favor for the rest of the movement, his ecstatic strains repeatedly impelling the orchestra to greater levels of vigor and lyricism. At the end of the movement, the violin receives its opportunity to have the spotlight entirely to itself with an extended cadenza, making this one of the last major concertos to allow the soloist to write or improvise his own. The cadenza most often performed today is the first, written by Joachim for the work’s premiere. In this performance, Mr. Vengerov accepts Brahms’s invitation for personal expression and performs his own.
The opening of the Adagio marks the arrival of the pastoral, heart-melting oboe melody that so offended Sarasate, accompanied evocatively by mellifluous winds. The patient soloist is eventually rewarded, though: The movement’s first contributions from the strings herald the entrance of the violin, which, with gossamer delicacy at first, offers its own, more filigreed interpretation of the tune. As the movement progresses, the intensity ebbs and flows as the soloist and orchestra find inspiration in a seemingly endless supply of variations and elaborations on the melody.
The Allegro giocoso finale can only be seen as a tribute to Joachim, to whom the concerto is dedicated. A fiery, toe-tapping dance in rondo form, it overflows with exuberance and Hungarian character and allows the soloist to let the rosin fly, the bow jumping off the strings in slashing multiple-stopped chords and syncopated passagework. For one final trick, Brahms brings the concerto to a close with a rhythmic transformation in the coda, the rustic, stamping dance step suddenly smoothing and elongating itself into swaggering triplets that lead the way to a final shout of joy.
Brahms’s Fourth (and last) Symphony, written during the summers of 1884 and 1885 in Mürzzuschlag, another one of Austria’s paradisiacal mountain retreats, is Brahms’s ultimate fusion of past and present. At a time when Wagner and his acolytes were pushing tonal harmony to its breaking point, Brahms begins his symphony with a movement entirely built around a simple pattern of thirds, the fundamental building block of tonality. But this pattern—specifically, falling thirds echoed by their inversion, rising sixths—is treated so organically and is allowed to travel so far afield that its simplicity and conventionality only more clearly reveal Brahms’s ingeniously original way of exploring and developing his modest material. The structure, too, is deceptive. Though the movement is cast in sonata form—the backbone of the Classical symphony—it is defined by the ways it breaks that mold. After a repeat of the opening eight measures, seeming to indicate that we have started the standard repeat of the exposition, Brahms instead alters the harmony and whisks us away into the development section. Then, we hear a quiet variation of the opening theme (in the woodwinds and at half the original speed), which would suggest a gradual buildup to the movement’s climax. But without warning, the tempo launches forward and we are immediately thrust into the heart of the recapitulation.
In the Andante, too, we hear Brahms as simultaneous historian and progressive. Ostensibly in E major, the movement is indeed based on a theme that centers around E. But it incorporates the pitches of the C-major scale (all white keys on a piano) to essentially transform the harmonic structure into that of the Phrygian mode, one of the standard pitch sets used in mediaeval and Renaissance music. This offers Brahms a host of chromatic and melodic possibilities, both of which the composer uses to make this one of his most harmonically modern-sounding movements. Brahms’s music-history treatises would also have explained that the melancholy Phrygian mode should resolve to the sunny Ionian mode (identical to C major). Sure enough, the Allegro giocoso is in C and—with its pounding timpani, tinkling triangle, and marching rhythms—is a rousing, energetic interlude to what is otherwise quite a weighty and solemn work.
The Fourth Symphony’s finale distills Brahms’s genius to its purest form. Inspired by the composer’s Renaissance and Baroque idols, it is a chaconne—a form in which a melodic pattern and its harmonic foundation are repeated over and over but transformed by means of extensive variation limited only by the composer’s imagination. The movement begins with a severe and blustery statement of its fundamental eight-note theme and proceeds through a whirlwind of 30 exceptionally diverse and inventive variations that demonstrate Brahms’s mastery of the form. The theme finds its way through the entire orchestra, appearing everywhere from the low brass to the upper woodwinds and exploring seemingly every possible permutation of the pattern. Finally, the chaconne gives way, and a fittingly stentorian coda concludes the piece.
—Jay Goodwin