Program Notes

Among Romantic composers Brahms was the great classicist. He venerated the high classical ideal embodied in the works of Mozart and Beethoven, and more than any other 19th-century composer was at home with their thematic and formal designs. The glory of Brahms lay in his ability to wed the passionate sweep and complex harmonic language characteristic of his own era with the organizational power and logic of the preceding one.

That synthesis took a while to master, however. In Brahms's early works we see him as more a pure Romantic in the tradition of his idol and mentor, Robert Schumann. Those early works form a special and fascinating category in Brahms's output: they do not yet exhibit the complete formal mastery we associate with his mature style, but there is a youthful, unbridled exuberance to the music, an overflow of inspiration, and in the earliest works a theatricality that the later Brahms would likely have found excessive, but is thrilling to us.

The Sonata in F minor, Op. 5, composed in 1853, is the third and last of Brahms's piano sonatas, yet was completed before the composer was 21 years of age. All his later piano works were either short pieces or variation sets; for larger multi-movement forms he seemed to feel the need for greater instrumental forces. And indeed, already here the conception is symphonic, especially in the Allegro maestoso first movement. The defiant, passionate opening theme seems to strain the limits of the piano as it surges centrifugally outward to the extremities of the keyboard, and the massive wide-spread chordal writing so typical of Brahms is already in evidence. Also highly developed even at this youthful stage is Brahms's technique of motivic development: all the movement's subsequent ideas, now brooding, now heroic, now lyrical, are derived from the swirling figure of the first measures.

There is no better example of the pure romanticism of Brahms's early style than the Andante that follows. It is headed in the score by a verse of the German poet Sternau:

For the most part Brahms avoided the hyper-romantic program music common in his day, and he offered no direct correlation (that we know of) between these lines and the shape of the movement. He did however write to his publisher that the poem "may be necessary or useful in the understanding of the Andante," and such a correlation does seem to exist. The opening descending phrase cast in dusky hues would appear to depict the deepening twilight, and the second phrase the shimmering moonlight. In the middle section, Poco più lento in D-flat Major, the right and left hands (in soprano and tenor registers) exchange whispering two-note sighs; the two voices engage in a caressing love duet, yet between them they form one long melodic line: "zwei Herzen in Liebe vereint." Eventually, after a varied reprise of the opening, a concluding Andante molto returns unexpectedly to D-flat Major with a transformation of the Poco più lento theme, hushed, magical, religious in its solemnity, then building to a monumental, ecstatic, very nearly erotic climax. The third line of Sternau's verse touches on a favorite theme of German Romanticism, the elevation of earthly love to the level of the divine; Brahms's music here, with its extraordinary blending of piety and passion, is a transcendent evocation of that ideal.

This Andante molto is in a sense a structural addendum: it upsets the expected ABA symmetry of the movement, and makes the formal balance somewhat bottom-heavy (in other words, it makes the movement feel rather long.) On these grounds the later, more disciplined Brahms might well have vetoed it. But the youthful, romantic Brahms allows the symbolic narrative of the poem to take precedence over purely formal considerations, and the result is one of the most deeply inspired pages he was ever to write.

The theme of the ensuing Scherzo is brazenly filched from the last movement of Mendelssohn's C-minor piano trio; we easily forgive this, however, once seduced by the movement's wild, lusty swagger. The warm, glowing Trio turns again to D-flat Major, which proves to be the key of most of the sonata's great lyrical effusions.

Another romantic touch in this work is the insertion of an extra movement into the usual four-movement scheme, an Intermezzo, which functions essentially as an introduction to the Finale. It is subtitled "Rückblick" , or "Retrospection", and what it looks back on is the second movement, recasting its theme in a grim minor mode, hauntingly accompanied by distant drumbeats. (Once again the writing is highly orchestral.) Moments of sheer terror alternate with bleak desolation.

The rondo Finale comes to life again, but darkly at first, and most oddly. Its opening is not so much a theme as a quirky series of fits and starts, only gradually developing a fiery momentum. It has for me somehow the tone of some slightly perverse North German fairy tale, full of things that go bump in the night. Contrasting ideas include a spring-like F-Major interlude, a march of munchkins, and finally a great noble hymn - once again in D-flat Major. This quintessentially Brahmsian theme appears halfway through the movement and gradually takes it over. The opening goblins return and resist, but are ultimately vanquished. 

Though written just three or four years after the F-minor Sonata, the Variations on an Original Theme show Brahms already on the cusp of his mature style. This lovely work is performed relatively infrequently, perhaps because it is essentially introspective in nature, and ends quietly, without fanfare. Yet it is an exceptionally personal statement by the young master.

As the title indicates, Brahms composed his own theme for these variations; and a magnificent one it is - in D Major, Poco larghetto, rich, warm and lush, full of a sense of well-being. The variations begin quietly and unfold gradually, each one picking up some aspect of the previous and developing it. Var. 5 shows Brahms's ability to bring poetry to a learned contrapuntal technique; it is an inverted canon cast as a love duet, the two voices soaring rapturously in mirror image. Var. 7, dreamy and floating, drifts off to sleep, closing the first large section of the piece.

Variations 8, 9 and 10 form in effect a central Allegro section, all in stormy D minor. Var. 10, a broad Hungarian lament, serves as a transition to the eleventh and last variation, which returns magically to the original key and tempo with a sort of distillation of the theme, accompanied by continuous trills (perhaps influenced by Beethoven's similar technique in his late variation movements.) An extended coda follows directly, the crown of the work, richly textured like the theme and overflowing with ineffable yearning. The piece closes in a mood of acceptance and consolation, and with a sense of nostalgia not uncommon for Brahms even in works of this relatively early period, but nonetheless remarkable in a man so young.

This sense of nostalgia not surprisingly grows deeper in the music of the composer's later years, and reaches its most intimate expression in the 20 short piano pieces he wrote in 1892-93, and published as Opp. 116-119. "Lullabies of my sorrows" is how he once referred to them, and though they at times still evince the old Brahmsian fire and passion, they are far removed from the flamboyant declamation of the youthful sonatas.

Op. 118 comprises six pieces, the first three of which open this program. The Intermezzo in A minor shows the composer's characteristic virility still undiminished; it is a passionate whirlwind, the melody surging in great, tumultuous waves amid swirling arpeggios. The Intermezzo in A Major is a true lullaby, and perhaps the most beloved of all the late piano pieces. As tender and touching as this music is, its pure craftsmanship is equally astonishing; the aching melancholy of the F-sharp minor middle section, for example, conceals a virtuoso display of canonic writing and invertible counterpoint, perfectly integrated into the musical discourse without the slightest trace of stiffness, only deepening its expressive power. At this stage of his life, the composer's blending of mind and heart is complete. 

In the popular Ballade in G minor Brahms ingeniously combines two of his favorite idioms: the grimly fantastic, old North German legend tone that he seems to associate with the term "Ballade", and the fiery Gypsy dance. The Gypsy element is predominant in the vigorous defiance of the opening idea. The bardic character manifests itself in a heroic cast informing the whole, in the fairy-tale quality of the middle section - a fleeting, blissful vision of some far-off paradise - and in the ending, when that vision is recalled as a desolate memory, then dissolves, leaving only a single triad floating, like the lingering echo of some ancient, tragic saga.