In his 14 years of struggle and creative gestation, Brahms has above all turned the symphony inward, in both musical and emotional senses. He is resolutely focused on the inner workings of his musical material rather an overt expressive program -- let alone an attempt to change the world, as Beethoven's Ninth seems to wants us to march forth and try to accomplish-- and for all its public grandeur as a large-scale symphony, this music speaks to us directly, rather than speaking to our collective humanity.
Yet Brahms's finale achieves that, yet goes far beyond, to change all of that. This movement is his solution to what he saw as the 19th century's symphonic problem - the tendency for the pieces to be weighted towards their opening allegros, to have worked out all their major structural tensions by the end of the first movement, and maybe even more meaningful in the larger historical context of what was happening in those years in Europe?
Brahms's fourth movement is different: ALL is at stake here, the longest part of the symphony, and from the beginning, the internal musical drama takes place on a much larger and more profound existential stage than the previous three movements. Brahms drops us into the middle of the finale's "terrifying swirling, impressionistic Adagio, then the mists clear and from the heights, a horn-call, from the alphorns of Switzerland, sounds in resplendent C major, a premonition of the trajectory of the whole movement."
To get there, we need the grandest possible melody, and the most assertively dynamic drama of the whole symphony, the one his first listeners kept comparing to Beethoven, with one moment of tension and release when the horn call returns, now harmonized by a dissonant chord, then saved when the music becomes a major key. At the very end of the symphony, there's the most heroically triumphant music that Brahms ever composed for an orchestra.
What makes it moving and penetrating, rather than bombastic and arrogant, is the sense that this is a hard-won musical and personal victory for its composer. This music both crowns the work's dramatic trajectory, and also celebrates Brahms's own conquering of his most tormenting symphonic demons.
Thanks to one of the greatest of program note writers, Phillip Huscher of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra:
Few great works of music have taken so long to get from sketch to finished product, and Brahms had his reasons for going over and over with his first symphony; in essence, he was forging his own redefinition of what a symphony was to be henceforth.Eventually his friends and colleagues began to wonder if he, like Schubert before him, might leave an unfinished symphony in the attic, and in 1870, Brahms himself said he would never complete this symphony!
His publisher, Fritz Simrock, finally wrote to him: "Aren't you doing anything more? Am I not to have a symphony from you in '73 either?" Yet there was no symphony forthcoming in 1873, just as there had been no symphony any year since 1854, when Brahms first set out to write one.
That earliest effort, in the key of D minor (the key of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, incidentally) sidestepped the issue to become Brahms's first piano concerto, even though the idea of "symphony" is written all through it.
Brahms knew that his first symphonic effort would be subject to intense scrutiny and high expectations. Thus, he went through a long process of preparation that included such works as the First Piano Concerto, the two serenades, the German Requiem, the short choral works from the Op. 50s, and the Haydn Variations, all of which sharpened his skills in orchestration.
Brahms sidestepped this challenge with the two serenades that gave him needed and valuable experience writing for the orchestra without directly taking on Beethoven and there was more testing of the waters in the substantial orchestral accompaniment to A German Requiem and other important choral works.
Lastly came the grand Variations on a Theme of Haydn from 1873--though this too, for all its mastery of instrumentation and intellectual rigor, was not a symphony.
However, Brahms did indeed have his symphony in the works. As early as 1862, he sent a completed first movement to Clara Schumann. "Imagine my surprise!" she wrote to Joseph Joachim, who would one day play the violin concerto Brahms wrote for him in a single summer. Clara's surprise eventually turned to dismay when Brahms continued to drag things out, sending her the horn call from the finale as a birthday card some six years later, and finally sitting her down to listen as he played the whole symphony at the piano another eight years after that.
Although Brahms certainly took his time, he proved to an impatient musical public that there was still music being written that was worth the wait. When a piece didn't please him, he put it aside or reworked it, or--in the case of his Fifth Symphony--he destroyed it entirely. When Brahms sent his completed first movement to Clara Schumann in 1862, it didn't begin with the fierce and arresting introduction we know, but took off from the headlong Allegro.
Clara confessed to Joachim that the beginning seemed bold and "r ather harsh, but I have become used to it." Brahms, however, evidently didn't, because when he played the entire symphony for Clara more than a dozen years later, it began with the powerful, measured drum beat and chromatic unfolding that now lead straight into the Allegro.
The Allegro is conceived on the largest scale. The final turn into the recapitulation, in particular, is stretched to incredible lengths--and then, with the destination clearly in sight, resolution is further delayed by a daring descent into a remote key. For a moment it appears that Brahms has thrown caution to the wind, but this sudden whim, too, is part of his plan, all calculated with the skill of a master composer.
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