Johannes Brahms 1833–1897

1 JOHANNES BRAHMS 1833–1897 8 Klavierstücke Op.76 1 No.1 Capriccio in F sharp minor: Un poco agitato. Unruhig bewegt 3.15 2 No.2 Capriccio in B minor: Allegretto non troppo 3.34 3 No.3 Intermezzo in A flat: Grazioso. Anmutig, ausdrucksvoll 2.11 4 No.4 Intermezzo in B flat: Allegretto grazioso 2.14 5 No.5 Capriccio in C sharp minor: Agitato, ma non troppo presto. Sehr aufgeregt, doch nicht zu schnell 3.27 6 No.6 Intermezzo in A: Andante con moto. San! bewegt 3.42 7 No.7 Intermezzo in A minor: Moderato semplice 2.57 8 No.8 Capriccio in C: Grazioso ed un poco vivace. Anmutig lebha! 3.36 2 Rhapsodies Op.79 9 No.1 in B minor: Agitato 8.56 10 No.2 in G minor: Molto passionato, ma non troppo allegro 5.55 7 Fantasien Op.116 11 No.1 Capriccio in D minor: Presto energico 2.10 12 No.2 Intermezzo in A minor: Andante 3.34 13 No.3 Capriccio in G minor: Allegro passionato 3.15 14 No.4 Intermezzo in E: Adagio 4.45 15 No.5 Intermezzo in E minor: Andante con grazia ed intimisso sentimento 2.23 16 No.6 Intermezzo in E: Andantino teneramente 2.56 17 No.7 Capriccio in D minor: Allegro agitato 2.15 2 3 Intermezzi Op.117 18 No.1 in E flat: Andante moderato 4.37 19 No.2 in B flat minor: Andante non troppo e con molto espressione 4.38 20 No.3 in C sharp minor: Andante con moto 5.41 6 Klavierstücke Op.118 21 No.1 Intermezzo in A minor: Allegro non assai, ma molto appassionato 1.50 22 No.2 Intermezzo in A: Andante teneramente 6.06 23 No.3 Ballade in G minor: Allegro energico 3.29 24 No.4 Intermezzo in F minor: Allegretto un poco agitato 2.58 25 No.5 Romanze in F: Andante 4.00 26 No.6 Intermezzo in E flat minor: Andante, largo e mesto 6.06 4 Klavierstücke Op.119 27 No.1 Intermezzo in B minor: Adagio 3.50 28 No.2 Intermezzo in E minor: Andantino un poco agitato 4.55 29 No.3 Intermezzo in C: Grazioso e giocoso 1.52 30 No.4 Rhapsody in E flat: Allegro risoluto 4.52 116.03 Charles Owen piano 3 Last Things. Johannes Brahms – Late Piano Music ‘Brahms’s late piano music is unbelievably intimate and so much is packed into such a short space of time. There’s a condensed quality about it; it’s squeezed together. But that doesn’t imply that it’s airless.’ Brahms’s late piano music marks a return to the composer’s roots. The piano was his own instrument and writing for the keyboard was a constant throughout his career. The late piano pieces also seem to look back over the composer’s life in a personal way. From his youth in Hamburg, to his deep friendship with Clara Schumann and life in his adopted city of Vienna, not to mention the ever-present sense of Hungary that he had first encountered in 1853 when as a young man he partnered the Hungarian violinist Eduard Reményi. Yet this piano music also looks forward. It’s no secret that Arnold Schoenberg would identify the ‘developing variation’ in Brahms music as a compositional device that he deployed to great e"ect in his own music. Indeed, it is perhaps this carrying forward of the compositional idea of a ‘theme and variations’ that makes Brahms the link between Beethoven and Schubert and the father of the Second Viennese School. Janus-like Brahms faces two ways in this late music, to the past and to the future. The eight Klavierstücke Op.76 were written between 1871 and 1878, 13 years a!er Brahms had published his enchanting set of Op.39 Waltzes. Each of these eight Klavierstücke is built out of variations on a basic musical idea, with the first brick of the piece o!en no more than a three-note phrase in the case of the F sharp minor Capriccio which opens the set. ‘I feel that the spirit of Schumann dominates these Op.76 pieces more strongly than in anything else that I know by Brahms. The first piece is like a Nachtstück with dark, troubled flowing semi-quavers asking endless questions. And then a yearning Schumannesque melody emerges. There is an underlying thread within the Op.76 pieces even though they were written over a period of seven years … and as ever Hungarian folk music comes to the fore, particularly in the second piece. That enchanting Capriccio in B minor which doesn’t 4 quite know whether it’s crying or smiling; it’s all very Schubertian. The Fi!h Capriccio in C sharp minor is one of the strangest piano pieces that Brahms ever wrote. It’s very Lisztian in character: Hungarian, fiery, with plenty of foot stamping and surprisingly dissonant harmonies. Experimental rhythmic patterns and unexpected time signature changes add to the weirdness. The fourth piece could be straight out of the song cycle Dichterliebe. It opens as if wandering in a sunlit garden – ‘Am leuchtenden Sommermorgen’ – before being interrupted by shadowy harmonies, the flattened sixth in B flat major always hovering. You hear the influential spirit of Schumann’s songs where so o!en all seems lovely on the surface and then the music turns a corner to reveal something darker lurking in the shadows.’ Perhaps the spirit of Schumann’s creative alter egos hovers over this music too: the quixotic Florestan in the o!en pungent capriccios and the judicious Eusebius present in the thoughtful intermezzi. It is Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, a composer’s wife, who presides over Brahms’s next two works for the piano, composed not long a!er the eight Pieces Op.76. Brahms regularly sent songs and other compositions for her approval and it was with Elisabeth’s input that he arrived at the title of the two Op.79 Rhapsodies that he would dedicate to her. ‘The word ‘rhapsody’ implies that the music is making all sorts of freewheeling journeys. But while the First Rhapsody is not exactly in sonata form, the Second is, so they are not quite as free as you might suppose. Whereas the First Rhapsody immediately announces its home key of B minor, Brahms does everything possible to hide G minor as the key in the Second Rhapsody, lending it a much more questioning mood. I find an element of gothic horror in this Second Rhapsody; in the dark, obsessional nature of the music. Brahms is obsessed by a three- note motif which is repeated countless times as the piece develops. If people say that late Brahms is ‘autumnal’, the G minor Rhapsody is much more of a winter piece reminding me of a bleak Caspar David Friedrich painting of a ruined abbey and graveyard surrounded by skeletal trees with their leaves all fallen. Both rhapsodies are also infused with the Hungarian spirit.’ Was Brahms’s fascination with Hungary and its foot-stamping dance forms a German equivalent of the French fascination with Spain at the end of the 19th century? A place where you could unbutton your bourgeois frock coat and roll up your respectable sleeves and have ‘fun’? Hungarian dances thread their way throughout Brahms late piano music. This is most certainly the case in the seven short pieces published as Op.116 and published in the 1890s, the composer’s final decade. ‘The capriccios and intermezzi in Opus 116 are built from melodic nuggets, little motivic cells packed with DNA. He’s obsessed by these musical building blocks and I am convinced that this comes from his admiration for Beethoven and before him J.S. Bach.’ Formally Brahms o!en builds his late piano pieces around the simplest ternary structure, A B A, the shape of a song and a tight form that can hold both his epigrammatic motives and questioning tonality firmly in place. ‘Some of the pieces have an ambiguous tonality at the beginning, like the opening pieces from both Op.118 and Op.119. Tonality is frequently destabilised and subtly avoided, which becomes part of the drama. One minute you are in one key and then suddenly in another. Brahms is defying our harmonic expectations and he o!en does this much earlier than his listeners expect.’ The three Op.117 Intermezzi can be heard as a portrait. They form a picture on a par with Rembrandt’s late self-portraits in which the artist looks at himself without blinking, painting truthfully: ‘the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.’ Each of the three intermezzi are marked ‘Andante’; slow and even. A tempo for contemplation. 5 ‘From Op.116 onwards there are so many incredibly personal moments of the most intense soul searching … confessional is the word that I really want to use. In Op.117 this quality is most tenderly revealed. These are pieces that are full of memories, gazing backwards towards childhood and contrasting with the reality of Brahms’s life in his early 60s. When I play these pieces I ask myself ‘what is the present tense, the here and now?’ and ‘what is memory?’. What too is in the future? There’s a sense of foreboding, of fear and doubt in this music. He seems to be asking ‘what is beyond this life?’.’’ In life, despite one serious quarrel, the pianist Clara Schumann had been Brahms’s devoted friend and a champion of his music.

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