S Late Turn to F Major Has Yet to Be Told
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DOI: 10.1111/musa.12122 ROWLAND MOSELEY THE LAST ACT OF BRAHMS’S LATE TURN TO FMAJOR The Second Cello Sonata was the first of three chamber works that Brahms lined up to clear the milestone of 100 published works with opus numbers, an achievement that Fritz Simrock had for some time wanted to celebrate with a thematic catalogue. Simrock, Brahms’s publisher, floated the idea in 1884, soon after the publication of the Third Symphony as Op. 90. ‘It looks disgracefully vain’, came the composer’s extraordinarily slow reply (see n. 13 for more context). And yet, in the nine months that Simrock waited for an answer to his proposal, Brahms submitted Opp. 91–5 and was probably imagining the high style in which he would achieve triple digits. As if to stand on solid ground with the three chamber works of 1886, Brahms returned to familiar territory in two ways. Firstly, he took up instrumental genres with which he was acquainted: the composer already had one cello sonata, one violin sonata, and two piano trios to his credit. Secondly, he wrote in familiar keys: F major, A major and C minor. To some degree, repetition was inevitable, but Brahms worked deliberately, triangulating a new enterprise out of each pairing of instrumentation to key. Of the six familiar elements, though, one was particularly fresh in the composer’s mind. Not five years before, Brahms had penned his debut chamber work in F major, and he kept to that key for the aforementioned Third Symphony. The tonality of F major proved an important catalyst for all that would be confident and ambitious in the Second Cello Sonata. This has long been recognized as a difficult piece. Its opening movement eluded even Arnold Schoenberg’s ears at first, and he famously recalled it as a still unpopular and undigested work at the time of Brahms’s death.1 The father of serial composition had his own reasons to accentuate the work’s unfavourable early reception, since it stood for proto-Schoenbergian advances in musical prosody; nonetheless, early critical appraisals of the Sonata were hesitant and uneasy. Publicly, Hugo Wolf was more than usually damning of Brahms when he dismissed Op. 99 as a hubbub (tohuwabohu) undeserving of the name of music.2 Privately, Brahms’s confidant, Elisabet von Herzogenberg, queried whether the playful finale was a good fit for the other movements.3 Completed during the summer of 1886 and published in 1887, the Sonata was a challenge on multiple fronts: difficult to execute in performance, it also staged difficulty as a compositional device, invoking the categories of ‘symphonic’ chamber music and ‘grand style’. Margaret Notley and Ryan McClelland have both observed an aspiration to high style in one of the Sonata’s interior movements.4 That its first movement might perplex a new listener is something that twentieth-century music scholars and critics Music Analysis, 37/iii (2018) 375 © 2018 The Author. Music Analysis © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA 376 ROWLAND MOSELEY variously attributed to the Sonata’s vigorous thematic idiom, volatile rhythms and terse application of developing variation. Walter Frisch (1984, pp. 146– 7) characterises it as an early essay in late concision. In this article I argue that Brahms’s use of the tonality of F major was instrumental to the Sonata’s progressive stance. As any recipient of Simrock’s forthcoming catalogue would have noticed (the first edition, published in 1887, included Opp. 1–101), the Second Cello Sonata was the third multi-movement work that Brahms published in the key of F major during the mid-1880s. In symphonic and chamber music, Brahms came to F major late, but then he seemed to revel in it, demonstrating more clearly than at any time in his career the capacity of a particular key to be a creative habitat with a sound and a promise all its own.5 Studying Brahms’s relationship with F major will allow us to make new observations about Op. 99, and, conversely, Op. 99 will allow us to observe a vision of F major which Brahms cultivated during the 1880s as well as before and after that time. While scholars have remarked here and there on some of the Cello Sonata’s thematic debts to the Third Symphony, the larger story of Brahms’s late turn to F major has yet to be told. There are three parts to this article. In the first, I make the case that an intensive cultivation of F major tonality was an important creative context of the Second Cello Sonata. In the second, I examine the first movement in relation to Brahms’s previous multi-movement works in F major. Although several elements of tonal structure hold fast, Op. 99 strikes a contrast to its precedents in the handling of sonata form: the creative momentum of Brahms’s engagement with F major is seen as crucial for the work’s expressive posture and formal innovations. In the last section I address the finale. A special rapport between F major and A minor emerges as a distinctive feature of this movement, with echoes in distant corners of Brahms’s oeuvre. I will scrutinize the role of A minor and ask how the composer imagined the colour and character of F major tonality. New Pastures ‘I have reason to fear’, jested Brahms, ‘[that] I have worked this udder, which has always yielded good milk before, too often and too vigorously’. Writing in July 1881 to Elisabet von Herzogenberg, Brahms was speaking of B b major, and his inelegant metaphor played into a pretended denigration of the piano concerto soon to be published as Op. 83.6 But there was some honesty about Brahms’s remarks. His First String Sextet, Third String Quartet, and ‘Haydn’ Variations had all been raised on the same ‘good milk’ as the new piano concerto, and it seems the composer was indeed ready to set B b major aside. Sixteen years later Brahms died with no new large instrumental work in that key, and his throw-away words to Herzogenberg now appear as a parting tribute. The observations I wish to make here are not about Brahms retiring B b major, but about where he turned next. What new tonal nourishment did he find? Brahms’s next new multi-movement project, completed in May 1882, was © 2018 The Author. Music Analysis, 37/iii (2018) Music Analysis © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd THE LAST ACT OF BRAHMS’S LATE TURN TO FMAJOR 377 Fig. 1 The tonal palette of Brahms’s multi-movement instrumental works and additional large orchestral works as of 1881 a string quintet in F major. This key was fresh, at least for large instrumental works. The chain-of-fifths diagram in Fig. 1 shows it was one of two untapped sources of ‘good milk’ remaining with three or fewer flats or sharps.7 In fact, it was the only such source if one considers that B minor was already enlisted by the Piano Trio Op. 8 (which famously ends in minor after having begun in B major). The First String Quintet, Op. 88, was a happy work: although Brahms jibed at the relatively untroubled beauty of its sound world in letters to Fritz Simrock and Clara Schumann, his pleasure in the piece was unmistakeable.8 The work was also well received: even Wolf published a complimentary review that envisaged Brahms’s listener as being led through a series of natural scenes, each charming and previously unknown.9 With this auspicious start, F major held Brahms’s attention in an unprecedented way during the period 1882–6. Still more than C minor during the previous decade, F major monopolised his work. The new Quintet was promptly followed by the Third Symphony, written in 1883 and published the next year. In 1886 came the Second Cello Sonata. Brahms completed these lengthy, important F major compositions within the space of five years, almost to the exclusion of other instrumental writing: between 1882 and 1886, the Fourth Symphony was the only multi-movement project Brahms began and completed in a different key. (The Violin Sonata in A major was begun, but the only movement we know to have been completed before 1886 was the middle movement, in F major.10) Whether Brahms felt refreshed by taking up this ‘virgin’ key in the early 1880s we do not know directly. But his letters regarding the Quintet, and his uncharacteristic readiness to play through the Third Symphony for Dvorˇak,´ are biographical traces of renewed vitality and self-confidence in composing at this time.11 To understand what Brahms was talking about with regard to B b major and to recognize the unique intensity of his subsequent interest in F major, it may help to consider Fig. 2, in which opus numbers are plotted by principal key and publication year (an imperfect but convenient placeholder for the date of composition). Much of Brahms’s compositional output is omitted from this picture in order to highlight large-scale and prestigious instrumental genres: symphonies, chamber works, concertos and other substantial orchestral works (two overtures and the ‘Haydn’ Variations). Without doubt, this inscribes biases which the composer subscribed to when considering his legacy. In the diagram, solid rectangular bars map the currency (or ‘working life’) of the fifteen tonalities in Brahms’s chamber and orchestral catalogue at the time Op. 99 was begun, whereas dashed outlines complete the picture at the time of Brahms’s death.