Johannes Brahms, Piano Concertos and 1St Symphony

Johannes Brahms, Piano Concertos and 1st Symphony

GEORGE BOZARTH is Professor of Music History at the University of Washington, co-author of the article on Brahms in the New Grove Dictionary of Music, and Executive Director of the American Brahms Society. His remarks on the early reception of Brahms’s two piano concertos and First Symphony are based on passages from his forthcoming book, Brahms in Boston: A Study in the Reception of Art Music in Nineteenth-Century America.

Hearing music of the past through the ears of its creator’s contemporaries can impart a freshness to our own listening experience that might otherwise be lost through over familiarity. When a truly original voice speaks, a few progressives understand its dialect and recognize its worth. But for most, it is a path of gradual comprehension. Such was the case with the works of Johannes Brahms—old friends by now, but initially greeted with an uncomprehending amazement, even outright hostility, that for us seems hard to imagine. The reception of Brahms’s music is interesting as well because during his lifetime reactions to it changed so greatly. When his First Piano Concerto, in D minor, was premiered in musically conservative Leipzig in 1859, critics and audience alike rejected it. As the conservative Eduard Bernsdorf wrote at the time:

The work . . . cannot give pleasure. Save its serious intention, it has nothing to offer but waste, barren dreariness truly disconsolate. Its invention is neither attractive nor agreeable. . . . for more than three-quarters of an hour one must endure this rooting and rummaging, this dragging and drawing, this tearing and patching of phrases and flourishes! Not only must one take in this fermenting mass; one must also swallow a dessert of the shrillest dissonances and most unpleasant sounds.‖

Clearly this hyper-emotional young composer, then only twenty-six years old, was not going to be another Mendelssohn, whose refreshingly positive music was so dearly loved in Leipzig. Brahms seemed to a composer with ―personal issues‖ to be worked out, and that was best done in private, not on the concert stage! The day after the premiere, Brahms wrote to his friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim, that the event had been ―a brilliant and decided—failure . . .‖ (The ―personal issues‖ that found resonance in this concerto were of course the mental demise of Robert Schumann and Brahms’s feelings about Clara Schumann, whose ―gentle portrait‖—his words—he painted in the concerto’s beautiful slow movement.)

By the time Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto, in B-flat major, made its triumphant European tournée of twenty-one debuts in 1881–82, not only had his language moderated—youthful Sturm und Drang superseded by a degree of Hellenic balance—but his unique innovative style was beginning to be understood, and this lengthy, technically demanding work soon joined the canon of acknowledged masterpieces.

The critical reception of Brahms’s First Symphony and Second Piano Concerto in Boston shows Brahms turning this corner. The Second Piano Concerto came to Boston in March 1884, performed by the progressive American pianist Benjamin Johnson Lang with Brahms’s friend, George Henschel, conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra, then only in its third season. By this time Boston’s critics and auditors had struggled mightily with Brahms’s First Symphony in C minor, a work that in 1876 had ―made us stare,‖ according the Harvard-educated music critic William Foster Apthorp; ―I doubt if anything in all music ever sounded more positively terrific than that slow introduction to the first movement did to us then.‖ So ―horribly dissonant‖ was the introduction’s chromaticism that the parts sounded as if they are ―mutually rubbing their skins off by grating one against another.‖ America’s preeminent music journalist, John Sullivan Dwight, found the symphony’s first movement as a whole so ―wearisomely full of chromatic and restless modulation‖ as to be ―sick music,‖ or at least ―not music which a sick man may listen to and feel better.‖ According to the Shakespearian scholar and drama critic Henry Austin Clapp, Brahms was ―a modern of the moderns, and this symphony is a remarkable expression of the inner life of our anxious, introverted, over-earnest age, which cannot even be glad in a frank and self-forgotten spirit.‖

Over the next six years, though, Brahms’s serious style came to be better appreciated in Boston, through performances of his shorter works like the Tragic and Academic Festival overtures, and his softer side also became known, through pieces like the Liebeslieder Waltzes, presented in their orchestral version by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Moreover, with his troubled First Symphony finally out of his system, and Beethoven’s ghost put to rest, Brahms was able to approach symphonic discourse with less ―anxiety of influence,‖ and the genial Second Symphony and Second Piano Concerto soon issued forth.

The Second Piano Concerto was the first of Brahms’s symphonic compositions to be heralded as a masterpiece by the most of Boston critics. Considered ―a work of extraordinary merit . . . noticeable for its harmonious and melodious character,‖ the concerto was seen by William Foster Apthorp as a work which ―for largeness of design, earnestness of purpose, and nobility of musical spirit‖ must be deemed ―the worthy companion of the greatest classic compositions in the concerto form‖—the Fourth and Fifth Piano Concertos by Beethoven and the A-minor Concerto by Schumann. ―The essential beauty and grandeur of Brahms’s work‖ could not be put into words. The change in perception of Brahms from self-indulgent young modernist to emotionally controlled romantic-classicist was clearly underway. Louis C. Elson, music critic for the Courier, pointed to the concerto’s romantic elements, as well as its symphonic nature:

[The concerto is] a work . . . of powerful orchestration, . . . [and] possesses far more of melody than the composer is given credit for. It is . . . a work of broad dimensions, possessing four movements of almost symphonic development, and, although the first two are allegros, they are in strong contrast with each other. The very beginning of the work, with its [beautiful] horn phrases, has a romantic flavor, and the succeeding pompous and martial theme is stirring. The piano part requires much breadth of treatment . . . Some of the orchestral effects of the development are [especially] impressive, notably a sombre, mysterious episode, before the final appearance of the chief theme. The second movement opens with a unison phrase for orchestra which reminds somewhat of Saint-Saëns, and is treated somewhat in the manner of that composer. The third movement [with its lyrical cello solo] is one of the most romantic that Brahms has yet given us. In the tenderness of its pious themes, the beauty of some of Brahms’s lieder (Wie bist Du, meine Königin, for example) is recalled, and the adagio which follows, as part of the same movement, is very beautifully worked out. The finale, with its galloping rhythms, is rollicking enough to recall the final [dance-like] movements of some of the old [Baroque] suites.

Elson’s last remark is especially revealing, for Brahms’s ―romanticism‖ is never ―healthier‖ than when— despite the Biblical injunction to the contrary—he is fermenting ―new wine in old skins‖—bringing an old style alive, now resplendent in a modern guise, as in the Second Piano Concerto.

These notes appear in galley files and may contain typographical or other errors. Programs subject to change without notice.