Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [112]
The effect of this opening may be the most turbulent in the repertoire to that time—not the gleeful demonism of Liszt and early Brahms, or the dramatic flash of dissonance that opens the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, but something darker and more savage. The opening and the ensuing first movement, one of the longest of all concerto movements, are as dramatic as Beethoven’s Ninth and on a comparable scale of weight and time. But in contrast to Beethoven, Brahm’s introduction is indifferent to conventional symphonic or concerto-like brilliance, almost indifferent to musicality.10 The orchestra strains to bear the weight of expression demanded of it.
There is a sensation of immediacy, of realism, in this music that Brahms never attempted again. The explanation for it appears to be that in his mind the beginning of the Concerto evoked the tragedy that preceded its inspiration by a few days: Robert Schumann’s leap into the Rhine.11 Like the “Edward” ballade of the same year, this is Brahmsian program music, the tragedy this time not literary but real. If the vertiginous opening moments of the concerto are applied to the image of a desperate man leaping into the water, they become almost cinematically, kinetically apt.
In that connection we also find, perhaps, one of the reasons Brahms could not let go of this movement: its turmoil was too compelling to him, too close not only to Schumann’s fall but to his own chaotic feelings in the aftermath. The primal gestures of the movement obsessed him. As Hans Gal has written, it “lay before him like an erratic boulder, huge and mysterious.”12 There was perhaps another reason: Brahms pounded away at the intractable mass out of loyalty and obligation, because this was the symphonic music that Robert and Clara Schumann had demanded of him.
Beyond all that, certainly Brahms felt obligated to stick with it because the ideas were too powerful to give up. For all the pain of its gestation and the shortcomings lingering in the final version, Brahms understood that in the first movement he had found ideas of Beethovenian scope and drama, one of the most electrifying and original concerto movements of the century. The material lay beyond his capacity to master, just as the expressive weight of the opening was beyond his or his advisors’ skill with the orchestra, perhaps beyond orchestral means entirely. Yet whatever the obstacles, Brahms doggedly saw it through because he knew the results could be worth it.
If there is a programmatic story behind the movement as a whole, it was known only to Brahms. He was not about to follow the Liszt faction into self-proclaimed musical illustration. More likely, after the inspiration of the opening, the other material of the movement fell into place not in programmatic but “abstract” terms. It unfolds in a free version of the usual first-movement concerto layout, adapted from sonata form, even if its succession of themes (organically but not transparently related) and their incessant restless development obscures the familiar Classical outlines: orchestral exposition, second exposition with soloist (usually with two major themes, here at least six), development, and recapitulation. Perhaps partly because of the first movement’s symphonic origin, there is no cadenza from the soloist to mark the beginning of the coda. (The other movements have cadenzas, if not the usual virtuosic ones.)
The first movement’s second theme, lyrical and hymnlike in contrast to the stark opening, and in the expected F major, is the first extended solo; in fact, the piano tends to have the more gentle material until its pounding octaves during the development.13 For the duration of the movement the solo part manages to be at once antivirtuosic and two-fistedly difficult, some of that due to sheer awkwardness. Given its difficulty and general indifference to practicality and popularity, the music ensured that for a long time, few soloists other than Brahms and Clara would be willing to take it on.
The second movement, the “tender portrait” of Clara that he promised