Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [123]
As a counterpart to the sunny Brautgesang, which he soon suppressed, Brahms composed the startling, powerful Begräbnisgesang (Funeral Song), for choir and an ensemble of winds and timpani. Thoughts of the grave inspired him more than thoughts of a bride. The two pieces, which he read over with his Detmold group, foreshadowed his habit of producing pairs of works for the same medium—sometimes contrasting in expression, such as the rollicking Academic Festival Overture and its companion the Tragic. The Begräbnisgesang returns to the foreboding Brahmsian minor, the Dies Irae tone to which he gravitated as evocation of fatality and death. As in the Begräbnisgesang, the Brahmsian minor often appears with relentlessly pounding timpani: Schicksal! Fate! That tone recurs from Ein deutsches Requiem of the 1860s to the Vier ernste Lieder at the end of his life.
This season in Detmold, Brahms played concertos by Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Chopin as well as solo and chamber music. Maybe he found more satisfaction in choral performances, which included his first Bach—the cantatas Christ lag in Todesbanden, which perhaps inspired his Begräbnisgesang, and Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis. With his choir he read over Palestrina’s High Renaissance Missa Papae Marcelli.53
In December he wrote Joachim asking for large manuscript sheets: “I need the paper to change my first serenade, now and finally, into a symphony. I can see that it is not right to have it in this mongrel state. I had such a beautiful, big conception of my first symphony, and now!—”54 One day shortly after, concertmaster Bargheer turned up at Brahms’s room in the Stadt Frankfurt to find sheets of manuscript draped everywhere from the piano to the bed, the ink drying. Brahms explained that he was orchestrating the D Major Serenade. A symphony? Bargheer inquired. “Ach,” Brahms sighed, “if in these days after Beethoven you presume to write symphonies, they’d better look entirely different!”55 Finally he shied away, however, from letting this cheerful, Haydn-inspired music stand as his first symphony. The manuscript originally called it “Symphony-Serenade,” but he struck off the first term.
Clara wrote Johannes at Detmold. Still bitter over his letter of the past summer chastening her efforts for him, between the lines she also stewed over Agathe: “I am sorry I did not write to you about the Hungarian Dances, for you know how I like to please you. I only refrained because I feared you might say something unkind to me, as you have often done in similar cases.”56 She had been feeling wretched all summer, as she wrote to Joachim: “I am so terribly depressed.… I do indeed give concerts, but with what torture of heart. My health is giving way entirely.”57
Brahms sent Clara a roll of music in December, with the demand “tell me particularly what you do not like, or what strikes you as weak, etc.” As he probably had anticipated, she noted the lameness of the Brautgesang and the vigor of the Begräbnisgesang, saying she would like the latter sung at her own funeral. Most of all she was taken with a first movement for another serenade, this one in A major, eventually five movements for an orchestra without violins. In her comments on the new movement, Clara tried to talk Johannes out of a long pedal point on A before the recapitulation, which undercut the return to the main key of A; he ignored the advice. She concluded her letter with another twist of the knife: “Thank you, dear Johannes, for having sent me these things. Leave me my joy in them and do not spoil it by your customary remarks.… I am sorry that you should speak so contemptuously about your concerto. So just lock it up in the cupboard—you cannot take it from me even if you can deny me the pleasure of playing it.”58
His deploring the concerto was a Brahmsian symptom of anxiety. A commitment for the premiere had finally turned up. After more