Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [133]
For the first time in years he had a little sustained creative momentum going, and after four years of publishing nothing he was ready to issue new work. Clara would be relieved to stop explaining to everyone why Johannes was not producing anything. The following August Prince Leopold’s invitation for another season at Detmold would receive a brisk refusal, Brahms citing the pressure of impending publications.22 He was too busy composing now to take on jobs just for the money. When he needed it, there was always performing.
Not surprisingly, 1860 saw one of his great outpourings of vocal music, much of it written for his circle of women in Hamburg. The music also includes mixed choruses, probably directed to Grimm’s choir, among them the two intricately polyphonic motets of Opus 29. Some of this music amounts to Brahmsian Gebrauchsmusik, the German term for occasional pieces written for practical purposes, but none of it is tossed off. Only in his teens did Brahms produce true potboilers, and even at that age he would not put his name on them.
Though his heart remained with his choristers, at the beginning of the year the main excitement concerned back-to-back premieres of his two serenades, the D Major and the A Major. Joachim read over the Second Serenade, the A Major, in January and Brahms felt reassured by what he heard. Then on February 10 he had another great day in his hometown, premiering the A Major Serenade with the Philharmonic under his own baton, and as soloist played the Schumann concerto. On the program Joachim contributed the Beethoven Violin Concerto and the Tartini “Devil’s Trill.” Then on March 3, Joachim took the podium in Hanover to premiere the D Major Serenade.
BRAHMS FELT TOO PLEASED with both serenades to hold them back, but even if his path was still uncertain he knew they were orchestration exercises, Kapellmeistermusik of no great consequence nor aspiring to be. He would not give them the exalted name of symphony. Yet they endure in the context of Brahms’s later and greater music as stretches of fresh air. For modern listeners the serenades are a gemütlich respite from the expressive intensity and formal complexity of so much Brahms. Where else did he find the rustic gaiety that opens the D Major, the charm of the scherzo in the A Major? He never again allowed himself to be quite so unbuttoned in orchestral music; only in the 1880 Academic Festival Overture did he come close. Otherwise the tone in his later orchestral music would be largely sober and monumental, as he believed symphonic music ought to be. In contrast, the serenades resound with the spirit of his youth, the Romantically ancient atmosphere of Detmold and the Teutoburger Wald, and echoes of Haydn and Mozart.
In the D Major, Brahms begins to integrate his studies, reaching toward an unprecedented kind of historical eclecticism. We hear that in the first measures of the First Serenade, the D Major, in the bagpipe drone and pealing hunting-horn tune that starts the first movement. The music is tuneful, Haydnesque in Papa Haydn’s folksy vein, as Brahms underscored with the archaic menuettos that make up the fourth movement. At the same time, the effect and style of the music also recall the Baroque suite. The forms are the familiar Classical models of sonata, rondo, scherzo, and the like. One after another for nearly an hour they unfold at a leisurely pastoral pace, without undue surprises. Inside the breezy opening allegro and the closing playful rondo are a pair of scherzos (one subdued, one brash), inside those a long adagio (awkwardly long, transparently recalling Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony) and the minuets.
To a later age the D Major speaks differently than when it was first heard, by people who had no experience of Brahms’s orchestral music except, if anything, the