Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [140]
JULY FOUND BRAHMS in Hamburg again, conducting the Frauenchor again, restless but composing steadily. Joachim and a chamber group premiered the B Sextet in Hanover on October 20, 1860. The date marks the public debut of Brahms as a master of chamber music. The piece endures as one of his most popular and accessible.
For Brahms, string sextet was a characteristic choice of medium in those days, partly because it sidestepped his apprehensions. As he put off composing symphonies because of what he was famously to call “the tramp of giants” behind him, for years in his chamber music he published nothing for the most essential chamber medium, string quartet. In fact he had been writing quartets all along, but did not let one out of the house until some twenty attempts had been consigned to oblivion. He claimed to have papered the walls and ceiling of his room in Hamburg with rejected pieces: “I had only to lie on my back to admire my sonatas and quartets.”9 For years he could not settle on what his approach to the string quartet might be. So in the 1860s Brahms concentrated on fresher, acoustically richer, more nearly orchestral chamber mediums that happened to be less thunderous with the tramp of giants—string sextets, strings with piano, a horn trio.
The B Sextet starts with a warm, floating lyric theme, with the moll-Dur (minor-major) coloration of so many melodies to come: a poignant mingling of minor and major, sometimes with short excursions into distant keys. Despite subtle games with the phrasing,10 the first movement unfolds in “textbook” sonata form, the second theme in the “correct” key of F major. Brahms contrasts the genial spirit of the opening with a startling minor-key slow movement almost in a different style: variations on a familiar Baroque bass line and harmonic sequence called la folia, also related to the slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, but with a strange, melodramatic, archaic feel—say, Brahms harking back two centuries in German music to the mode of Heinrich Schütz, the predecessor of Bach, with the cello raking across the strings in the manner of gamba music. The scherzo and rondo finale return to gay and ironic deportment, both of them submitting like the first movement to the expected formal layout of their genre.
In other words, in this work of his early maturity Brahms appropriated traditional models of sonata, variations, scherzo, and rondo more or less at face value, then filled them with his melodic and harmonic personality, his singular expressive world: Romantic emotion bridled by Classical form. In the formal orthodoxy of the B Sextet we see still relatively unsullied the teachings of Eduard Marxsen, and his student who copied down in the “Schatzkästlein”:
Form is the product of thousands of years of the greatest master’s efforts and something that each new generation cannot assimilate too quickly. It is but the delusion of misguided originality to seek in one’s own limited universe to achieve a perfection that already exists.11
Having conformed to that outlook in the B Sextet and made a conspicuous success of it, in his next works Brahms was to move on to a more imaginative dialectic with tradition.
Meanwhile despite Clara’s entreaties to wipe Leipzig off his map, in November 1860 Brahms conducted the D Major Serenade at the Gewandhaus. If no fiasco on the order of the piano concerto, it still fell as flat as expected. Clara, who attended, wrote in her journal, “I should have liked to throw myself on Johannes’s neck, I was so moved by it, and the coldness with