Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [146]
These kinds of formal adaptations mark Brahms’s mature style. In work after work he maintains the expected elements in some degree, but may withhold a clear announcement of them, the kind of help that Mozart usually provides us. Complicating matters more, in Brahms’s sonata-form movements the development of ideas tends to spread out of the development section and pervade the whole movement; he wanted that richness of elaboration. A Brahmsian movement is often made of succinct melodic ideas that begin to transform as soon as we hear them, and continue to evolve and recombine throughout, accompanied by the sort of abrupt key changes that used to be confined to the development section. It is this innovative aspect of his style that Arnold Schoenberg admiringly named “developing variation.”32
Of course, given that there is little new under the sun, and that we can find a cue in the past for nearly everything “new” in Brahms, his games with formal expectations are not unprecedented. Haydn regularly teases listeners with false or withheld recapitulations, in the same playful way as he might begin a piece with an ending gesture or end with an opening gesture. These are jokes for the connoisseur. Brahms is innovative more in the extent, seriousness, and subtlety of his formal explorations, his up-to-date chromatic harmony, his constantly developmental approach that also tends to blur formal outlines. A primary reason Brahms was perceived for so long to be a “difficult” composer, despite the manifest expressiveness of his style, is his complex handling of form, his obscuring of the boundaries. Critics said: he can’t just do something simple and beautiful and let it be; he’s driven to snarl it up with complexities.
Certainly Brahms’s experiments with inherited patterns did not begin all at once with the G Minor Piano Quartet. As early as the A Major Serenade he used a false repeat of the exposition. But in his maturity the games become more systematic than in his earlier works. At the same time, in the G Minor Quartet he counterbalances the formal complexities by clarifying other dimensions. The exposition, for example, has an unusually restricted key outline: a little G minor, then a lot of D major—which simplifies the key structure while deliberately unbalancing the overall effect.
Besides, if the formal outline of the G Minor first movement is innovative and sometimes confusing, the ideas are more compact than in Brahms’s earlier large-scale pieces. The austere, measured opening unfolds like a microcosmic demonstration of developing variation: a four-note motive in even quarter notes, the second measure the same shape inverted and varied in intervals, the third measure the second transposed, and the fourth measure the inverted shape transposed again, with the middle two notes juxtaposed to make a harmony:
The movement grows and intensifies from that opening motive, its shape turning up again and again in fresh configurations. Finally a new figure, tense and driving, is superimposed contrapuntally in piano under the main motive in strings:
The calm opening, then, is like a coiled spring that gradually releases its power (an effect Brahms would make explosive in the F Minor Quintet). Before long the tense subsidiary figure drives into the foreground, to become the main rhythmic and dramatic force in the movement. To keep the thematic evolution in focus, Brahms characteristically makes his music almost unceasingly melodic. In contrast to the stretches of chordal figuration common in Mozart and Beethoven, many Brahms movements can be whistled practically from beginning to end, as if they were a single melodic line. He intended to keep in our ears the essential logic of developing and transforming motives, expressed