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After the difficulties he posed in the first movement of the G Minor, Brahms compensates listeners in the rest of the piece. The second movement Allegro he first called “Scherzo” as expected, but at Clara’s suggestion struck that off the score and substituted “Intermezzo.” He was beginning to move away from the old Beethovenian scherzo toward a new kind of graceful, medium-tempo inner movement of his own invention, for which “Intermezzo” is an apt term. The Intermezzo of the G Minor is liltingly tuneful in its simple, scherzo-like A B A-coda pattern. The formal simplification continues with a yearning, melodious Andante, enlivened with an Animato, A B A again but with elaborate thematic developments that blur the outline.

For the finale, Brahms supplied something he knew would cinch the popularity of the quartet: a breathless, pounding, irresistible movement in gypsy style, rondo alla Zingarese, complete with a torrential cadenza for the piano that recalls the wild violin roulades of Hungarian music. One imagines patriotic Joachim, composer of the Hungarian Concerto, smiling when he wrote Johannes: “In the last movement you beat me on my own turf.” With this movement Brahms broke once and for all, and with manifest exhilaration, out of his uncertainty about finales. (Once again, he got his cue for this “innovation” from Haydn and Schubert, who seized on the gypsy style.) In pieces of the next years his gypsy voice would continue to develop, even if never presented quite so directly again. The evolution of his alla Zingarese style, meanwhile, was part of a broader evolution toward the essential Brahmsian symphonic finale: more moderate in tempo, serious, monumental.

At the same time as his treatment of sonata form became more subtle and adventurous, his approach to theme-and-variations got relatively tighter and more traditional. His earlier sets were close to Schumannesque “fantasy-variations.” Then in 1856 he wrote Joachim that he had rethought his approach: “From time to time I reflect on variation form and find that it should be kept stricter, purer. The Ancients were very strict about retaining the bass of the theme, their actual theme.” By “Ancients” he mainly meant Bach and the Baroque. The traditional primacy of the bass line—as in Bach’s Goldberg Variations—became his model, in theory. In practice, as scholar Elaine Sisman observes, he “sought to reconcile older and newer models in his works”33—say, joining the imaginative freedom of Schumann’s fantasy-variations with the strictness and “purity” of Bach’s.

In 1861 Brahms’s conscious turning back to the past, and perhaps unconscious integration of the present, produced perhaps the finest set of piano variations since Beethoven’s—the Opus 24 Variations and Fugue on a Theme by G. F. Handel. Besides a masterful unfolding of ideas concluding with an exuberant fugue with a finish designed to bring down the house, the work is quintessentially Brahms in other ways: the filler of traditional forms with fresh energy and imagination; the historical eclectic able to start off with a gallant little tune of Handel’s, Baroque ornaments and all, and integrate it seamlessly into his own voice, in a work of massive scope and dazzling variety. The Handel Variations are dedicated to a “beloved friend”—Clara.

Without pausing for breath, in November 1861 Brahms produced a companion piece to the Handel Variations, his second set of Schumann Variations, Opus 23, for piano four hands. Maybe in Brahms’s mind this work, with its concluding funeral march, laid to rest the turbulent, improbable, glorious, and wrenching last eight years that saw the end of his youth and his enforced maturity. That autumn, still without a break, he finished the A Major Piano Quartet.34

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AMIDST THIS CASCADE OF WORK, Brahms wrote Clara a remarkably abject letter, however ironical in tone. She was scheduled to perform in several Hamburg programs starting in mid-November 1861, which would include the premiere of the G Minor