Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [166]
OF THE PAIR OF PIANO QUARTETS from that period, the G Minor has often had an easier time of it with audiences, maybe because the alla Zingarese ends the piece so irresistibly. Comparing it with the A Major, its slightly later partner (and both from earlier sketches), shows a characteristic pattern in Brahms’s pairs of works for the same medium: the first looser and more extroverted, the second relatively tighter and more subtle. If the appeal of the earlier piano quartet grows with each movement to a peak at the finale, for much of its course the A Major stays engaging and also demanding for the listener. The forms of its movements are comparatively straightforward. The complexity comes in the working-out of the material, some of the earliest examples of mature Brahmsian developing variation.5 As Hanslick’s review shows, the technique is not so easy to take in on first hearing. Often, as in the opening movement of the A Major, a theme is no sooner stated than it begins evolving both melodically and harmonically, often with new keys washing through it.
Whatever the complications, the A Major Quartet’s melodic material is winning, the tone largely good-natured. The second movement is one of Brahms’s stretches of nocturnal music, the tone sweet verging on sentimental, interrupted with mysterious and vaguely ominous piano swirls (recalling Schubert’s eerie lied “Die Stadt”). The A section of the third-movement scherzo is lyrical and light, the trio an exercise in the demonic-canonic, echoing Haydn’s famous minuet for string quartet called the “Witch’s Round.”
Perhaps the most arresting new element in the A Major is its rhythmic explorations. In contrast to the gaunt quarter-note theme that opens the G Minor Quartet, the A Major begins gently, undulating between eighths and triplets, a pattern to recur through the movement, sometimes expressed as two-against-three: in the second theme section from measure 53, for example, the eighths of the melody are based on the eighths of the opening, while the cello counterpoint comes from the triplets of the opening. Beyond this distinctive use of two-against-three, now Brahms plays remarkable games with meter. The extended and gracious closing theme of the first movement—at the end of the exposition and the most elaborate melody so far—is still written in but as Walter Frisch observes, for three measures the perceived downbeat is shifted to the third beat, followed by three two-beat groupings in a row, before the perceived and written downbeats settle down together.6 (See above.)
From now on in Brahms’s music the apparent, audible metric groupings are apt once in a while to drift around the written measures. He carries that idea further in the driving, vivacious last movement of the A Major. The eruptive beginning defies us to find the barline, then the second phrase almost convinces us the downbeat is in the middle of the first beat. After a series of similar diversions, for several measures (from 47) Brahms superimposes a five-quarter-note pattern over the meter—a wild, almost disorienting effect for its day, mitigated by the larkish tone of the movement.
Where did these metric subtleties come from? For all its unprecedented theoretical and historical investigations, the nineteenth century concerned itself little with rhythm, had few theoretical concepts to apply to it and scarcely even the language to analyze it. In the hundreds of pages of detailed response to Brahms’s music from contemporary friends and critics, we rarely find any comment on his rhythmic ideas and no systematic analysis at all. It is as if Brahms were the only musician of his age aware that he was doing remarkable things with rhythm—and since he seldom talked about his own technique, he never brought it up either.
Walter Frisch notes that some of Brahms’s ideas developed from his studies of Renaissance and Baroque composers,7 whose rhythmic patterns can treat the barline more flexibly than later music—before the Classical period, composers did not necessarily think in regular, dancelike