• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1277 0

measures. Certainly Beethoven’s metric games (as in the Eroica first movement) contributed to Brahms’s love of hemiola, which usually means redefining a 3+3 metric division into 2+2+2. The “Hungarian” style in general gave him all sorts of fresh ideas for ritmico movements. For Brahms’s habit of shifting the perceived downbeat for long stretches, maybe Bach was another model—for example, the B Minor Prelude from The Well-Tempered Clavier Book I, where the sense of downbeat drifts to the third beat of the measure, back to the first, to the second, and so on over the course of a languid, beautiful adagio. Schumann’s music also provided models of metric freedom. By the finale of Brahms’s First Symphony, obscuring the meter for long stretches has become a feature of both local and larger structural organization, and also a highly expressive device: moments of wrenching intensity are created partly by uprooting the pulse.

Besides the bold games with meter, the A Major Quartet’s exhilarating last movement evolves a step away from the “gypsy” finale. If the G Minor last movement is a full-scale lusty alla Zingarese, the A Major is gypsyish, keeping some of the characteristic rhythmic drive and tonal coloration of the “Hungarian” tone, but more abstracted. The finale of his next chamber piece, the F Minor Piano Quintet, would go a degree further into an abstraction of the Hungarian accent, and a step closer to solving one of the questions that still confronted and maybe baffled Brahms: if this kind of chamber-music finale suited him, what did he want for a symphonic finale? For that, the alla Zingarese vein did not feel right to him.

Brahms already had the draft of an opening movement for a C minor symphony awaiting answers to that and at least two other questions, one abstract and one mundane. First: If not a scherzo movement, what instead? Second: How could he earn enough to give him time and peace to write a symphony at all, given that a symphony is the sort of project that can lose one a lot of money? The financial side of creative life was to become even more pressing when Brahms found himself the main support of his family. As it played out, though, the decade following 1862 would provide both the aesthetic and practical questions with agreeable answers.

HISTORY CAN ONLY FOLLOW a little of the process by which he arrived at one approach or another in a piece, because Brahms the avid student of Beethoven’s sketchbooks destroyed most of his own sketches. He did not want the world snooping in his workshop any more than in the rest of his life. Maybe too he did not want history to discover how relatively little sketching he did, compared to Beethoven. (Brahms’s friend Gustav Nottebohm made the first important study of the Beethoven sketches, and Brahms eventually owned some originals.)

One of the few surviving sketches concerns fourteen measures for the first movement of the A Major Piano Quartet. The fragment consists of two lines, mostly bare melody on top and bass on the bottom, with figures under the staff indicating the harmony.8 These measures show how much Brahms composed in terms of a continuous melody unfolding over a strong bass line. In later years, when composers showed him their songs, he was apt to cover up the middle parts with two fingers and critique only the melody and bass.

From the evidence of the few surviving sketches on paper and from observation, it appears that Brahms did not need the painful forging of ideas on paper that became, after Nottebohm’s studies were published, part of Beethoven’s Romantic mystique. Beethoven’s sketches look like a heroic struggle with fate and human fallibility. Brahms got his ideas like everyone else, from the unconscious or the angels or the Muse, or whatever one’s metaphor for inspiration. Then he put the ideas aside, to let them work in his mind. Given his tenacious memory for music (and for all else good and bad), Brahms did not necessarily have to write things down to work on them, as apparently Beethoven did. Much of his composing was done in his head, pacing around