Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [185]
Their collaboration began immediately. In late July, Clara wrote Brahms that she and Levi had been playing the F Minor Sonata for Two Pianos, and “it is masterly from every point of view, but—it is not a sonata, but a work whose ideas you might—and must—scatter over an entire orchestra.… Levi … said the same thing, very decidedly, without my having said a word.… Please, for this once take my advice and recast it.” Brahms probably conceded that this music worked with two pianos hardly better than it had with string quintet (though he published the piano version). He remained loath, however, to risk a purely orchestral work. Instead he got to work recasting the piece as a piano quintet, asking advice from Clara and Levi and Joachim.
FOR SOME REASON that July of 1864, despite the sociable diversions of Baden-Baden, Brahms was overwhelmed with memories of the euphoric, evanescent love he had found in Göttingen six years before. He wrote one of his oblique inquiries to old friend and host Julius Grimm, now working in Münster: “I’d like to know how it is in all the houses where one used to go so happily. Also write me of that house and gate—” He meant Agathe’s. Grimm replied without mercy:
At that house and gate things have sadly changed: the old Professor died three years ago.… Since last year Agathe has been a governess in Ireland, she teaches music and German to the two young girls of a rich English family.… Finally it got too much for her in Göttingen, she wanted to find a job for herself and get away from the shadowed pages of her life. She wrote me just the other day that … she’s yearning to come back to Germany—How much she’s had to endure—at least she has a strong nature and hasn’t lost her sense of humor.… But what a gloomy lot is that of a girl alone.75
Grimm knew there was no question of Johannes’s rescuing Agathe from her lonely wandering. Johannes had made his choice and that was that. With no danger of running into Agathe, Brahms returned to Göttingen and revisited the streets they had walked together. In September, back in Baden-Baden, he composed the devastated and exalted songs of Opus 32, most telling of them “Nicht mehr zu dir zu gehen”: “I would like to stop living, to perish instantly, and yet I would like to live for you, with you, and never die.”
The same month he composed the first three movements of the G Major String Sextet, completing it the following May. On the face of it this sextet is another magnificent chamber work, more complex, integrated, and mature than its predecessor the B Sextet (and therefore never as popular). To outline it is comparatively simple; the expressive implications are not. First movement warm but with an undercurrent of unrest. Second movement a “scherzo” medium in tempo and in rather than the usual , a Brahmsian intermezzo though not so called (its leading idea comes from a neo-Baroque gavotte of his from the 1850s). For contrast to the gentle elegance of the gavotte theme, a presto giocoso middle section in , entirely scherzolike. Then a set of adagio variations based on a sketch Brahms had sent Clara in 1855; despite a brightly rhythmic fugal variation in the center, the dominant tone of this movement is wandering, empty, tragic. The finale, not the least alla Zingarese this time, explodes with something like the racing vivacity of a proper scherzo, immediately contrasted with a warm section of moll-Dur melody with the gentle lilt of a dance—say, a last dance, at the end of an affair.
Brahms composed the sextet at the top of his form. Even though it adapts earlier material, it creates its own emotional world; hints of darkness, tragedy, and regret drift through the graceful surface. There is nothing of the monumental quality of his symphonies to come, or the relentless tension of the F Minor Quintet he was reworking at the time, and few hints of the naked anguish found in some of the contemporaneous Opus 32 songs. Rather there is a twilight quality, wistful and high-Brahmsian but still particular