• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The opening movement shows what he had learned by age thirty-one as a shaper of expressive and inventive sonata forms. It begins with a babbling half-step ostinato on G-F# by the first viola. With interruptions, this figure persists through much of the first theme group. In that figure lies the main technical gambit of the opening section: what harmonies can be superimposed on a given half-step ostinato? At the beginning Brahms makes a striking tonal shift out of two distant keys that can contain the G-F# oscillation, G major and E major (the oscillation gives a major-minor inflection to the latter key). The linked rising fifths of the opening melody, G-D, E-B, define those two keys, which dominate the opening pages—thus a motive element produces a larger-scale tonal element. The half-step oscillation goes on and on, stopping only to resume, changing to other pitches, ushering in new keys.

To spell out these devices, this depth of craftsmanship, seems terribly dry applied to music this lovely, its gentle wistfulness shot through with quiet obsession. But the technical and expressive are inseparable in this work. The oscillation, for example, is nominally an accompaniment figure, yet it moves continually from foreground to background, functioning like a theme. It is like an obsession—say, with a woman—that moves in and out of consciousness but never really stops. As to the technique: once again, and never more strikingly, Brahms thematicizes accompaniment figures, integrates melody and accompaniment, unifies foreground and background, and the fifths of the opening unify motivic and larger harmonic structure. Meanwhile, for all their simplicity, the half steps of the ostinato never tire the ear because he continually superimposes fresh harmonies around them, finding the right moment to change the pitch and finally to leave the idea.

Maybe the most arresting thing in this movement is the overall thematic process, beginning with the rising fifths of the opening melody. From that point scraps of themes succeed one another, seeming to accumulate rather than just pass by. Step by step, each turn of melody building on the last, we move toward something hinted in a motivic fragment here, a rhythm there. The second theme group arrives with a melody more extended than any so far, and builds yearningly toward a dancing, ecstatic climax that has been gathering since the beginning of the piece. That climax flares in a simple but urgent line with a poignant suspension underneath:

It is the climax of the exposition, a moment of breathtaking beauty and emotional power, more remarkable for the simplicity of means: a line in even quarter notes, as simple and ingenuous as a little waltz. The impact of that climax, its meaning for all the abstractness of meaning in music, is created by a marshaling of every musical dimension: a coalescing of thematic elements that seems to produce the melody as inevitably as a flower blooms; the brilliant scoring, the instruments soaring into the high register; the position of the phrase within a subtly original sonata form exposition in which everything points to the end of the second theme group; the rhythmic complexity of the buildup paying off in the lilting simplicity of the climax, which soon falls into metric shifts combined with breathtaking harmonies, rhythm and harmony together almost sexual in the way they mount to a luminous culmination and afterglow.

There is also a secret lying behind that climax, those particular notes: the pitches spell out Agathe’s name. They are A-G-A … H-E (H being the German name for the note B). The missing letter T is represented by the suspended D that comes in under the melody—so, A-G-A-D-H-E. At the same time the D forms part of another word, made of the second A of the upper melody, the suspended D, and the E of the next melody pitch. The other word is ADE, farewell. Agathe, farewell.

By this work,” Brahms told Joseph Gänsbacher, “I have freed myself of my last love.”76

In it Brahms freed himself of more than love—if he did that, if it can