Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [191]
During the first two months in Baden he composed the last movement of the G Major String Sextet and the fugal finale to the first solo sonata he would own up to, the E Minor for cello and piano, begun three years before. The main effort was a new piece whose opening theme found him as he sat among the mountain firs near his house—a keening melody, sentimental in almost Schumannesque fashion, for violin, horn, and piano: the Horn Trio, Opus 40.
Not for this music nor any other of his did Brahms want the newly developed chromatic French horns with valves. For the trio Brahms specifically asked for the open, valveless Waldhorn. He had grown up hearing his father play the instrument, and with his father’s coaching tried it himself in childhood. At the same time, in practice Brahms knew that open horns were obsolescent. From the beginning, the trio has most often been played on a modern valved French horn.
In his horn writing in the trio—and in all his music—Brahms felt the instrument as he did the piano, and perhaps no other until he became wedded to the clarinet near the end of his life.16 The open horn, meanwhile, had been the one used by the gods, the horn of Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven, noble in sound but limited in available notes. (The virtuosic high horn players for whom Bach wrote had died out by Haydn’s time.) In their orchestral music, Classical-era composers often used natural horn for long pedal notes, as tonal anchors. Now and then, as Beethoven did in the scherzo of the Eroica, a composer might let the horn loose on its ancestral hunting calls: “Waldhorn” means forest, or hunting, horn.
A valveless horn can largely only produce pitches in its key unless the player creates a kind of artificial pitch by “stopping,” which means shoving a hand into the bell to raise the pitch. Besides being the only way of playing notes outside the single, always-major key of the horn, stopping also mutes the instrument’s normally bright sound. Brahms wanted both qualities: the particular tone of valveless horn on the open notes of its compass, and the veiled, from-afar quality of stopped notes. Since the requested horn for the trio is in E, every movement had to be in that key—the tuneful opening, a scherzo as ebullient and rhythmically fanciful as Brahms’s youthful ones, a slow movement in E minor, a finale where the horn finally gets its hunting calls.
The first movement is laid out in an A B A B A pattern, the only opening movement in a major work of his not in sonata form.17 All the movements count among the more delicious in Brahms’s chamber music, but the telling one is the adagio third movement. It is a mournful dirge in , in which the minor key and chromatic motives require the horn to use stopped notes much of the time. At the last cadence Brahms deliberately brings the horn to rest not on an open E but on a stopped G; he wanted the veiled effect. In the solemn ritual of the music and the faraway stopped tones, this slow movement reveals itself as a gentle memorial for Christiane Brahms, the first of a son’s requiems for his mother.18
DESPITE THE DEATH of his mother and its reflection in the trio, Brahms was in one of his agreeable phases in summer 1865. He traveled to Basel in June to hear Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and play his own music in concert, staying with Julius Stockhausen and Theodor Kirchner, the