Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [241]
Brahms first drafted the Haydn Variations (theme, eight variations, and finale) for two pianos, during June and July of 1873. As it turns out, what appear to be most of his sketches and drafts for the piece survive—the only substantial set of sketches he ever allowed, deliberately or not, to escape destruction.36
In his study of this material, Donald M. McCorkle notes three levels of work: shorthand rough drafts (often two-line continuity sketches), detailed sketches of tricky places, and finally relatively full drafts for two pianos, from which Brahms made his fair copy. The material tells an interesting story, both in what it contains and what it does not. As in the other surviving scraps of Brahms’s sketches, one does not find the slow, painful development of ideas, often beginning in the commonplace and ending in the sublime, that Brahms’s friend Nottebohm detailed in the Beethoven sketchbooks. Instead, Karl Geiringer notes, “In the first sketch all the characteristics of the complete work are already evident.”37 One sees further evidence of Brahms composing fast and efficiently, then solving the remaining problems during read-throughs and early performances, and in the copying and engraving process. (Any number of pieces he quietly smothered in the cradle, before or after private readings.)
In other words the compositional process revealed in the Haydn Variations sketches duplicates what is implied in the surviving sketch of the A Major Piano Quartet: by the time Brahms started putting notes on paper he had already worked out in his mind much of the continuity and general drift of a piece. That is what his early-morning walks (or, in Tutzing, swims) were devoted to. His main tool in this method was his superb memory—the kind of memory Mozart possessed. Like Mozart, though, in the complex contrapuntal passages with which the Variations are studded, Brahms needed to work out things on paper, including the skittering Variation V and the intricate presto of Variation VIII. (There may, of course, be lost sketches.)
By the time the Variations were finished for two pianos Brahms had apparently decided to make an orchestral version of the piece, if that was not the idea from the beginning. In both versions the music represents a watershed for him, marking his return to instrumental composition after seven years of concentrating on vocal, and to major piano works after ten years (not counting the two-piano version of the F Minor Quintet). As it turns out, the Haydn Variations in the piano version is the last large keyboard work of his life. In grander garb, meanwhile, it is his first purely orchestral work since the early serenades of 1858–9.
In the spectrum of Brahms’s compositional output the Haydn Variations amount to a tour de force. As McCorkle puts it:
the most distilled essence … of the compositional craft and musical aesthetics of Brahms, as well as a phenomenal artistic amalgam of Baroque, Classical, and Romantic formal and stylistic components.… [A] synthesis of the Romanticist’s miniature character piece and Beethoven’s type of character variations climaxes in a Bachian passacaglia, the first time a basso-ostinato construction was used to conclude a set of character variations.
At the same time the instrumentated version constitutes an entirely new genre—the first freestanding orchestral variations in history.
Pervading all this we see Brahms’s singular melding of historicism