Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [242]
If such heavy historical and personal baggage seems a lot to lay at the feet of a relatively short—about twenty minutes—and apparently unpretentious piece, that is an illustration of the issues with which Brahms grapples, sometimes, even in his more straightforward works. And he addresses these formidable aesthetic and stylistic matters with as little apparent effort as he negotiates invertible triple counterpoint in the lyrical Variation IV.
There is still another matter that surely absorbed Brahms as much as any, as he composed the Variations: they are his final orchestral study before taking up the C minor symphony sketches again. That summer of 1873 he made several visits to conductor Hermann Levi in Munich, where the two presumably sat working through the scoring. Certainly by then Brahms was far more experienced with the orchestra than he had been in the 1850s, when he dived into the D Minor Piano Concerto and found himself over his head. But he still depended on Levi’s expertise for ideas and corrections, as he had once relied on Joachim and other friends.
After writing the Piano Concerto he had come to terms with orchestral technique in the two Serenades and in the accompaniments to his choral music—most strikingly the Schicksalslied, his breakthrough as an instrumental colorist. With the Haydn Variations, Brahms reached his full bloom as an orchestrator: very late for someone of his stature, never as concerned with sheer color as Wagner and Berlioz nor as thoroughly at home with the orchestra, nor as consistently imaginative as those two; but still with a personal voice that ideally projects his musical intentions.
It is characteristic of his autodidactic approach that Brahms could hardly have designed for himself a more practical scoring exercise than a set of variations, in which each number has to be characterized not only in texture and figuration but in color. From theme to finale, the scoring demands, and nicely achieves, ten distinct environments. Which is to say, it requires an orchestral virtuosity that Brahms did not possess in the previous decade, and might not have achieved at all without Hermann Levi to advise him.
Among other things the orchestral Haydn Variations clarify his debt to the past in the instrumental dimension. Brahms begins by evoking the sound of Haydn and the eighteenth century; he scored the theme largely for winds, close to the original chorale. (During rehearsals for the premiere he corrected a blunder—strings had doubled the winds in the beginning, making a bland scoring instead of the neo-Haydn effect we know today.) The sound of the beginning evokes quite specifically the early Classical period. Brahms probably knew how the wind section had developed in the history of the Classical orchestra: pairs of oboes and horns and bassoons added to the string section, with trumpets and drums for festive effects; then in Haydn’s day flutes were added, followed by clarinets; and Beethoven first introduced trombones to symphonic music in the Fifth Symphony. Brahms begins the Haydn Variations with the woody sound of winds dominated by oboes and bassoons, without flutes, and he left trombones out of the piece entirely.39 That sound, with its characteristic Classical-era doublings, was to turn up often in his later orchestral music.
In the first variation, its sweeping lyrical lines in vinelike intertwining, appears fully emerged the mature Brahms string sound: octave doublings making a weightiness (perhaps gleaned from studies in