Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [243]
If the rhythmically driving second variation recalls the sonic world of Brahms’s serenades (but with more octave doublings in the winds than before), another of his thumbprints turns up in the wistful and flowing third variation, in which he moves from rich, full scoring to (at letter B) delicate effects of instruments used soloistically. There we hear an early example of his way of integrating full-orchestra and chamber textures, alternating the monumental with the intimate. At letter C in the same variation we find Brahms’s new mastery of characteristically Viennese durchbrochene Arbeit (“broken work”). As Karl Geiringer defines that technique, “The motives and themes rove continually from one instrument to another; long-drawn-out melodies are divided among the various instruments, so that the lead is permanently changing from one section of the orchestra to another.”40
The liquid lines of variation IV make up a contrapuntal tour de force that at the same time is the most poignantly expressive moment of the piece. Its mood is contrasted immediately by the darting, vivace chromaticism of variation V, that recalls the exhilarating scherzos of Brahms’s younger days (now with a steady exploration of polyrhythm, playing 3+3 against 2+2+2 in the meter). After the next variation’s robust pealing of hunting horns, variation VII presents another contrapuntal extravaganza in the form of a lilting siciliano.
That sighs away into the finale, at once the most original and most backward-looking of the movements. Having taken bits and pieces of the theme and its harmonies for his material throughout, Brahms fashions elements of the theme’s harmony and melody into a five-bar bass pattern repeated over and over, underlying a gradually unfolding contrapuntal development above. It makes for the first set of variations ever to be concluded with a “ground bass” movement, a genre whose most famous exponent is Bach (especially the Chaconne for solo violin, a specialty of Joachim and a favorite of Brahms).
As much as anything else in this work one remembers its sound—massive here, delicate there. Only perhaps in the Schicksalslied does Brahms’s sheer orchestral voice say so much. As one of the more subtle examples of originality: who would expect him to deal so lovingly with so un-Brahmsian an instrument as the piccolo? The Variations has one of the most elaborate piccolo parts written to that time. Besides making use of its usual function of adding a top to the orchestra, in the eighth variation Brahms became one of the first to explore the fragile lyricism of the instrument’s middle register. Most memorably, in the finale the piping voice of the piccolo seems to pull the other instruments up an octave, to create a glittering reminiscence of the “Haydn” theme. There, in a prophetic suggestion of what the avant-garde of a hundred years later would call “tone-color composition,” the silvery tones of the triangle blend with the piccolo and high winds to produce a music-box effect of magical charm, which casts its nostalgic glow backward over the whole piece. With that gesture Brahms capped one of his most delightful, most popular, and most far-reaching works.
THEN, immediately after the scintillating Variations he completed, at age forty, two of his most severe, introspective, and ultimately least popular works—the String Quartets in C Minor and A Minor, Opus 51.41 Both had been going for some time, with provisional versions read over by Joachim and his group (he formed his renowned quartet in 1869).
Brahms claimed that