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By Root 1575 0

Opus 51 had been preceded by twenty discarded quartets. The quartet genre/medium was a territory Haydn had laid out in its developed form, Mozart carried forward, and Beethoven in his sixteen quartets explored to a breadth and depth that for composers raised the question of whether he had left anything for anyone else to say. Since Beethoven, only Schubert and in some degree Schumann and Mendelssohn had shown that the quartet could still produce fresh ideas—but as of the 1870s the Schumann and Mendelssohn quartets had not taken hold, which means that none since the 1820s had entered the repertoire.42

So by mid-century the string quartet like the symphony appeared a moribund genre despite the dozens of composers writing them. The intimacy and concentration of the quartet seemed contrary to the spirit of Romanticism, which loved the extravagant and monumental. Wagner, Liszt, Chopin, Berlioz—none of them wrote string quartets. Carl Dahlhaus observes, “It had become virtually impossible to strike the precarious and mutually conditioned balance between subjectivity of expression—as in late Beethoven—and rigorous objectivity of form; composers saw almost no escape from the trap of succumbing either to musical academicism or to programmatic confessions.… After Beethoven, string quartets resembled fossil specimens of an extinct genre.”43

With a tenacity that he showed in no other genre, not even the symphony, Brahms kept writing quartet after quartet and throwing them away. He insisted on picking up the legacy of Beethoven and carrying it further, but as always he insisted on doing it his own way, which included finding something fresh in the old genre. When he finally issued his pair of quartets in C and A minor, his personal solution to the problem turned out to be what biographer Malcolm MacDonald calls a “remorseless logic” of thematic construction,44 and a harmonic complexity that Arnold Schoenberg (in “Brahms the Progressive”) admiringly compared to the hyperchromaticism of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.45

The C Minor String Quartet begins with a rushing theme that casts its urgent tone and its motivic echoes over the whole piece:

Ivor Keys comments that the theme “constantly summons a storm, as it were, to drown any incipient songs.”46 The melodic material of the first movement and much of the rest is fragmentary bits of themes, largely in a dark minor, with none of Brahms’s lyrical transports. The instrumental writing is scrupulously without brilliance. Walter Frisch summarizes the approach of the C Minor:

Harmonies, especially in the first and last movements, churn continuously, carrying aloft very small thematic or motivic fragments.… The rising stepwise third that opens the first movement reappears … to shape the main theme of the [second-movement] Romanze. Both the main theme and countersubject of the [third-movement] Allegretto also clearly derive from the basic motive. And the finale bursts in with a theme that directly recalls the main idea of the first movement.… It is the first work in which Brahms shows a concern for such higher-level thematic processes, rather than mere thematic recall or transformation.47

Thus Brahms’s manifestly self-conscious solution to the dilemma of following Beethoven and Schubert as a writer of string quartets: not lyricism or subjectivity but objective craft, a heightened attention to structure and motivic development across the movements, a relentless determination to make every note significant to the whole. The expressive intensity of the C Minor is created in large part by the intellectual intensity of that labor—for composer and listener alike. (This “total thematic” approach to composition, and the heated effect of the result, were to be founding elements of Schoenberg’s style.) The middle movements of the C Minor, the romanze and the allegretto—both moderate in tempo, neither remotely like a scherzo—relent a little, before the brusque and explosive last movement.

The A Minor Quartet is a degree more outgoing, less intense, less self-conscious, more relaxed in logic than