Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [258]
So in layout (if less in material) the symphony’s movements recall Beethoven: serious opening movement in moderate-to-fast tempo, contrasting lyrical slow movement, relatively light third (though not the usual minuet or scherzo), then a “heroic” allegro finale. In the 1860s, Brahms had first solved his uncertainties about last movements with the “Hungarian” style wedded to rondo form. That approach did not suit him for a symphony finale, though it did for concertos. For a symphonic last movement he wanted something more serious. After years of mulling it over he finally conceived an approach for the C Minor, but one that placed an enormous burden on his imagination.
The symphonies of Haydn and his time were “top-heavy”—the first movement the weightiest, then lighter middle movements, then the finale usually a “last dance” in tone: a light, spirited movement usually in rondo form (A B A C A, etc.). Mozart in his last three symphonies began to build up the intensity of the finale, but (except perhaps in the Jupiter) the first movement remained the most substantial. From the Eroica onward, Beethoven added weight and intensity to the finale, in the process quickening the rhythm of the third movement with the creation of the scherzo, until his middle movements hung suspended between the pillars of the first movement and finale. Following Mozart’s cue, Beethoven thus changed the “last dance” idea of the symphonic finale into an apotheosis. The end result of that process was the epic choral finale of the Ninth Symphony.
Picking up mainly from the Ninth, in the C Minor Symphony Brahms continued in a logical but supremely difficult direction. He inverted the top-heavy symphony of Haydn’s day, making the finale the weightiest movement, a culmination of the motivic and dramatic unfolding—the “characters” and “plot”—of the entire symphony. To that end he made the middle movements less intense, the third lightest of all. Following the daunting assignment he had given himself, to intensify between first movement and last, Brahms was now obliged to write a finale of extraordinary impact.
He begins the finale with an unprecedented gesture: an extended slow introduction, calling to mind the introduction of the first movement. That is its function, to return to the dark intensity with which the symphony began, the fatalistic question it poses and leaves unanswered. In the finale, though, the terms of the introduction are new: the timpani rumbling rather than pounding, the main theme a keening minor one that is about to undergo a remarkable transformation into major:
So the plot of the symphony, posed in the searing introduction that begins it, reaches its denouement in the finale. As Reinhold Brinkmann puts it: “Brahms [takes up] that ‘plot archetype’ of nineteenth-century music which might be paraphrased as the resolution of a conflict of ideas through an inner formal process aimed toward a liberating ending—in a nutshell, the ‘positive’ overcoming of a ‘negative’ principle.”47 As in Beethoven’s Third, Fifth, and Ninth Symphonies, Brahms’s First is a symbolic journey from darkness to light, from fatalistic uncertainty to apotheosis, from tragedy to joyous liberation.
Yet in taking up that archetype Brahms finds fresh ways to realize it. With the F Minor Piano Quintet he had mastered the Beethovenian sense of dramatic plot in his own terms, and carried that personal interpretation into the First Symphony. The final liberation of Beethoven’s Fifth, for example, begins with the outbreak of the finale—resolving C minor to C major—and ends in the coda with the falling fate-motive of the famous opening transformed into a triumphant rising figure.