Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [259]
It is the alpenhorn theme Brahms had sent to Clara on a postcard in 1868, as a gesture of reconciliation in a stormy time between them. Here it is the great resolution of the symphony, presented as a transformation from minor to major—an old trick done a million times, but here as fresh and moving as if Brahms invented it. More than that, to accompany the horn he added an extraordinary shimmering tremolo in muted strings, creating an atmosphere Debussy would have been proud to own (and probably, in Brahms’s case as in Debussy’s, owing much to Wagner).
If the keynotes of the First Symphony’s plot are intensification and joy overcoming darkness and fatality, Brahms demands of himself continually fresh, striking ideas in the finale. And with a marvelously sure hand and strength of inspiration, he found them. After the first horn call is echoed by a soaring flute, Brahms brings in trombones for the first time, joining bassoons in a quiet, archaic, chorale-like moment like a benediction that floats effortlessly from D minor to B to F to C:
In this symphony, as in most of his music now, Brahms no longer overtly draws on his own life and sufferings, but there is still a personal resonance in those two gestures. Surely the alpenhorn call suggested to his mind Clara; and in the trombone chorale the upper notes A E F recall F-A-E, frei aber einsam, and Joachim. Such Young Kreisler note-cabala, however, if intended at all, no longer determines the music or its meaning, either for us or for Brahms. His terms now are the terms of music in its dynamic, self-creating form.
After the trombone chorale the alpenhorn theme returns, horns calling to each other as if in an Alpine valley, within the shimmering sunlight of strings. The music reaches a pause like a held breath. Then comes a chorale theme in strings (above), its melody transformed from the dark minor of the introduction, unforgettable from the first time one hears it. It has a noble simplicity that like its model in Beethoven’s Ninth was written to intimate the highest qualities in life—and written to conquer the world.48 The turn from darkness has already been made, with the emergence of the alpenhorn. The chorale theme then is like a revelation on top of an epiphany, a melody of extraordinary folklike directness that bears a mysterious power. (Still, its sighing accompaniment at x is a transformation of the fateful chromatic lines of the first movement.)
For all this melody’s echoes of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony theme, however—its position in the finale, its hymnlike quality, its scoring—the chorale is still unique. Beethoven’s theme is joyous and finally heroic. Brahms’s theme is gentle and noble, its second half touched by his moll-Dur yearning, the whole more lyrically sustained than Beethoven’s. Once again we find in Brahms’s music something manifestly inspired by the past that he carries to an utterly individual place.
What follows the finale’s chorale theme is one of Brahms’s most extraordinary personal adaptations of traditional form. The music unfolds as a combination of rondo and sonata: the return of the C major chorale theme after letter H seems to be a repeat of the exposition but isn’t—more like a return of a rondo theme, quickly modulating to the distant key of E before dissolving into what turns out to be more or less the development.49 The development features a thematic dialectic in which the chorale melody is systematically transformed into the alpenhorn theme:
The end of that process of transformation is the recapitulation after letter N, which therefore presents the alpenhorn rather than the expected chorale theme. (The second theme recapitulates normally, even in the “right” key of C, at measure 302.)50
The finale has moments of conflict, with Brahms more ingenious than ever in dislocating the meter to intensify climaxes—either displacing the downbeat