Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [275]
For many listeners from then to now, the D Major has seemed a backward-looking, idyllic affair, with all four movements in major keys. The first is in three-quarter time like a waltz, beginning with lilting themes that Johann Strauss might have claimed. In a symphonic context, the symphony’s opening seems light, gemütlich, radically retrogressive. With it Brahms evokes, in his lush, mature orchestral voice, both Haydn and his own tranquil days in Detmold, and the D Major Serenade. In other words, he returns in maturity to the tone of his youth to take it in new directions, technically and expressively.
In fact, anyone trying to waltz to this music will fall on his face. That this is no longer the world of the Serenades but the fully mature Brahms is shown right away, the opening bass line answered by motives in the winds whose phrase begins a bar later than the basses’, so a whisper of uncertainty intrudes already into the gemütlich tone. The apparent lilting simplicity of the beginning will not last either, but fall into the kind of rhythmic and metric explorations Brahms had come to insist on: for the thirty-eight measures between letters E and F in the exposition, the stresses constantly shift within the bar line, never finding the written downbeat. In movements like this, an unequivocal downbeat is a structure-defining event, to be parceled out carefully. As Brahms may withhold harmonic resolution for long periods, now he does the same with meter.
A few figures unify the melodic unfolding of all four movements, mainly the three-note motive that begins the symphony. The little rocking figure recurs right-side-up and upside-down, in constantly evolving guises:
As its rhythmic ambiguities suggest, the cheery pastoral surface of the Second Symphony, the source of its instant and abiding popularity, masks a darker undercurrent. The “black border” Brahms wrote about was only partly a joke. Musicologist Reinhold Brinkmann called his study of the D Major Symphony Late Idyll. He means it is an idyll longed for when the idyllic is no longer possible. As a few people realized from the beginning, deep shadows cross the sunny face of the D Major Symphony. If it evokes Haydn, it conjures a world and a time that Brahms understood to be past. The symphony is secretly inflected by the question posed in its complement, the motet of summer 1877: “Wherefore is the light given?” As he did in his Kreisler years, but now more subtly and more thoroughly within the boundaries of an “abstract” musical discourse, Brahms adumbrates in tones his life and his fatalistic sense of life.
The symbolic bearers of that “Why?” in the Second Symphony are the trombones and tuba. Brahms never relished the brass section and the new possibilities of valved instruments nearly to the degree that Wagner and Bruckner did. If he accepted grudgingly that valveless brass instruments were obsolete by the 1870s, his French horns are still largely those of Beethoven, and his trumpet writing barely enough to keep the players awake. (Slide-equipped trombones, of course, had always been able to play all chromatic notes.)
Previously, in the First Symphony Brahms had held back the trombones until the finale, then introduced them with a chorale, the sacred tone traditional to those instruments. Solemn harmonies in trombones had long been associated with sacred music. (That is why the instruments served Mozart to evoke the sacred in The Magic Flute, and the perversion of the sacred in Don Giovanni.) In the Second Symphony Brahms characteristically wielded his trombones sparingly, but for that reason they are more telling from their first entrance just after the halcyon beginning. Here there is no sacred tone at all. Their quiet, ambiguous dissonance (a diminished seventh chord) appears like a chilly shadow falling across a summer meadow. The intensity near the end of the development, almost shocking in context, has much to