Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [276]
After the introduction and the first ambiguous whispers in the trombones, the breeziest of lines breaks out, the first theme proper of the sonata form:
At C comes the second theme, a gracious and ingenuous tune in parallel thirds:
Yet that gentle theme is also touched by the shadow. The normal key of a second theme in a D major movement is A, and the sweet parallel thirds of Brahms’s melody imply that key—but the bass harmonizes it in F minor. Throughout the symphony, these four major-key movements are treated to some of the most subtle and pervasive moll-Dur inflections in Brahms’s long history of mixing the brightness of major keys with poignant tints of minor. At times he went beyond that into modal suggestions, especially the ominous suggestion of Phrygian mode, with its poignant lowered second degree—as in the strings at (C) in the generally untroubled third movement.
The adagio is the longest slow movement in all his symphonies and maybe the most beautiful. It opens with one of his sighing cello themes, this one vaguely disquieting in its ambiguity, at first revealing neither the meter nor the B major tonality. From this beginning Brahms keeps the metric and tonal sense off balance for most of the movement:
This opening is a prime example of what Carl Dahlhaus calls Brahms’s “centripetal” tonality, which is to say: how he manages the stresses, tensions, and resolutions within the tradition of the major-minor tonal system. To be technical for a moment: at the beginning of the slow movement the pedal tone is F, the dominant of the actual B major, but the cello line begins by descending to a BS. When the bass falls to B at measure 3 it still sounds ambiguous; only in measure 4 do we more or less understand B as the actual key. Yet Brahms withholds a root-position tonic chord for most of the movement; the first one does not come until the downbeat at C—and that is B minor.
In other words, in contrast to Wagner’s frequent “centrifugal” tonal meandering, often seeming to go from anyplace to noplace in particular, Brahms’s technique (more formalistic, as one would expect from him) is to hide tonal references within the ambiguity, so the revealing of the actual key is a matter of closing in on an implicit presence. Thus, “centripetal.” Another example is the opening of the D Minor Concerto, in which he actually manages to make a pedal point on D unstable. In Brahms’s maturity his handling of rhythm and meter can be thought of as centripetal in the same sense: the written meter can be obscured for long periods, with the eventual coming together of written and perceived meter forming a kind of rhythmic “full cadence.” (One can’t avoid finding in all this a reflection in his art of Brahms’s elusive and oblique personality. He was as expert at hiding key and meter as at hiding himself.)
As third movement of the Second Symphony we find another of the charming intermezzos with which Brahms replaced the symphonic scherzo, its leading theme like one of the Viennese proto-waltz pieces called ländler. It is built on an inversion of the three-note motive that began the symphony:
As Max Kalbeck notes, much of the game in this movement is rhythmical, with exhilarating jumps of meter and tempo, the opening melody and its ländler rhythm transformed into a two-beat “Galop,” then “a pungent quick-waltz.”32 The touch of shadow in this movement comes in the lapping Phrygian-tinted string lines at letter C, swept away by mocking phrases in .
Brahms did not begin the Second Symphony with a gentle idyll simply in order to negate or destroy it, say, as Carl Nielsen tears apart the Brahmsian idylls of his Sixth Symphony with flatulence and madness.