Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [277]
The symphony ends with a spine-tingling D major chord in high trombones. With that Brahms once again completes a transformation that heralds tone-color composers of a century later: timbre as the bearer of structure and meaning. The trombones, harbingers of darkness in the first movement, are redeemed in the last, proclaiming the triumph of joy—or at least of Pörtschach’s sunshine and water and seafood in quantity.
The trouble is, the finale for all its pleasures and ingenuities doesn’t really redeem what it proposes to. As Brinkmann expresses it, “the gaiety becomes almost violently brilliant and seems stage-managed.” After all, the halcyon past of delirious love and uncomplicated composing is gone indeed—from this composer’s life, and from music. The finale is like Brahms on a Prater merry-go-round, or laughing and drinking with friends in a café. He threw himself into the gaiety, but in the end it was mostly show.
That Brahms understood the symphony’s ambiguities, and how they echoed his own malaise, is hinted in a remarkable response he wrote in 1879 to an admirer named Vincenz Lachner. In a thoughtful letter about the Second Symphony this older musician took Brahms to task for the “rumbling kettledrum, the gloomy lugubrious tones of the trombones” that sully the first movement, and for darkening that D major expanse with the suggestion of G minor in the last measures.33
Brahms’s reply to these protests begins, “My letter will hardly tell you what great, sincere pleasure your letters are giving me … it is so good to know that what one has created with love and hard work is also being studied lovingly and carefully by another person.” For the trombones he has this, for him, astoundingly self-revealing defense:
I very much wanted to manage in that first movement without using trombones, and tried to.… But their first entrance, that’s mine, and I can’t get along without it, and thus the trombones.
I would have to confess that I am … a severely melancholic person, that black wings are constantly flapping above us, and that in my output—perhaps not entirely by chance—that symphony is followed by a little essay about the great “Why.” If you don’t know this [motet] I will send it to you. It casts the necessary shadow on the serene symphony and perhaps accounts for those timpani and trombones.
He leaves between the lines that neither in the motet’s final dying cries of Warum?/Why?, nor in his heart, did he find any answer to the question of Wherefore is the light given to them that toil? Thus his birthday greeting to Joachim’s child: the best is not to be born at all. The black flapping wings will abide—and certainly they were hovering over Austria and Germany as Brahms wrote the Second Symphony. He would evoke the unanswerable “Why?” in two more magnificent and despairing works of the next decade: overtly in Gesang der Parzen (Song of the Fates), covertly in the Fourth Symphony.
The darker, more mollig import of the D Major Symphony, the “necessary shadow,” would have been perceptible even if Brahms had not written his letter to Lachner (maybe doing that with an eye to history and biography). Lachner felt the shadow, though he could not understand it. In the first movement Brahms provides another covert clue. In the music he alludes to a lied he had written that spring, and in his working copy of the score he jotted a few words from it under those measures.34 The song is Heinrich Heine’s “Es liebt sich so lieblich im Lenze,” one of the relatively few settings of Robert Schumann’s favored poet that Brahms produced in his maturity. Heine’s way of secreting lacerating ironies within charming little verses,