Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [282]
Exasperated by these bait-and-switch games, Joachim kept at Johannes with dogged patience. He was determined that the concerto would be a showpiece for both of them. Near the end of the process Brahms gave his collaborator free hand to compose the single cadenza, in the first movement, the one usually played ever since. (Joachim’s cadenza for Beethoven’s Violin Concerto is also the standard.) Even the final manuscript of Brahms’s concerto is dotted with revisions in the solo part, some in Joachim’s hand, some of those ignored in the published version.
Meanwhile separately and together they wrestled with the inevitable affliction of composing concertos in general, which is heightened by the fact that a violin cannot make as much noise as a piano: how can you have every note of the fragile solo part be heard over an orchestra of eighty or more people? That Brahms intended this to be a massive, full-throated piece compounded the usual problems of balance.
If all that were not enough to contend with, Joachim pressured Johannes to have the piece ready for a New Year’s Day 1879 concert in Leipzig. Just as the anointed soloist made his push for a quick premiere, Brahms wrote that he had gotten himself in trouble with the four-movement idea: “The middle movements are bust—naturally they were the best ones! I’m writing a wretched adagio instead.”52 (Of the two discarded movements, one would do service in the Second Piano Concerto.)
Through all these frustrations one notes that while Brahms was plainly concerned about the solo part, he was not particularly intimidated by the idea of writing a concerto. Essentially he had two daunting models to live up to in the nineteenth century—Beethoven’s sublime one, and Mendelssohn’s elegant and melodious one. With one previous concerto and two symphonies under his belt now, Brahms was not as intimidated by those giants as he would have been before producing his first symphony and string quartet. Besides, he had always liked some of the minor composers of virtuoso concertos such as Paganini and Viotti, neither of them any threat to him.
Despite the mounting pressures and the sheer labor of writing a concerto substantial even in three movements, that summer of 1878 Brahms wrote several lieder for Opus 85 and Opus 86, and also composed and pulled together his first collection of solo piano pieces since the little Waltzes of 1865—the Four Capriccios and four Intermezzos of Opus 76. The Romantically passionate No. 1 of the new piano set had been written in 1871, the others perhaps later. Given his stated ease in composing for his own instrument, Brahms’s relationship to the piano seems almost perverse. At the beginning of his career he wrote three immature but still extraordinary piano sonatas, then some masterful sets of variations and wildly profitable light works; then he largely gave up doing anything like any of them. Only toward the end of his life would he produce piano music again in quantity—and it would again be small, distilled character pieces with vague designations such as capriccio, intermezzo, and rhapsody.
Michael Musgrave writes that Opus 76 stands “stylistically, as chronologically, between the character pieces of Brahms’s youth and the rich flowering of the later period.”53 As usual the pieces are distinctively Brahms and at the same time have clear ties to the past, mainly the character pieces of Schumann and Mendelssohn. One is also reminded, for once, that Brahms knew and admired Chopin’s music and, during this period, was editing volumes for the Chopin Complete Edition. In Opus 76 Brahms spins out little pieces like Chopin’s that move from Romantic fervor to drawing-room grace: two of the set are marked agitato, three grazioso.
What with the rush of composing and the ongoing bother over the Violin Concerto—he and Joachim kept revising it into the following summer—Brahms seems