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songs is part of the dialogue throughout, making a rhythmic motto across the movements. That shows Brahms concerned, as usual, not only with writing something charming and gently lyrical (though it is enormously so) but also with further integrating thematic material throughout the movements. Most noticeably, the main theme of the middle movement and its key of E are taken up and carried to apotheosis in the finale. In its first appearance that slow-movement theme, in its somber beauty, shows another dimension of Brahms’s harmonic originality: the harmonies are conventional and unambiguous, but the rhythmic freedom is remarkable, with nearly every structural bass note kept off the strong beats. The music wanders in a rhythmic fog:

In the first movement Brahms plays elaborate games with phrasing, switching the stresses of the meter back and forth between 3+3 and 2+2+2, or superimposing both in violin and piano. (That dichotomy, as we expect from Brahms, is inherent in the principal theme itself.) These ideas gather at the climax at measure 235, with its layering of phrases making an effect that perhaps during the nineteenth century only Brahms could have conceived:

The First Violin Sonata is usually thought of as harking back to the earlier product of Pörtschach, the lyrical Violin Concerto. So it does; at the same time, in its rhythmic sophistication and its integration of thematic and tonal elements across the movements, the sonata looks forward as well to the Third Symphony.

On a copy of the sonata’s slow movement that he sent to Clara, Brahms told her that he composed it to “tell you, perhaps more clearly than I otherwise could myself, how sincerely I think of you and Felix.”8 (The thought did not persuade Clara to like the adagio; she preferred the outer movements.9) When Brahms sent the piece to Simrock, he asked his publisher to slip the thousand-taler fee anonymously into an account that Clara drew from. She apparently did not detect the gift, or she would have returned it indignantly. For a more tangible memorial to Clara’s son, Brahms set a third lyric of Felix’s, “Es brausen der Liebe Wogen.”

Another product of summer 1879 was the song “Feldeinsamkeit” (“Solitude in an Open Field”), one of his most beautiful and eventually most famous, with its extraordinary second stanza depicting the thoughts of a dreamer lying in the grass:

The beautiful white clouds pass above

Through the deep blue, like beautiful silent dreams;

I feel as if I were long dead

And moving peacefully with them through eternal space.

Also that summer he wrote the two intense, passionate piano Rhapsodies of Opus 79, dedicated to Elisabet von Herzogenberg. If the pieces rise from his feeling about Lisl, they were rhapsodic indeed. For this period of his life, when most of his music had become magisterial and impersonal, the Rhapsodies turned out startlingly turbulent in their harmonic and rhythmic language, and in their emotions.

In the course of this sojourn in Pörtschach Brahms enjoyed his accustomed string of visitors, and made a new acquaintance of considerable enchantment for him. It began with a rehearsal of young women musicians that he attended. Brahms sat nearsightedly watching as a miserable pianist played, followed by a superb violinist, after which apparently the pianist returned to play a second piece, much better. When he commented on the improvement to a neighbor, he was informed that actually the second piano piece had been played by a different girl who was also the violinist, both of them fifteen-year-old Marie Soldat. Brahms sought her out afterward and quipped, “Now that you’ve played violin and piano so beautifully, why don’t you sing for us too?” In August he accompanied Marie during a Pörtschach recital, then he sent her off to study with Joachim.10 She would later repay Brahms’s favors with interest. He gave her the sort of nicknames he bestowed on people he liked: she was “Mietzchen,” or “die kleine Soldat,” the little soldier.

That September Joachim joined Brahms for a concert tour of Hungary and Transylvania.