Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [295]
AS IN THE 1860s Brahms, enjoying his liberation from the onus of genres the past had perfected, wrote two string sextets with great freedom and success, so in his maturity he produced two string quintets undaunted by Mozart’s great ones. The viola added to the usual quartet of strings allowed him to indulge in some of the textural richness and warmth that had marked the sextets.
The F Major Quintet opens without preliminaries on a gemütlich, almost Schubertian theme, lushly harmonized:
From that uncomplicated (perhaps a touch self-satisfied) beginning, the Quintet goes on to be quirky in all sorts of ways, including being cast in three movements rather than the usual four. The second theme of the opening movement, traditionally in C if you start in F, instead goes up a third to A major; in the recapitulation it comes in down a third, to D major. That heralds a number of other “mediant” key relationships in the piece, an echo of the same in Schubert’s C Major Quintet. Among other formal singularities, the development begins in busily contrapuntal fashion, but after a false recapitulation in the middle spends its second half in an extended retransition to the real recap.
The middle movement turns out to be based on two of Brahms’s little neo-Baroque piano dances from three decades back. The slow part, which returns three times in varied forms something like a rondo theme, comes from his old A Major Sarabande, now put into C## minor. Here the moll-Dur quality of the original is made even more poignant.
That theme is marked by penetrating harmonic vagaries, mostly turning around the “Neapolitan” harmonic inflection (a D major chord in C# minor). Between those slow, introspective sections Brahms scissors in two fast, dancing interludes derived from his old A Major Gavotte. The effect, in the middle of this three-movement piece, is to put a slow movement together with a scherzo in a kind of collage. At the end comes a veiled, cryptic series of harmonies that cadence not on C# minor but rather A major—another rare example of Brahms finishing a movement in a different key than he started it. (And the ending makes a mediant relationship with both the beginning of the movement and with what follows: C#, A, F.)
For a finale he picks up the cue of his First Cello Sonata—and of Beethoven’s third Rasoumovsky Quartet—to create a racing, high-spirited sonata form treated fugally throughout. The virtuosity of its counterpoint seems part of the joke. It keeps climaxing with one or another form of a manically polyphonic, absurd little phrase, its leading tune doubled by barking low cello and squeaking high violin:
For some reason this F Major Quintet would turn out to be one of the least popular of Brahms’s chamber pieces, at the same time one of his own favorites. He told Simrock, “You have never before had such a beautiful work from me”; to Clara he named it “one of my finest works.”51
Brahms had a surprising pattern in his favorites. Of the three string quartets he most liked the B Major, which stands out from its siblings in its light, almost satirical tone. When in 1880 Eduard Hanslick expressed delight in the tuneful and mocking little song “Vergebliches Ständchen” (“Futile Serenade”), Brahms responded surely with irony, if not forced praise: “I am in an extremely good humor as a result of the good-humored correspondence!… And this time you have hit my bullseye! For this one song I would give up all the others.… But from you the confirmation is of immensely serious value to me! I have known for a long time that your excellent sniffer doesn’t miss any really excellent morsel (this is more annoying when we are eating oysters).”52 One recalls Brahms’s glowing cheeks and flashing eyes when he played his Hungarian Dances.
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