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By Root 1444 0

it adds up to is that he seemed most to enjoy the pieces of his that came to him most easily and posed neither daunting technical nor emotional demands. In that he was a bit like Hanslick, after all: he liked to relax and listen to something tuneful and delightful, including his own stuff. It does not follow, though, that he would have placed the lighter pieces above his symphonies and choral works, only that like many artists he could not forget or entirely forgive what the hard ones took out of him. (When Jean Cocteau’s disaster-haunted production of La Belle et la Bête finally ended and Cocteau viewed the uncannily beautiful result, he remarked, “It looks to me like nothing but pain.”) At least the public agreed with Brahms about the song: among his lieder, “Vergebliches Ständchen” is one of the enduring hits.

The C Major Piano Trio is his first in the medium since the youthful B Major of 1854, and so a good indication of the distance he had traveled, what had changed and what stayed the same. Young Kreisler had begun the earlier trio with a sweetly lyrical cello tune, and the Herr Doktor still was not above producing gestures like that. The C Major Trio, however, does not particularly try to seduce us at the outset; it starts with a stately unison, a kind of blank slate. It goes on to be an expressive but organic and straightforward first movement, with tense moments here and there. Then comes a remarkable slow movement. By then, Brahms had written a number of driving “gypsy” allegros; now he writes variations on a slow tune of Hungarian flavor. Its hollow, keening tone and its “Scotch snap” rhythm can be heard in some of Bartók’s slow movements, which are more authentically Hungarian but hardly more soulful than this:

After a skittering, succinct scherzo, Brahms begins the finale with a flowing tune in Lydian mode on C, with its characteristic raised fourth degree:

When he flirts with these scales outside the usual major and minor keys (often Phrygian, with its second degree lowered from minor), Brahms does not usually jump whole cloth into modality but rather suggests the coloration of a mode before resolving everything into major or minor. (Here, for example, there is nothing particularly Lydian about the harmony.) In its overall shape the finale is laid out in sonata form, but for most of its course it has the lighthearted, dancing feel of the traditional rondo finale. About a quarter of it is taken up by a coda of ambiguous expressive import: though it winds up with the joviality of the movement proper, it is dominated by a shimmering arpeggio figure that strangely recalls, in both texture and harmony (F diminished seventh) Schubert’s unsettling late lied “Die Stadt.” In that song the narrator is rowed by a mysterious figure who suggests Charon, across a cold bay to an obscure city, where on the shore he finds the place where he lost his beloved. (Earlier there seems to be an allusion to “Die Stadt” in the A Major Piano Quartet.)

From those moments when a chilly wind seems to blow through the generally affable atmosphere of the trio finale, it is not so far to the world of Gesang der Parzen (Song of the Fates), for orchestra and six-part chorus, its text from Goethe’s Iphigenia.

The thought of fate had always been an ominous one in Brahms’s work, shadowing the opening of the C Minor Symphony and the Schicksalslied. Meanwhile there had grown in his music and in his mind the bleak conviction that humanity in some way has been divorced from God. Ein deutsches Requiem ends with the word selig, blessed. The Alto Rhapsody portrays a misanthropic separation from the world, but ends with a sublime prayer. The middle of the Schicksalslied (Song of Destiny) expresses the rift with the gods in an anguished voice, but the work ends in wordless peace. In Nänie the gods weep for the death of beauty. Now in Gesang der Parzen there is no prayer, no answer, no resolution, neither in its searching harmonies nor in its verses. Now the gods are distant, silent, and foreboding.

Let the race of man

Fear the gods!

They hold