Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [301]
Infatuation or no, then, most of the lyrics of 1883–4 reflect Brahms’s perennial theme of love lost rather than found. Vigorous as he was, age weighed on him. The viola song “Gestillte Sehnsucht” (Satisfied Longing), which he added to “Geistliches Wiegenlied” to make up Opus 91 for Amalie Joachim, voices his feelings more than Amalie’s: “You desires of mine, always stirring in my breast.… Thou longing of mine that makes my breast heave, when will you rest, when will you slumber?”
If those lyrics speak his thoughts, Brahms at fifty felt more torn by life, more frightened by love than ever. Yet the summer of 1883 he went to Wiesbaden to work, because Hermione-ohne-O was there.
THERE IS LITTLE RECORD of what went on between the two that summer in Wiesbaden, but the time looms large in his work. Brahms told Billroth that his country house with a high airy studio, in sight of the Rhine, was as luxurious “as if I were trying to imitate Wagner.”4 Back in Bad Ischl, when it got around that he was not returning there for vacation, he received a mock-tragic letter from the proprietress of the Café Walter: “In the name of the heartbroken Esplanade … I take the liberty of asking you whether you are not going to honor us with your visit again.… Although your faithful companion [Brüll] has entered into wedlock, I will do my best to give you good coffee and plenty of newspapers.”5 By then Brahms was ensconced in the vicinity of Hermine and working on the Third Symphony in F Major.
His First Symphony he had managed, with unrelenting and in some degree audible effort, to hold together despite the enormous period of gestation from Young Kreisler to mature master. The Second had been a sigh of pleasure and relief, completed perhaps a touch too fast and too easily. Apparently also done in a summer, the Third shows Brahms at the height of his mastery, confidence, and concentration.
If with the First he had already produced one of the most hair-raising beginnings of any symphony, he nearly matched it with the Third: two pealing wind chords move from stable F major to a rivetingly ambiguous diminished chord, followed by a towering string theme undergirded by a bass line that leaps from a major chord to an ear-churning minor:
Brahms had long favored such moll-Dur moments, mingling minor and major, but usually to poignant and yearning effect. The opening of the F Major Symphony is heroic, moll-Dur with a vengeance. At the same time it begins with another of his double themes, the violin line on top the less featured, if in the end more significant. The figure that will actually dominate all four movements is the bass line, F-A♭-F: a third up and a leap to the octave, a signature motive of Brahms’s that goes back at least to the D Major Ballade of Opus 10.
Yet while that simple three-note bass line (first outlined in the opening wind chords) is the leading motive in a symphony of extraordinary thematic integration, the violins’ opening melody is the main bearer of meaning—and this theme comes from Robert Schumann. Specifically, in a symphony composed on the bank of the Rhine, it is taken from the first movement of Schumann’s Rhenish Symphony. Brahms’s version of it has the swinging “hemiola” rhythm of Schumann’s opening (in which two measures of three-beat are broadened out into 2+2+2), but it also begins with the exact intervals of a variant Schumann presents during the recapitulation.
What did this theme signify to Brahms? Is it another cabalistic reference like the “Clara theme” that he took from Schumann, or like the songs without words in his early music, or like the portrait of himself as Werther in the C Minor Piano Trio?
In fact he left no clues in this music, never hinted anything to friends about