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By Root 1298 0

and for further stretches (for example, measures 50–77) displacing the downbeat or letting the stresses float free of the bar line. Another kind of metric tension is found in the clarinet’s second theme, noted above: clear in meter, but in the wrong meter, instead of the prevailing . The kind of prolonged harmonic tension Brahms perhaps learned from Robert Schumann is now fully joined by a technique of prolonged metric displacement, which resolves at a rhythmic “cadence” when written and perceived meter finally fall together. As in the Second Symphony but more pervasively, these strong downbeats form the structural articulations.

The gentle opening of the second movement andante—in C major with clarinet again the leading voice—has one phrasing marked for the melody and another for the accompaniment.10

As in the slow movement of the Second Symphony, that metric freedom will dominate much of this sonata-form andante. Its second theme is this keening melody in clarinet and bassoon, the harmonic effect verging on polytonal—the melody in A minor and the accompaniment suggesting G minor:

Brahms withholds that second theme from the andante’s recapitulation. Instead, it will reappear, in different garb, in the last movement: here, as he had done in the G Major Violin Sonata, he integrates the material of slow movement and finale.

The C minor third movement, marked Poco Allegretto, was the immediate hit of the symphony, regularly encored in concerts during that era when audiences applauded every movement and conductors and composers were happy to repeat one. It features a sighing melody with a lacerating sense of yearning—another of Brahms’s intermezzos, another cello tune, but with a fresh and indelible expressive atmosphere. The movement strikes a tone and a voice familiar now but extraordinary to his time: this backward-looking contrapuntalist who can conjure a tonal world like nothing heard before, this conservative allegedly indifferent to orchestral color who can shape a string accompaniment with a magical wavelike shimmer.

Reinhold Brinkmann calls the finale of the Third a “valediction,” in comparison to the Second Symphony’s “last dance” and the “apotheosis” of the First.11 Metrically it is the most regular and predictable movement of the symphony, but still ambiguous harmonically. The whispering, flowing opening sounds like C Phrygian, giving little hint of the underlying F minor tonality.

The finale closes in on F minor, as if the opening gesture of the symphony from major to minor finally came to rest on the darker mode. The AN that defines the major key seems eclipsed by the A♭ of the minor. In the exposition the “missing” theme from the second movement is taken up again, now in A♭ major—see the facing page.

The finale’s surging, lyrical second subject in C major provides some lightness, but it also has a breathless and unsettled quality. Joachim told Brahms that for him it conjured up the image of Leander swimming desperately toward Hero: “I cannot help imagining the bold, brave swimmer, his breast borne up by the waves and by the mighty passion before his eyes, heartily, heroically swimming on, to the end, to the end, in spite of the elements which storm around him!”12 Brahms received the idea silently, but he did not try to deny the image: the struggle above the abyss.

The “missing” second-movement theme returns in the towering, trombone-haunted climax of the last movement’s development, which leads almost undetectably into the recapitulation. Then, after strains anguished and heroic, Brahms produces the most unforgettable of his codas.

Just before the expected loud and lively wrap-up of a movement or a piece, Brahms often injects a meditative moment, or (as happens in the F Major Quintet) a moment of troubling ambiguity that darkens the customary high spirits of the coda. At the close of the Third Symphony he appears to do something like that again: starting seven measures after letter N, muted violas begin a whispering variation of the movement’s opening theme in the distant key of B minor. So