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Privately too, Billroth declared his scientific opinion that no artist could surpass himself after his fiftieth year.15 Maybe he told that to Brahms, because Brahms suspected the same.

WITH THE FOURTH SYMPHONY Brahms did present a “dark well” to his public, just as Hanslick said. The E Minor has the most concentrated expression of his symphonies, lies the furthest from the effusive Romanticism of his youth. At the same time, with its complexity of design and expression and intent, its pervasive skepticism and foreboding expressed in the rhythms of dance, it represents so many returns for him. It is the beginning of a process of coming full circle in his life and art. Little of that could be perceived by the listeners who first heard the symphony in 1886, but those who knew his work sensed a web of issues musical and personal surging beneath its incomparably crafted surface.

Brahms tried out Joachim’s suggestion for a brief chordal introduction and then struck it out of the draft.16 Instead he began right on the main theme, a lilting minor-key melody of ambiguous expressive import. Its building block is thirds descending and then ascending, a chain of thirds being a Brahms thumbprint going back at least to the “Abend dämmert” movement of the Opus 5 Piano Sonata. They also recall the endless games with thirds in Beethoven’s Hammerklavier, the model for the opening of Brahms’s Opus 1 Sonata. (By the time of the Fourth Symphony, Brahms owned Beethoven’s original sketches for the Hammerklavier.17)

The opening theme and its intervals presage a work of extraordinary thematic integration, of a kind Brahms had done before but here perhaps more pervasively than ever. The thematic process begins with the first notes and continues to the end of the symphony. Besides the ever-present melodic thirds, much of that integration will turn on the relations of E and C, the tones respectively of the opening key and the first leap in the melody:

The first movement stays close to a particular tone, call it somber nobility. It is significant as much for what it does not do as for what it does: little of Brahms’s games with rhythm and meter, most of the time with a straightforward, dancelike two-beat that develops a sweeping momentum. Nor is there any Kreisleresque lyricism; where that is most expected, in the second theme (at letter C), there comes a melody strained and searching for all its expansiveness, darkly scored in cellos and horns. The curt, stuttering accompaniment to that theme forms another of the work’s chains of thirds, and its juxtapostion of thirds with a stepwise line (reaching A#-B in the fifth measure) presages the thematic culmination of the finale.

In Sonata Forms, Charles Rosen writes, “The glory of Brahms’s academicism is his almost complete transformation of his models.”18 That was a lifelong process, now reaching its furthest extension. All the movements of the Fourth adapt historical forms and genres and historical resonances to fit this specific frame. In the sonata-form first movement, after stating his opening theme Brahms takes the unusual step (at letter A) of immediately presenting a contrapuntal variation of it—notifying us that the idea of variation is going to figure importantly.19 For the first time in one of his symphonic opening movements there is no repeat of the exposition; instead, the development begins with another of his false repeats, an idea going back to the Second Serenade and the G Minor Piano Quartet. While the usual transition to the recapitulation in an opening movement is a moment of drama or anticipation, here the tone is hesitant and mysterious, slipping into a quiet return of the main theme not at its beginning but in the middle, after an extended stretching out (augmentation) of the notes of the first phrase—in other words, the transition to the recap and the recap itself overlap. The movement ends with slashing minor chords and pounding timpani, a fateful close that from long experience listeners expected to be resolved