Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [321]
For second movement comes a brooding intermezzo, as singular in tone and expressive import as its parallel in the Third Symphony. It begins (see previous page) with a solemn, declamatory theme of wide-ranging tonal import, hovering between Phrygian E and major C. Then, picking up the implications of C and E at the beginning of the symphony, the theme suddenly falls into E major, or rather a mélange of shadowed moll and bright Dur.
From the tints of Phrygian, darkest of the modes, and the archaic incantation of the leading theme, we are returned to the world of Brahms’s bardic voice that stretches back to the “Edward” piano ballade and the Opus 17 Harp Songs. Now that voice is joined with some of his most artful instrumentation, none more telling than from bar 9, where every timbral element is fresh and expressive: theme in the veiled timbre of the clarinet’s middle register, middle voices in whispering low clarinet and bassoons, and pizzicato strings doubling the winds, giving the feel of a solemn processional as if for a fallen hero—a Wagnerian scene, but painted as if from afar, and in Brahmsian colors.
The formal outline of this second movement is sonata-like, with a brief development (from measure 74) and a gently lyrical second theme for contrast at letter C. Again the idea of variation pervades the movement, with the main theme undergoing a series of transformations in mode, texture, and tone—among them the twining, beautiful E major variation at letter B. The movement ends in almost pure E Phrygian, only with a raised third on the tonic chord for a touch of E major. The scoring there—horns and bassoons and complex string doublings and accompaniments—has a lush coloration reminiscent of Wagner, prophetic of Mahler if not of Ravel.
The third movement’s Allegro giocoso is not quite a scherzo in form or meter (two-beat rather than the usual three, again sonata-like), but it functions as the scherzo. Clearly Brahms wanted to move back toward the traditional fast movement, rather than issuing another of his intermezzos. Some have called its pounding, brusque main theme “bacchanalian”; Tovey admires its “tiger-like energy.”20
The movement’s second theme, the one Max Kalbeck found “trite,” seems indeed coy, balletic, almost Tchaikovskian. That reinforces the expressive point of the third movement, which is to contrast the somber cloudiness of the rest of the symphony with an expanse of major-key animation, lightness, and unbuttoned joyfulness that courses down to the climactic piccolo and flashing triangle. (The main theme has, of course, a heavy-footed Teutonic joyfulness.) The symphony’s governing chain-of-thirds motive is preserved in the outline of the opening theme, whose skeleton is thirds descending from C to D. The larger tonal implications of third-relations are echoed, meanwhile, in details like the opening theme’s nimble leaping from C major to E major.
The finale stands as Brahms’s most remarkable symphonic movement—most profound in craftsmanship, most wide-ranging in historical resonances, and most troubling. Likely the conception of this movement was the beginning of the work, which is to say that the finale not only completes the Fourth Symphony in its thematic and expressive design, but may have been its reason for being in the first place. In tracing that reason as far as we can discern it, the dimensions of craft and personal impetus are indistinguishable. The finale of the Fourth Symphony is a technical tour de force in an archaic genre, expressed in terms of a personal and cultural tragedy.
It appears that the immediate inspiration for the finale came out during a conversation among Brahms, Bülow, and conductor Siegfried Ochs in 1880. The subject of Bach cantatas came up and Brahms predictably knew that repertoire better than his friends. He went to the piano and played for them the climactic chaconne of the then-unpublished Cantata