Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [322]
So began the process of thought toward the Fourth Symphony. As he had suggested, for his purposes in the finale Brahms altered Bach’s bass line by adding a chromatic A# to fill out eight measures of .
Inevitably, other associations accumulated around the idea of basing a symphonic finale on an archaic procedure—more or less the Baroque idea of the chaconne, a slow, solemn dance built on a “ground bass.” This means that as the basis of the finale Brahms repeated the Bach-derived theme over and over as an ostinato, the theme sometimes drifting from the bass into the upper parts, and wove the rest of the music around it. The chaconne Brahms had particularly in mind was another of Bach’s, which Joachim had made famous—the epic one from the D Minor Sonata for solo violin. In 1877, Brahms made an arrangement of that work for piano left hand, dedicated to Clara, and wrote her about it:
For me the Chaconne is one of the most incredible pieces of music.… For a little instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest and most powerful expression. When I ask myself if I had written this piece—been able to conceive it—I know for certain the emotions excited would have driven me mad.22
Michael Musgrave notes that as Brahms worked out his ideas for the finale, other influences and associations collected, among them a favorite organ passacaglia (a similar genre to chaconne) by Georg Muffat, Couperin’s passacaglias that Brahms edited for Chrysander’s edition,23 and perhaps the E Minor Ciacona of the pre-Bach German master Dietrich Buxtehude.24 So if the presiding spirit of Brahms’s chaconne finale is Bach and the voice his own, his inspiration characteristically stretches back through Bach to the early Baroque and perhaps further, to Palestrina and the Renaissance polyphonists. Meanwhile, in the symphonic literature the clearest predecessors of his finale are that of Beethoven’s Eroica, also a series of variations on a bass line, and the variations on the “Ode to Joy” theme in the Ninth Symphony finale.
Moreover, if the chain-of-thirds opening of the Fourth Symphony represents Brahms’s return to the Hammerklavier inspiration of his early keyboard music, the finale echoes his own first maturity as an orchestral composer with the Haydn Variations. The latter, however, was a series of contrasting character variations by way of an orchestral study—cumulative in effect, highly episodic in practice. Having invented one unique form in the Haydn Variations, in the finale of the Fourth Brahms wanted a new and far more rigorous procedure: he unified the thirty variations on his eight-bar chaconne theme by binding them up in a continuously unfolding form, an arching A B A-coda design.25
To shape a long movement from a short repeating ostinato, thereby forbidding changes of key (though he moves from E minor to major), and yet make the music accumulate, expand, turn up contrasts, and finally climax, requires something like the incomparable mastery that Bach wielded in his solo-violin chaconne. The cumulative effect of Bach’s work is so intense, like a spring wound tighter and tighter, that even Brahms said it would drive him mad to attempt it. Maybe no other composer could equal that feat, and certainly no one has with a single instrument. Brahms, near the end of his career and in the full flood of his mastery, accomplished something like it in the finale of the Fourth—though he needed the full resources of the orchestra to do it.
Beginning the movement with a series of trombone-dominated wind chords that present the chaconne theme in the upper voice, he then outlines the theme in curt string pizzicatos, around which wisps of melody accumulate. In its A B A-coda design, the finale functions something like a sonata form, the impassioned melody