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The variations succeed one another, the chaconne theme sometimes absorbed into the middle of the texture, the sections at once expressively contrasting but also unified in their steady progress—that perhaps the greatest technical feat of the movement, echoing Bach’s. From letter D, variations 10 and 11 serve as a sort of transition to the B section/quasi-development, which begins with a flute solo of unforgettable tragic beauty, exquisitely poised between moll and Dur, and in the silken lower register. From there, finally, E major emerges like a breath of hope, leading to a solemn, halting trombone and bassoon chorale that recalls the sublime male choruses of Mozart’s Magic Flute.

The trombone chorale sinks to a meditative pause, then variation 16 erupts fiercely in the winds as a quasi-recapitulation, leading to an expanse of towering and anguished music and a shouting climax. From there flow shimmering strings and gentler, more lyrical variations that complete and unify the melodic unfolding of the whole work. Now the thirds that began the symphony are joined to the scalewise theme of the last movement, finally coming to a moment of profound compositional alchemy: a chain-of-thirds canon at one beat’s distance whose downbeats magically form the chaconne theme:

The music builds to the pealing and declamatory coda, the place where in the First and Third Symphonies a transformation of tone took shape. In the First it was a transformation from “fatalism” to “exaltation,” in the Third a turn to a quiet, valedictory peace. In the coda of the Fourth Symphony there is no transformation but rather a sustained tragic intensity that reels to the final E minor chords. For the only time in his symphonies, for one of the few times in his work or in any large work before him, Brahms does not turn to major at the end of a minor-key piece. He allows the darkness to stand, gives tragedy the last word.26

The significance of that ending was not lost on his era, when listeners and critics had gotten to know the Fourth. After Brahms died, conductor Felix Weingartner wrote of the finale: “I cannot get away from the impression of an inexorable fate implacably driving some great creation, whether it be an individual or a whole race, toward its downfall.… This movement is seared by shattering tragedy, the close being a veritable orgy of destruction, a terrible counterpart to the paroxysm of joy at the end of Beethoven’s last symphony.”27

Thus Reinhold Brinkmann, recalling the words of Thomas Mann’s haunted, Schoenberg-like composer Adrian Leverkühn in Doktor Faustus, speaks of Brahms’s Fourth as the “taking back”—taking back the “Ode to Joy” that Beethoven proclaimed in the finale of the Ninth, and so creating an anti-archetype that would go on to speak in Mahler’s more tormented and grotesque symphonies, and from there through the shattering course of Viennese and German musical Expressionism. “The chorales in the First and Third Symphonies,” writes Brinkmann, “resound with ‘hope,’ directly and positively.… With its negative ending, the Fourth Symphony denies this hope; it is the composed revocation of it.” And with this symphony Brahms sealed his “skeptical, broken mastery.”28

If most of the minor-key symphonies ever written, among them Beethoven’s Fifth and Brahms’s First, enact a drama from darkness to light, fatality to triumph, minor to major, Brahms’s Fourth narrates a progression from a troubling twilight to a dark night: fin de siècle. When he finished it he was fifty-three years old.

With this work, Brahms at the onset of old age shaped his apprehensions and prophecies into a vessel of consummate craft, his dark answer and counterpart to Beethoven’s joy. He saw himself as the meager but last-ditch embodiment of the great Germanic tradition, the line of Schütz and Bach through Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann. He believed that when he died, that lineage would die. The E Minor Symphony “means