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cello that Brahms seemed to carry in his mind in the last decade of his life, as he carried Joachim’s violin and the voices of Amalie Joachim and Hermine Spies. The sonata begins recalling the Third Symphony, with a metrically wandering and wildly disjunct theme in a mixture of F major and minor. Arnold Schoenberg would recall how “indigestible” this beginning appeared to the Viennese, himself included, in his youth.47 Theodor Billroth expressed some of that feeling in his response: “I confess the first movement was somewhat dubious to me.… But you always know the right way to the purely musical.” With his accustomed lustiness (Billroth seems to have believed the musical instinct to overlap the sexual) he added, “The [Second] Violin Sonata is of unending grace, charm, and lovely feeling—a darling child, so sweet and dear, just to be kissed all over!”48

Hausmann’s influence on the Second Cello Sonata may be seen in its feeling for the cello as cello, a creative involvement with timbre and technique only now and then to be found in Brahms’s writing for instruments other than the piano, and which looks forward to his obsession with the clarinet in his last years. The sonata begins memorably with sweeping piano tremolos; in the course of the movement they are transformed into cello tremolos across the strings. The change of the idea of tremolo from one instrumental medium to another is itself a “theme,” a coloristic/structural kind of thinking one hardly expects from Brahms the conservative. And there are novel experiments with pizzicato effects including, at the end, the proto-Bartókian idea of changing pitches on a single pluck of the string.

If the Second Cello Sonata ends with a certain emotional equilibrium, that feeling is counterpoised by the Third Piano Trio in C Minor, which from the first measures contains some of the most Romantically expressive unto anguished music of Brahms’s maturity—that contrasted with a flowing, hymnlike, utterly beautiful second theme. Much of the piece exhibits the compactness of form and gesture that marked Brahms’s late music. Every idea is stated succinctly, each part of the formal model not only treated with his usual freedom, but making its point with dispatch—such as the tiny two-beat quasi-scherzo of the second movement, in straightforward A B A form.

The Third Trio also carries his metrical explorations in a prophetic new direction. The first movement begins with general metric stability, but for long sections (most of the development, the first part of the recap) there is little sense of meter and sometimes little of the beat. Part of the second-movement scherzo’s function is to establish an interlude of stable two-beat. The third movement presents an extraordinary metric experiment in the form of constantly changing time signatures, at first an alternation of one bar of with two of , making a seven-beat phrase.49 Later in the movement he varies that idea, including a section combining one bar of with one of , to make a five-beat pattern. (In 1888 Brahms composed the unsettling vocal quartet “Nächtens” entirely in . By that point in Brahms’s work the twenty-five years to Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps seem less of a leap.) The trio’s scherzo-like last movement begins on an upbeat that sounds equally like a downbeat, and sustains that kind of ambiguity for much of its course—a quite intense course, though this time there is a concluding turn to C major.

Elisabet von Herzogenberg hastened to declare this work and its optimistic outcome a more satisfactory image of the composer than the Fourth Symphony. The whole Third Piano Trio, she wrote, is “better than any photograph, for it shows your real self.”50 That was wishful thinking about Brahms, in 1886.

BRAHMS MUST HAVE GONE BACK to Vienna in October 1886 feeling satisfied over that summer’s crop, one of the most prolific of his life, and one of the last richly productive ones. Certainly he had warm feelings about the social part of the vacation. He wrote Widmann: “When I think back on wonderful Thun—the memory of you is the dearest,