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By Root 1632 0

with the inscription: “To him for whom it was written.” The public, for its part, would never embrace the Double Concerto during Brahms’s lifetime, and since then the requirement for two first-rate soloists has been a steady impediment. The music, consistently beautiful and of course masterful, is hardly the “senile production” Billroth called it. But maybe this time there are signs of Brahms slipping from his extraordinary standard. A decade before, in the successive years 1876 to 1878, he had produced the first two symphonies and the Violin Concerto, then a major orchestral work every second year, each of them an unquestioned masterpiece.

Among those historic orchestral works the Double Concerto seems the most backward-looking, the most Romantic, from the melodramatic unison proclamation of its opening to passages of Schubertian sweetness. Its predecessors probably include Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante, and the Bach Concerto for Two Violins.70 As usual, Brahms absorbed his influences and produced something in his own voice, in fact a unique genre as a solo concerto for violin and cello. Certainly the piece has great tonal and rhythmic fluidity and striking harmonic effects. Yet it is hard to place expressively, neither particularly tragic nor particularly gay, its monumental opening arguably rhetorical and unearned. It has few memorable melodic transports of the kind in which Brahms had always been lavish; perhaps there are too many passages of the soloists rippling through the harmony bar after bar in unvarying figuration.

If Billroth was wrong to call the concerto senile, maybe it is a little weary, or geared mainly to honor two friends and reconcile with one—a holiday before Brahms turned to the more intimidating proposition of a fifth symphony. As Beethoven harked back to the Baroque concerto grosso in his Triple Concerto, Brahms in this concerto harkened a half-century back. In that context it is startling to realize that the year of the Double Concerto, 1887, was the year Vincent Van Gogh painted Moulin de la Galette and Marc Chagall and Marcel Duchamp were born. The next year Paul Cézanne painted L’estaque and James Ensor the proto-surrealistic Entry of Christ into Brussels.

In other words, a zeitgeist was taking shape in which the magisterial, backward-looking beauties of the Double Concerto seemed to have no place. Surely Brahms felt it; for all his studied posture of indifference to everybody and everything, he had extremely sensitive antennae for the public, for culture and its moods. He published a revised version of the concerto in 1889, but that did nothing for its popularity or its relevance to the present or the future.

The more relevant developments of 1889 are that Gustav Mahler completed his First Symphony and Brahms’s young acquaintance Richard Strauss electrified the world with his tone poem Don Juan, the first of his excursions into the minute depiction of stories, in musical style hyperchromatically post-Wagnerian. The year after that Van Gogh died unknown, but at the beginning of a decade whose spirit transformed his once-aberrant paintings into masterpieces. The next year, 1891, Gauguin headed for Tahiti and his greatest work. Likely Brahms knew little of those landmarks, though he certainly kept up, growling, with Strauss’s manifestations.

It was in 1887, the year of the Double Concerto, that young French composer Claude Debussy introduced himself to Brahms. Seven years later, the exotic perfumes of his L’après-midi d’un faune would open a fantastical tonal world, one in which Brahms’s world seems never to have existed. In 1887, Arnold Schoenberg had entered his teens in Vienna and was dreaming of composing. In the United States that year, Charles Ives’s father was tinkering with quarter-tone instruments and teaching his son to sing in one key while he accompanied in another. Even if no one could know the import of all that, there was still an encroaching sense of something new and unsettling approaching, in art as in society.

If one arguable metaphor (among