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In November the Rosé String Quartet, with added violist, began rehearsing the new piece. This was a young ensemble founded by the then twenty-seven-year-old Arnold Rosé, who had already served as concertmaster of the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra and had led the Vienna Philharmonic violins since age eighteen. A decade later the Rosé Quartet was to become an historic champion of Arnold Schoenberg. At their first rehearsal with Brahms in Vienna, they had a frustrating time of it. Max Kalbeck speculates that the initial theme of the G Major Quintet was originally meant for a symphony—a brash, craggy cello melody under pealing chords in upper strings. As soon as he saw the beginning, Joachim told Johannes that it would take “three cellists in one” to make the line heard above the forte accompaniment.2 Joachim was right as usual, Brahms as usual open to all suggestions and resistant to most. After the rehearsals with the Rosé, after various makeshifts with the opening, after further warnings from Joachim and from Elisabet von Herzogenberg (“the cello … must scrape mercilessly to be heard,” she complained3) and experiments on the manuscript, Brahms let the beginning stand and bequeathed aggravation to cellists in perpetuity.

He simply didn’t want to give up the effect he had in mind, and was ready to let musicians thrash out for themselves how to achieve it. When they do succeed, the opening is breathtaking, an explosion of youthful summery spirits whose energy surges through the concise but kaleidoscopic opening movement. When he first heard the beginning, Max Kalbeck exclaimed, “Brahms in the Prater!” Brahms replied, “You’ve got it!,” and added with a roguish grin, “And all the pretty girls there, eh?”4

Moments of dolce wistfulness wash through the opening movement as well. That changes to gypsy-toned melancholy in the short quiet second movement in D minor, with its soaring roulades from the viola (the soulful, dark-voiced viola the most Brahmsian of stringed instruments). The G minor third movement is closer to Ländler than scherzo, marked with the double diminutive Un poco Allegretto—a little slightly fast. Its poignant, hesitant main theme contrasts with a flowing waltzlike G major middle section. After these two plaintive minor-key movements (Elisabet’s favorites), Brahms finishes with one of his zestiest gypsy movements: Vivace ma non troppo presto.

Thus he proposed to quit. Maybe that is why Billroth, knowing it, wrote him a beautiful twilight letter after hearing the first rehearsal:

As I think back over the hours of my life, the richness of which few mortals can have had, you always and still stand in the first place. I have lived with you a great part of our being, and you with me. The experiences which bind us together are a bit like those that tie together the brothers of a good family.… Today I heard enthusiastic shouts, “The most beautiful music he has ever composed!” … I have often reflected on the subject of what happiness is for humanity. Well, today in listening to your music, that was happiness.5

At the end of a career or a life, there could be no sweeter words from an admired friend. Brahms replied to Billroth with a restraint he knew would be understood: “My nature has not changed. Such words in such cases are not only pleasant for me, they are necessary—for I do not say such things to myself. They reverberate in me gently and are damped down delicately.”6 The premiere of the G Major String Quintet in Vienna on November 11, 1890, was a sensation.

THE EXPERIENCE OF COMPOSING the G Major, however, and the acclaim for his gay and poignant farewell to music, led to an ironic puncturing of that drama and poignancy. Brahms told a friend,

Recently I started various things, symphonies and so on, but nothing would come out right. Then I thought: I’m really too old, and resolved energetically to write no more. I considered that all my life I had been sufficiently industrious and had achieved enough; here I had before me a carefree old age and could