Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [352]
Most important, in that visit to Meiningen Brahms was stunned by performances of the Weber Clarinet Concerto and Mozart Clarinet Quintet by the orchestra’s principal clarinetist, Richard Mühlfeld. This musician had come to Meiningen in 1873 as a violinist, and then in three years taught himself clarinet well enough to take over the principal position. He also served as the orchestra’s assistant conductor. In the next decade he became principal clarinet with the Bayreuth Festival orchestra, but despite his fame stayed on in Meiningen for the rest of a long career.
Brahms befriended Mühlfeld and sat listening to him play for hour after hour. Maybe for the first time in his life he felt something more than pleasure in a fine musician. Now he experienced an epiphany of an instrument in itself. With the clarinet it was the superimposed layers of its three octaves: the rich reediness of the low register, then the gentle paleness of the “throat” tones; above that the velvety center of the instrument, in Mühlfeld’s hands and breath capable of endless nuances of color and volume; and finally the high register, flutelike when soft, swelling to a piercing angry cry.
Here was a musician who could make his instrument sing like a violist or a mezzo-soprano, and so Brahms recognized another incarnation of the kind of dark, soulful voice that had always seduced him. Thus his nicknames for Richard Mühlfeld: “Fräulein Klarinette,” “my dear nightingale,” “my Primadonna,” even sometimes, “Fräulein von Mühlfeld.”20 All Brahms’s life, as he had painstakingly mastered the orchestra and chamber media, the influence of his training and of his North German temperament had pulled him back from the sensuality of mere instrumental sound. In his maturity, even as he shaped beautifully fresh orchestral effects he could never quite concede the possibility that color might exist on the level of counterpoint and harmony and form. And even as he wrote many hours of music for Joachim’s violin, whose sound rang in his inner ear, he still felt inadequate in his understanding of any instrument beyond the piano. Other than perhaps in his study of Wagner’s scores, he had never systematically tried to overcome that limitation.
Now in his imagination Brahms embraced Fräulein Klarinette like a woman, and as with so many Fräuleins before, this celibate passion inspired him. The fruits of his Ischl summer of 1891 were first the Clarinet Trio in A Minor and then what he called “a far greater folly,” the Quintet in B Minor for Clarinet and Strings.
Brahms was fond of the four-movement Trio, which especially in the first movement has some of the subtle novelties in form that characterize his late music—Michael Musgrave calls it “a broad A B with a retransition to the tonic rather than development.”21 For the public ear the Clarinet Trio has always seemed an austere affair, its expressiveness more ambiguous than the Quintet’s warm wash of emotion. Malcolm MacDonald notes of the Trio that “in some stretches the work resembles a cello sonata with clarinet obbligato.”22 Which is to say, in the piece Brahms’s fondness for Hausmann’s cello competes with his newfound love of Mühlfeld’s clarinet.
In the Quintet nothing competes with the glory of the instrument. Its beginning is a gentle, dying-away roulade that raises a veil of autumnal