Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [361]
With these miniatures he returned to the genre of Romantic character piece for keyboard—the kind of music played in nineteenth-century parlors all over the world. In his own career, he had followed his early piano sonatas and variations with character pieces. The new ones went under the relatively arbitrary names of ballade, capriccio, intermezzo, rhapsody (he revised the designations of several before publication). They lie in the tradition of miniatures by Schumann and Chopin, two masters Brahms knew as both performer and editor.
The inspiration for this flood of pieces in Opuses 116–19 of 1892–3—twenty in all, probably with others that were destroyed, some of them probably composed earlier—we can trace to matters both personal and “purely” musical. The beauty of playing and person of young Ilona Eibenschütz likely had something to do with them. (Ilona premiered Opuses 118 and 119 in London in 1894, and in her later years recorded a number of the pieces.) It was the gently beautiful, lilting intermezzos of Opus 117 that Brahms declared “three cradle-songs of my sorrows.” Maybe all the pieces with their delicate lyricism are love songs to lost women in Brahms’s life, to Ilona and Clara and Agathe and Hermine and Alice, to Elisabet for whom he wrote the rhapsodies of Opus 79, and to all the others known and unknown to history. And no less he may have composed the pieces to try and keep Clara Schumann going in body and soul. Since she could only play a few minutes at a time now, and because she loved these miniatures so deeply, maybe they did keep her alive.
Musically, they were an expressive outlet in a time when Brahms did not feel up to larger projects—and he probably suspected that he never would feel up to them. (At one point he proposed to Fritz Simrock that he might whip several of the piano pieces into an orchestral suite, but nothing came of it.) The main significance of the late piano works, however, is this: they are a summation of what Brahms had learned, almost scientific studies of compositional craft and of piano writing, disguised as pretty little salon pieces.
Expressively they are varied, but the majority slow and gentle. There is a preference for A B A forms. His rhythmic subtleties, his love of two against three and related effects, pervade the pieces. The complexity is in the depth of construction, the thematic relations, the novelties of harmony and modulation. The B Minor Intermezzo, whose dissonance Clara loved, is an essay not only in complex harmonies but in tonal implications, moll-Dur carried to a new level: in the first section the right hand implies B minor, the left D major, and the establishment of each key (the A♭-A♮ dichotomy that defines each) is left exquisitely ambiguous until the sweet D major of the middle section.
As shown in his letter to Clara, Brahms was afraid he had gone too far with the dissonances in this piece. In fact, he had not gone as far as Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, or Liszt’s atonal late piano works. (Debussy had already written piano pieces in which tonality is systematically blurred.) Which is to say: in its harmonies the B Minor Intermezzo may not have gone as far into the future of music as others had, but it represents the furthest Brahms was willing to go.52
Yet these late pieces helped inspire the next generation. There is a direct line from Brahms’s late piano works to the revolutionary piano miniatures of Schoenberg, twenty years later. Which is to say: Brahms’s techniques transcended his own language, his own aesthetics, his own era.
All that can be demonstrated as well as anywhere in the A Major Intermezzo of Opus 118. On the surface it is a wistfully lyrical piece, technically easy, eminently suitable for young women to play in the parlor. Brahms begins it, tellingly, with an