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The important thematic material in the upper voice is a four-bar theme whose significance is both motivic and rhythmic, and whose most important element is the motive C#-B-D:

He follows the presentation of that theme with three subtle variations on it, each having the same metric inflection: three one two, three one two, three-one-two-three one two.… (At the same time the downbeat, the one, is usually compromised by an unstable harmony even as it is perceived as a downbeat.) The next few measures pick up and simplify that metric motif with a new idea.

The melodic motive of measure 17 was anticipated in the bass in measures 11–12; thus the motivic development is not just played out in the top voice but saturates the texture, even when there is no overt counterpoint. In the process, melody creates harmony. After a rising chromatic sequence based on the initial melodic motive of the piece, the music settles down to a sighing section from measure 30, which is another variant of the three one two rhythmic pattern. (It features a three-note descending motive that has been growing in the piece since the middle voice in the first two beats, in the bass line in measures 5–6, etc.)

The most striking thing about the moment from measure 30, though, is the sighing, yearning harmonic inflection. There we see some of what excited Schoenberg and his heirs: that harmonic inflection is created by the bass line, which turns out to be the opening melodic motive of the piece, the figure C#-B-D, repeated over and over; then that Dur figure become the moll C♮-B-D.

At the final cadence before the B section, the piece’s opening theme is buried in the middle voices. The new section, beginning at measure 49, is based on a descending figure apparently new, but derived from the subsidiary descending motive, now extended (but with the original C#-B-D part of the line too):

At the same time, what appears there to be a countermelody in the left hand is actually a near-canon with the top line—then it departs for another reference to the C#-A leap of the opening theme.

It was this kind of musical alchemy, this extraordinary depth of construction, these three-dimensional relationships in musical time and space, that helped inspire Arnold Schoenberg’s invention of twelve-tone composition: one or two ideas saturate the texture and constantly change and grow in developing variation; a leading melody is submerged into bass and middle voices; melody and counterpoint create harmony. Even though Brahms willfully planted his feet in the musical language of his world, his class, his century, in this kind of craftsmanship at once traditional and innovative we find the genius Schoenberg named “Brahms the Progressive.”53

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DURING 1893 Brahms felt plagued by Billroth, who was working on a projected book called Who Is Musical?. For all his respect for the surgeon’s knowledge and judgment in the art, Brahms felt his friend to be out of his depth in theorizing about musicality. Still, he answered Billroth’s questions as patiently as he could, ignoring a basic divide between them: Billroth considered the sense of beauty inborn and unexplainable, Brahms considered it a matter of knowledge and craft. For his friend Brahms analyzed Goethe’s famous poem “Über allen Gipfeln ist ruh” in both musical and philosophical terms. It is the only evidence that survives on paper of the kind of debates the two men held regularly in person. As Billroth summarized Brahms’s analysis:

The beauty and grandeur of the entire picture, from the heavens to the tops of the trees and downward to silence in the life of nature, and the reference to sleep and death of humanity; humanity is a part of nature, thus taking into itself all of nature.… One could not alter one word of it without destroying the poem; the shortness and simplicity of the whole, a beautiful adagio in the form of a song. For a similar analysis, Brahms explained some Sarabandes from the French suites of Bach; the configuration of the whole,