Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [396]
41. Litzmann Schumann/Brahms Letters 5/31/1856.
42. Litzmann Life 137.
43. Litzmann Life 138–9, Geiringer Brahms 349 (Brahms/Grimm letter).
44. Reich 151.
45. Litzmann Life 138–40 and May 213.
46. Bickley Joachim Letters 8/8/1856 and May 215.
47. Geiringer Brahms 50.
48. Kalbeck I, 285.
49. E. Schumann 154. It is usually presented in biographies that the trip to Switzerland was the deciding point, but I have noted that Brahms’s letters imply he began pulling away well before then. It would be characteristic of him to wax passionate when Schumann’s prognosis was more hopeful, then to pull back when Schumann’s decline meant Brahms would have to make good on his avowals of love. Clara was the first to experience that pattern of his, but not the last.
50. E. Schumann 154.
51. E. Schumann 154.
52. Burk 324.
53. Litzmann Life 145.
54. Litzmann Life 146.
55. Bickley Joachim Letters 10/6/1857.
56. E. Schumann 155.
57. Litzmann Life 147.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1. Litzmann Life 152.
2. Stephenson 70.
3. May 217. Though Clara Schumann spent her career playing her husband’s A Minor Concerto, one of the most popular ever written, she always considered the later movements weak. She wrote Joachim of “how much it hurts to find a defect in one whom we love supremely. That will perhaps explain to you my tears when playing Robert’s Concerto.” She tried to convince Joachim to recompose the finale, but he declined. (Bickley Joachim Letters 154.)
4. Tovey Concertos 115.
5. S. Drinker 10–12.
6. Sisman 143n.
7. Litzmann Schumann/Brahms Letters 12/4/1856.
8. Reynolds 5.
9. The collection of notes in the introduction of the concerto’s first movement imply E major, but that never sounds like the tonic, which remains obscure for some time even though the basses hold D as a pedal tone. In the recapitulation of the first movement the A♭ of the opening is redefined as G#, as the chord superimposed on the D pedal becomes E major rather than B major. The recap forms an interesting structural change on the original tritone with the bass; it is also tonally ambiguous, as in the introduction.
10. Most writers treat Beethoven’s Ninth as a direct influence on the Brahms D Minor Concerto, but there is a caveat to that. According to the reminiscence of his friend Albert Dietrich, Brahms had three movements of the two-piano sonata, one of them eventually the concerto’s first movement, sketched by March 9, 1854, less than two weeks after Schumann’s suicide attempt. It was not until March 28 that Brahms first heard the Ninth live, with Grimm at a concert in Cologne. (Legend relates that he emerged saying, “I must write something like that!”) The Cologne performance also came before Joachim gave Brahms the Liszt piano-duet arrangement of the Ninth. None of this says there was no influence of the Ninth on Brahms’s concerto, only that the influence was less direct. Brahms had certainly gone over the Beethoven score in his studies, and several aspects of the concerto recall the Ninth—the key, the monumental scale, the expressive tone, even the initial dichotomy of D and B (though that dichotomy is structurally more significant in Beethoven than in Brahms). Maybe the best way to think of it is that hearing the Ninth for the first time was an overwhelming experience for Brahms because it connected so strongly with music he had already sketched out, and thereafter the Ninth became part of the creative ferment that produced the concerto out of the original two-piano piece.
11. The idea that the opening of the First Piano Concerto pictures Schumann’s leap into the Rhine is the suggestion of biographer Max Kalbeck, which he said he got directly from Joachim. Geiringer rejects the idea, but most writers tentatively accept it. I accept it firmly for several reasons: the time it was composed, within days of the tragedy; that most of Brahms’s music of that period had to do with Robert and Clara in symbolic terms; that he wrote another programmatic piece that year, the first of the Four Ballades; Joachim’s testimony; and the dizzying, tragic