Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [66]
Each of the early piano works, including the F Minor Sonata published in 1854, strikes a similar tone of Romantic drama, even melodrama: portentous thundering octave figures contrast with tender moments. There are songful slow movements, impetuous fast ones. Each successive sonata shows an unmistakable advance on the last. Together, even at this youthful stage, they reveal Brahms transforming traditional developmental technique, in which themes are dissolved into their constituent motives during the development section, toward the pervasive thematic transformation characteristic of late Beethoven—and of Liszt.52 The result, in mature Brahms, would be the protean motivic technique Arnold Schoenberg named “developing variation.”
In its tone the rhapsodic F# Minor Piano Sonata, Opus 2 but the first written, is the most Young Kreisler of the three. Its expressive world recalls the Sturm und Drang movement, the form-shattering “storm and stress” emotionalism of Goethe’s Young Werther and of middle-period Haydn. In keeping with that tone, in the finale Brahms tries an experiment: an introduction like an improvisation on the main theme, which repeatedly dissolves into quiet, rushing figuration; after the intense and often marcato movement proper, the finale ends with the texture of the introduction and trails off into ambiguous filigree, with two loud chords for a deliberately unfulfilled finish. It all makes for a hazy, Kreislerian beginning and end—the kind of Romantic self-indulgence Brahms would rarely allow himself again. (In the First Symphony, though, he would return to the idea of a slow introduction to the finale.)
Even at his most rhapsodic, in the F# Minor Sonata Brahms still pursues large-scale thematic integration. The rushing main theme of the scherzo, for example (Ex. 1c), begins with a transformation of the delicately songful melody of the andante (1B.), both of them a transformation of the sonata’s opening theme (1A.).
The C Major Sonata, called Opus 1 but composed second, seems intended as a contrast to the F# Minor, beginning with its muscular major theme based on Beethoven’s Hammerklavier. In further contrast to the rhapsodic F S Minor, Brahms made the C Major tight and economical. All the same, he had begun to rethink the formal models he inherited from Mozart and Beethoven—say, the transition from development to recapitulation in sonata form, usually dramatic and decisive. Instead, in the first movement’s recapitulation Brahms makes the tonic C-major chord ambiguous by adding a dissonant seventh, sending the music into restless tonal peregrinations, but ones that still unfold without calling attention to themselves.53 (Even at this stage, Brahms’s harmonic audacity rivaled Wagner’s. The difference is that Brahms did not care to show off his audacities; usually they are integrated into the voice leading and structure, there to find for those who know where to look. Wagner placed his novelties to give the galleries goose bumps.)
In the C Major, Brahms once again carefully shapes the relations of his themes. The breathless beginning of the finale, which launches as if already in mid-flight (EX. 2B.), is made from the same motive as the vigorous Beethovener opening of the sonata (EX. 2A.), and both of them make the same quick deflection to G major.
Likely Robert Schumann would have been shocked to know that the massive, five-movement F Minor was to be