• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1319 0

Brahms’s last piano sonata. For all Brahms’s youth—twenty when he composed it—the piece has a seasoned maturity beyond the earlier pieces. There is less virtuosity for its own sake, less reliance on mechanical harmonic sequences to whip up excitement, more expressive depth and ambiguity. The F Minor seems almost like a summary and compendium of its predecessors: portentous and virtuosic first movement like the F# Minor, but tightly made like the C Major, with all the melodic material derived from transformations of a single theme;54 brash scherzo, rhythmically dazzling like its predecessors, but the placid trio more contrasting than usual; another songful movement, mostly quiet and inward, the most touching of these interludes in the sonatas (Brahms sometimes played it alone in recitals, and it resembles his later freestanding piano pieces). The finale approximates rondo form (traditionally A B A C A, etc., but here varied) and is perhaps the most expressively complex movement he had written—the almost playful beginning grows into expansive and intense sections, these resolve into an ingenuous chorale theme, and all finally comes to a crashing, two-fisted coda. There is a formal experiment, more convincing than earlier ones: a brief intermezzo titled “Rückblick” (Reminiscence), between movements three and five. It amounts to a recall of the second-movement andante, but now with an air of fatality and imitations of pounding kettledrums, strings, winds, and blaring brasses.

For all their differences, common elements unite the three sonatas. One is their massive, orchestral approach to the piano—the reason Robert Schumann called them “veiled symphonies.” Another element, a telling one for Brahms’s future, is the connection of several movements to song. The Andante con espressione of the F# Minor is a set of variations on the old Minnesinger melody “Mir ist leide” (“It saddens me that winter has bared the wood and heath”); the andante of the C Major varies the German song “Verstohlen geht der Mond auf” (“Furtively, the moon rises”—Brahms had the words printed under the melody), and pictures the text verse by verse;55 the Andante espressivo of the F Minor is not an old tune but rather a song without words, whose text by Sternau Brahms cites at the head of the movement: “The twilight falls, the moonlight gleams, two hearts in love unite, embraced in rapture.”56 Brahms told Albert Dietrich that he associated the racing finale of the C Major with Robert Burns’s folk song “My Heart’s in the Highlands.”57

These connections to song in general and, in the sonatas’ first two slow movements, German song in particular, manifest Brahms’s Romantic and nationalistic devotion to folk music and to the idea of songfulness, of lyric melody in instrumental music. If he had not quite found the Brahmsian lyric voice of his later music, he was near it—especially in the lovely andante of the F Minor, with its succession of singing themes. (They begin with a chain of thirds, a Brahms thumbprint all the way to the Fourth Symphony.)

The song-based sonata movements adumbrate another, more subtle prophecy of his coming work: a sense of meanings beneath the surface, secrets hidden within the abstract forms of instrumental music. Soon Brahms would go beyond just suggesting song texts. As he worked on the F Minor Sonata in Düsseldorf, he picked up from Schumann and from Joachim a more esoteric means of symbolizing feelings, ideas, and people by means of musical pitches: an explosion of F major near the beginning of the F Minor Sonata finale proclaims Joachim’s F-A-E theme, the idée fixe of the F-A-E Sonata.58 Schumann had written pieces with themes whose notes came from the names of his friends Abegg and Gade; more covertly, he created themes to represent Clara in his music.

A cabala in pitches and unsung texts suited Brahms as well as it had Robert Schumann. It would be a means of capturing his own life and suffering, burying them in notes that had no words to betray the chaos of feelings that he was determined to hide, but could not avoid expressing.