Johannes Brahms
Symphony No. 1
Although Johannes Brahms first began toying with themes for a symphony as early as 1854, when he was only 21, the thought of being compared to the master of the genre, Beethoven, daunted him. Indeed, 1854 was also when he first heard Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. As he later wrote a friend, “I shall never compose a symphony. You have no conception of how the likes of us feel when we hear the tramp of a giant like him behind us.”
Nevertheless, his mentor and friend Robert Schumann had urged him to compose a symphony. As Schumann sank into madness and then death in an asylum, the young Brahms spent the next two years helping Schumann’s wife Clara with her seven children, and sketching several themes for an orchestral work. Eventually, one set of sketches became the first piano concerto (1861), while another section became a portion of A German Requiem (1857 – 1868). He saved the remaining sketch, for an Allegro movement in C-major, and in 1862 refined it and showed it to Clara; she praised it but felt it ended too abruptly. In 1873, he tried his hand at a non-choral work requiring full orchestra, the Variations on a Theme by Haydn. The Variations found favor with the public, and so finally in 1874, when he was 43 years old, he decided it was now or never.
Brahms reworked his old Allegro of 1855, moving it from major to minor and adding a stately introduction. He borrowed an alpenhorn theme that he had transcribed and sent to Clara Schumann while on holiday in Switzerland in 1868, and used it as a transition in the new symphony’s finale. It took him two years to complete the work. The full symphony premiered in 1876 in Karlsruhe, followed by performances in Vienna, where the influential conductor Hans von Bülow dubbed it “Beethoven’s Tenth.” Although Brahms was not quite comfortable with this designation, he understood that such praise meant his symphony was considered a worthy successor to the works of the giant he had feared.
The symphony’s ‘new’ introduction opens rather somberly, as if Brahms wanted to make sure that each listener understood how seriously he took this business of composing a symphony. Once the main Allegro section begins, however, it moves forward with driving inevitability. Part of that drive is caused by a particularly Brahmsian technique used throughout the symphony, that of constantly placing the beginning of a phrase on an off-beat. Another driving force is a repeated, four-beat pattern, from the insistent timpani in the introduction to the full orchestra in the development, handing the pattern between brass, woodwinds, and strings. Yet this steady drive finally ends with a series of calm chords in C major, preparing the listener for the reserved character of the second movement, Andante moderato. Strings sound sweeping, lyrical melodies, augmented by solo lines for oboe, clarinet, and flute. Although the mood is reflective, the triple meter keeps the “engine running” and the movement never bogs down. It comes to rest with tender solos by the first violin.
The third movement, Un poco allegretto e grazioso, is not a scherzo but an intermezzo, a form Brahms favored in many of his piano works. Bright and the most “cheerful” movement of the piece, it still retains a little of the work’s overall reserve. The finale, Adagio — Allegro non troppo ma con brio, announces itself in no uncertain terms, with swelling chords and rolling timpani. The introduction is highlighted by two suspenseful pizzicato sections for strings, the second increasing in both volume and tempo and segueing into a flurry of activity that is suddenly calmed by a call from horns (the alpenhorn tune Brahms transcribed for Clara) and then a brass chorale. The strings introduce the main theme of the movement, a grand processional that is at turns regally majestic or joyously exultant.
Critics quickly noted the similarity of this theme’s rhythm to that of the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth, to which Brahms is said to have replied, “Any jackass can see that!” But it is Beethoven’s Fifth that this symphony resembles most in structure, and, as Beethoven had done before him, Brahms had to find a way to resolve the minor-key tension of the first movement into a major-key blaze of glory. His grand theme becomes ever more energetic, and by movement’s end the calm brass chorale is thunderous, closing the symphony on a shout of triumph. Brahms had finally achieved his goal, and made a place for himself as a symphonist out from behind Beethoven’s long shadow.