Johannes Brahms / Arnold Schoenberg
Piano Quartet no. 1, arranged for orchestra
Critic Donald Tovey has called the seven chamber pieces Johannes Brahms completed from 1859 to 1865 the works of his “first maturity,” when Brahms synthesized his own style from the influences of predecessors such as Beethoven and Schubert. The Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, completed in 1861, numbers among these. Though at the time of its composition Brahms was seen as “old-fashioned” by composers such as Lizst and Wagner, with this work Brahms was already working in a much larger scale than his mentor Robert Schumann, the great Romantic composer of chamber works. Brahms’s quartet also exemplifies his ability to tightly integrate thematic material into a cohesive whole, in a way that was not found in chamber music at the time. This self-referential structure was disconcerting to the work’s first audiences in Vienna, who gave it mixed reviews. Even pianist Clara Schumann, who premiered the piece, thought the first movement lacked clarity.
Yet many decades later another Viennese, composer Arnold Schoenberg, found a kinship in Brahms’ work. A principal figure in the so-called “Second Viennese school” of composition along with Alban Berg and Anton Webern, Schoenberg is considered the father of twelve-tone composition. But Schoenberg insisted his works were only “evolutionary,” rather than “revolutionary,” and simply a logical extension of the German tradition. He traced his own compositional roots from Mahler through Brahms, Schumann, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and Bach. It is not surprising that he would choose to orchestrate a work by Brahms, whom he admired for his technique of “developing variation:” doing much with a limited amount of thematic material. Indeed, such technique paves the way for atonal composition.
Schoenberg began his arrangement of Brahms’ quartet in May of 1937 in Los Angeles, where he had moved to escape the dangerous political atmosphere in Europe, and completed his work in September of that year. He explained his reasons for choosing this work in a letter to Alfred Frankenstein, music critic for The San Francisco Chronicle, in March of 1939:
“My reasons: I like the piece.
It is seldom played.
It is always very badly played, because, the better the pianist, the louder he plays and you hear nothing from the strings. I wanted once to hear everything, and this I achieved.
My intentions: To remain strictly in the style of Brahms and not to go farther than he himself would have gone if he lived today.
To watch carefully all the laws to which Brahms obeyed and not to violate them, which are only known to musicians educated in his environment.”
Schoenberg changed none of the notes of Brahms’ original score. The extent to which he adhered to Brahms’ style, however, is open to some interpretation. The arrangement includes a style of chromatic writing for the brass that Brahms did not use, even after such writing became technically possible; brass is also used more heavily to double the melodic line than is typical for Brahms. (Schoenberg is said to have suggested that if Brahms had been aware of such modern scoring he would have used it.) The coloristic writing in Schoenberg’s version of the fourth movement includes decidedly un-Brahmsian appearances by xylophone, glockenspiel, and cymbals, as well as trombone glissandos, brass double-tonguing, and divisi strings. Yet in general Schoenberg’s arrangement makes a compelling case for the symphonic quality of Brahms’ original work. As Redwood Symphony’s conductor Eric Kujawsky has written:
“Most of Schoenberg’s arrangements say more about him than they do about the music he was adapting. In this case, however, he was uncommonly respectful, dealing as he was with the predecessor he probably admired above all others save Mozart. Where in his arrangements of concertos by Handel and Monn he sought to remedy what he regarded as the deficiencies in Baroque style, here he was concerned with releasing a potentiality latent in the music, for like several of Brahms’s early large-scale works, his G minor piano quartet is a budding symphony.”
The Allegro develops through five distinct themes, from somber gravity to graceful, lightly dancing passages (augmented by Schoenberg with strategic touches of triangle), all of which Brahms interweaves with his gift for endless variation. The second theme is in D major, harmonically distant from the opening G minor and requiring, as Maestro Kujawsky writes, “a great deal of harmonic acrobatics to get to and from.” The following Intermezzo marks the first time Brahms substitutes this gentler musical form for the expected scherzo or minuet. Here again, Schoenberg employed effects unknown to Brahms to let the listener “hear everything,” using string harmonics mixed with pizzicati at the end of the movement to bring out both chordal and rhythmic texture. The Andante con moto contrasts a slow theme of great lyricism and grandeur with a little march that Schoenberg expands into full military pomp with brass and percussion. The finale, Rondo alla Zingarese, is the earliest appearance of the style hongrois (Hungarian style) in Brahms’s chamber pieces. This evocation of gypsy music was popular in European music from the mid-18th century to the early 20th. Brahms used it here with authority, having learned its niceties from the Hungarian violinist Reményi, with whom the composer had toured. Full of fiery three-bar phrases and folk-like dances and processions, this movement’s brisk gaiety appears to have infected even the reserved Schoenberg with a spirit of fun in his playful arrangement, all the way through to the whirling dervish of an ending.
November, 2002