Johannes Brahms

(1833-1897)

Allegro non troppo

Scherzo. Allegro

Andante

Finale. Allegro comodo

It took Brahms 20 years to be satisfied with the form he finally achieved for his third piano quartet, of which two movements had been conceived in 1856, when he was with Clara Schumann during the emotional upheaval of Schumann’s final illness. The music, even in its revised, mastered form, shows the state of mind Brahms indicated when writing about this quartet in 1868 to his friend Hermann Deiters: ‘Just picture a man who is going to shoot himself…’, and to Theodor Billroth: ‘This quartet is only communicated as a curiosity, say as an illustration to the last chapter of the Man with the Blue Jacket and the Yellow Vest’. The reference is to Goethe’s Werther, whose sorrows, an expression of the Storm and Stress movement in the literature of the 1770s, created a Europe-wide fashion for copycat suicides.

Eventually the piece was published as the third of Brahms’ three piano quartets, in 1875, long after the first and second, completed in 1861-2. Joachim talked Brahms out of the original key of C sharp minor, in which form he remembered the two movements Brahms had written as ‘very diffuse’. Revised and refined, they have kept their breadth, but the key of C minor still has tragic implications, and the music is fierce and stormy, often seeming to burst the bounds of the medium. Brahms remembered the opening when composing his First Symphony – a groping downward phrase is pregnant with an expectation. This is fulfilled by a rushing downward phrase for the piano leading to a propulsive statement of the same figure over pounding chords. The second subject, first stated in a rich chordal guise by the piano is, most unusually, followed by variations.

The second movement is a terse and furious scherzo, in the same key as the first movement. Repose and expansion come at last with the major key of E in the slow movement, launched by a wonderfully expressive cello solo. The strings sing to the piano’s accompaniment, until the piano takes the theme in octaves with a plucked accompaniment.

The finale is dominated by the falling third in its plaintive theme and the nearly perpetual motion of its accompaniment, except where the strings have a chorale-like phrase punctuated by the piano in separated descending figures. The tragic mood which dominates this movement, and indeed the whole work, has the last word.

First published for Musica Viva, 2003