The music of Brahms is a perfect choice to celebrate and
close the forty-one-year tenure of Gustav Meier as Music Director and Conductor
of the Greater Bridgeport Symphony Orchestra. It is music of the highest craft,
filled with detail and careful consideration, but also saturated in wit and
elegant humor. Every corner of the orchestra will be highlighted during this
program, with colors ranging from the public sound of celebration to the
intimacy of chamber music. Brahms was at heart an optimist and both works on
the program move from darkness into light by engaging epic struggles. Brahms
sought the good life in both the first symphony and the second piano concerto;
but what he found was radically different in each case. These two journeys will
make for a memorable evening.
Brahms was born in the worst part of town in the slums of
Hamburg in the early spring of 1833. The second of three children (he had an
older sister and a younger brother); his father was a bass player in street
ensembles and bars. He began his musical instruction at age seven with
Friedrich Wilhelm Cossel, and three years later with Cossel’s teacher Eduard
Marxsen, to whom the second piano concerto is dedicated.
When he was twenty years old he accompanied the violinist Eduard
Remenyi in a concert tour. The tour took them to Altenberg where he met Liszt.
Brahms offended Liszt with indifference and Remenyi ditched him. Brahms then
joined forces with the violinist and composer Joseph Joachim, and eventually
met Robert and Clara Schumann in Düsseldorf. Robert Schumann was so impressed
by Brahms that he wrote an article in the journal “Neue Zeitschrift für Musik” on
October 28 that proclaimed Brahms as the one “called forth to give us the
highest ideal expression of our time.”
The pressure of this proclamation weighed on Brahms. He came
to international attention and fame quickly for the German Requiem in 1865, a work in memory of his mother and based on
oft repeated and underlined passages from her copy of the Bible.
His first symphony was finally completed after a long
struggle with the materials and the conception of the work at age 43. Typical
of Brahms, he followed with the second symphony almost effortlessly a year
later. The second piano concerto occupied Brahms for three years and was
completed in 1881. It was a work that he himself premiered as piano soloist.
Johannes Brahms
(May 7
1833 –April 3 1897)
Symphony No. 1 Op. 68
Instrumentation: 2 flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons,
contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani and strings
World Premiere: November 4, 1876
Most Recent Performance by GBS: March
1999
Description: Four movements
[13’ 10’
5’ 17’] duration.
In an unforgettable opening gesture against pulsing timpani
strokes, two opposed musical lines are torn apart with the force of the entire
orchestra. The movement explores an explosion of simultaneous ideas. These
ideas refer to one another and are changed by their interactions, but they also
refer to the symphonic tradition. “You can’t imagine” wrote Brahms, “what it
means to the likes of us when we hear those footsteps behind us.” Most
specifically Brahms meant the footsteps of Beethoven.
Suddenly breaking a moment of repose within the exposition
of this movement Brahms scored a memorable gesture in E-flat minor that
consists of isolated 3-note gestures. Listen for the way that this gesture is
quickly expanded to become a four-note motto. This four-note motto will then be
used to represent the footsteps of Beethoven; it invokes the use of iconic
motives made famous by Beethoven, in particular the four-note motive played by
the horns in the scherzo of Beethoven’s fifth symphony.
During the development this four-note motive alternates with
a chorale. The contrast between driving energy and religious peace seem
promising; but that energy is not sustained. The recapitulation continues to
drive directly into a coda with great force. Then, mysteriously, the music suddenly settles and ends without resolving its own tensions and
ambiguities.
The second and third movements explore contrasting
directions. They are placed in tonalities of mathematical significance [E major
and Ab major along an axis of major thirds] that cause them to sound in radically
different colors from the movements on either side of them. Within these
movements Brahms explores the intimacies and passions of love and
companionship.
The second movement opens with an extended lyrical line that
is signature Brahms. Listen for the darker, questioning undersides that remain,
not far away, during even the most serene passages. The central oboe solo, set
in C-sharp minor, prefigures the clarinet music that opens the third movement.
Interconnections are important to the musical language of Brahms.
The third movement is set as chamber music. It is an
anti-scherzo. The standard scherzo model was boisterous in its outer sections
with a contrasting and often more subdued trio section. This scherzo has the
opposite design. Also, a scherzo is typically set in triple time; but the outer
section in this scherzo is set two beats to a bar, and in odd and unpredictable
phrase groupings. It is only the contrasting trio; more boisterous than the
frame that surrounds it, that is set in 3 beats to the bar. The music of this
movement is social and engaging; quality time spent with a best friend
The final movement returns to the deep-seated philosophical
struggle and drama of the opening movement. The first and fourth movements
stand like two mountain peaks within this symphony. And yet, this movement also
attempts to reconcile the qualities of the inner with those of the outer
movements.
A secret cipher to this movement was provided by Brahms
himself. On September 12, 1868 Brahms wrote a postcard to his muse Clara
Schumann. On it he quoted the famous horn melody which emerges from the slow
introduction in the fourth movement. He claimed to have heard the melody played
earlier in the day on an alphorn and thought of her. He wrote: “Hoch auf’m Berg,
tief im Thal, grüss ich dich viel tausandmal (High in the mountains, deep in
the valleys, I greet you many thousand times).”
This horn tune and another famous melody in the style of
Beethoven vie for attention within this movement. Which will win in the
ecstatic and victorious music at end of this symphony? Will Brahms turn toward
the footsteps of Beethoven or will he embrace this vision of nature and of
love? Both? Neither?
(May 7
1833 –April 3 1897)
Piano Concerto No. 2 Op. 83
Instrumentation: 2 Flutes (first doubling piccolo), 2 Oboes,
2 Clarinets, 2 Bassoons, 4 Horns, 2 Trumpets, Timpani and strings
World Premiere: November 9, 1881 with Brahms as soloist
Most Recent Performance by GBS: March 2002
Description: Four movements
[16’ 9’
12’ 9’] duration
Classical concerti were traditionally cast in three
movements. In this sense they differed from symphonies, which were set in four
movements. Symphonies included a dance movement (usually a minuet or scherzo).
Brahms intended this work to be symphonic in its design; it is set in four
movements and the “extra” movement (the second) is a scherzo. The work is as
much a symphony for piano and orchestra as it is a traditional concerto.
Standard concerti typically delayed the entrance of the solo
instrument. They often had orchestral expositions that revealed the essential
themes and character of the movement before the soloist entered. In this work
the horn solo invokes the soloist immediately and the soloist remains a central
part of the fabric of the music throughout the work.
Whereas the Symphony No. 1 had it dramatic peaks stationed
in the outer movements, the second piano concerto is organized around dramatic
structures that break in the center; the first two movements are peaks. Each is
designed to intensify and produce a sense of ovation as they close.
The third movement sets off in a new direction. It features
an extended cello solo adapted from the Brahms song “Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer” (Op. 105, No. 2).
This song, about the “ever quieter slumber” of death, explains that grief
transcends death. The singer of the original song hears you calling from the
grave as if in a dream, but “no one wakes and lets you in.” It is May in the
final stanza, and the song implores; “Komm, o komme bald! [come, oh come soon].”
This music,
encoded without singer in the tune of the solo cello at the opening of the
movement, retains all the elements of song. When the piano enters, the music
becomes a nocturne and finds its way from B-flat major into the unexpected key
of F-sharp minor. It is then joined by the clarinet. When the cello reprises the song
it is in the wrong key; F# major, and the piano guides it back into B-flat with
trills; it is one of the most wonderful moments in the concerto literature.
The finale has often confounded those who imagine that all
finales after Beethoven must transform into drama. This one contrasts Mozartian
grace against the beloved Hungarian dances that so entertained Brahms throughout
his life. This is a concerto that ends with sonic smiles.
Jeffrey Johnson
University of Bridgeport
