Johannes Brahms (1833-97)
Piano Quartet no. 3, in C minor, op. 60 (1855-75)
Anyone who buys the canard that Brahms was no more than a dour pedant (a “relic from primeval times,” as Hugo Wolf put it) probably doesn’t know the C-minor Piano Quartet. Begun in 1855 as his mentor, Robert Schumann, lay dying and Brahms was, himself, infatuated with Schumann’s wife, Clara, it’s about as emotionally wrenching as anything Wagner, Liszt, or even Schumann wrote. In fact, it seems the music’s deeply personal resonance gave Brahms pause: it took him twenty years to complete.
And, when he was done, the music’s subtext remained fresh. Indeed, in a note to his publisher after he finished the work, Brahms drew a Berlioz-like parallel between his emotional state when he wrote the piece and the score, referencing the hero of Goethe’s Werther, whose love for an unattainable, older, married woman drives him to suicide. “On the cover you must have a picture,” he wrote, “namely a head with a pistol to it. Now you can form some conception of the music! I’ll send you my photograph for the purpose.”
You get a sense of this intensity from the very beginning of the Quartet’s big first movement, which opens with tolling octaves from the piano. In response, the strings play a short, falling figure that develops into a longer-breathed melody. Gradually, shards of rhythms and motives coalesce like a maelstrom and build to a turbulent climax before suddenly vanishing away into the ether. It’s all terrifically unsettled, troubling, and almost uncomfortably intimate.
Then comes a welcome change: out of this decay, the piano introduces the movement’s second theme, a noble tune first heard in the warm, burnished key of E-flat major.
But this new mood doesn’t last too long. The development comes next and much of it focuses on ideas derived from the Quartet’s first pages, with a particularly violent emphasis given the strings’ opening, falling dyad. And when the second theme is finally referenced at the end of it it’s not fervent and homey but rhythmically dizzy.
This last episode leads into the driving transition to the recapitulation. The turbulent mood here is now heightened by a subtle harmonic stroke: Brahms transposes the lyrical E-flat-major melody not to the expected C major but to G. The result extends the stormy emotional aura of the movement all the way to the (eventual) C-minor coda.
The middle movements are shorter and a mite less fraught. In the Scherzo, pregnant pauses and sudden rhythmic shifts lead to an unanticipated cadence in C major. And the E-major third movement is all singing, radiant glory.
The finale returns to the moody atmosphere of the first movement, featuring a striking contrast between the rhythmically dissonant first theme and the second, a stately, flowing chorale. Light and shade constantly alternate, with the former winning out – some sort of triumph, rather than Werther’s fate – at the last moment.
© Jonathan Blumhofer
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