SYMPHONY NO. 2, IN D MAJOR, OP. 73
I. Allegro non troppo II. Adagio non troppo III. Allegretto grazioso, quasi andantino IV. Allegro con spirito
The latest biographers of Johannes Brahms differ curiously concerning the character of the Second symphony. The excellent Walter Niemann finds a tragic undercurrent; “ghostly elements glimmering in a supernatural, uncanny way”; even “mysterious Wagnerian visions.” The equally excellent Richard Specht finds sunshine, fair days, warm winds, clarity, and tenderness. Brahms can on occasion be gloomy and crabbed enough. Why cannot Mr. Niemann, a devoted admirer of Johannes, allow him to be cheerful once in a while, as in this Second symphony?
The Symphony in D is the most genial of the four, the most easily accepted by an audience, for, if there are pages of supreme beauty in it, as toward the end of the first movement, so there are pages that are Mendelssohnian in form and in the rhythm of the easily retained melodic thought. Mendelssohn, a shrewd composer, seldom, if ever, committed the blunder of surprising an audience. As in the theater, so in the concert hall, an audience does not wish to be left in doubt, and in this symphony, which is in reality a storehouse of truly beautiful things, there is every now and then a passage that is accepted by the hearer as an agreeable commonplace.
Chamber music, choral works, pianoforte pieces, and songs had made Brahms famous before he allowed his First symphony to be played. The Symphony in C minor was performed for the first time in 1876. Kirchner wrote in a letter to Marie Lipsius that he had talked about this symphony in 1863 or 1864 with Mme Clara Schumann, who then showed him fragments of it. No one knew, it is said, of the existence of a second symphony before it was completed.
The Second symphony, in D major, was composed, probably at Pörtschach-am-See, in the summer of 1877, the year that saw the publication of the first. Brahms wrote Dr. Billroth in September of that year: “I do not know whether I have a pretty symphony; I must inquire of skilled persons.” He referred to Clara Schumann, Dessoff, and Ernst Frank. On September 19, Mme Schumann wrote that he had written out the first movement. Early in October he played it to her, also a portion of the finale. The symphony was played by Brahms and Ignaz Brüll as a pianoforte duet (arranged by the composer) to invited guests at the pianoforte house of his friend Ehrbar in Vienna a few days before the announced date of the orchestral performance, December 11, 1877. Through force of circumstances the symphony was played for the first time in public at the succeeding Philharmonic concert of December 30. Hans Richter conducted. The second performance, conducted by Brahms, was at the Gewandhaus, Leipsic, on January 10, 1878.
Certain German critics in their estimate of Brahms have exhausted themselves in comparison and metaphor. One claims that, as Beethoven’s Fourth symphony is to his Eroica, so is Brahms’ Second to his First; the one in C minor is epic, the one in D major is a fairy tale. When Bülow wrote that Brahms was an heir of Cherubini, he referred to the delicate filigree work shown in the finale of the second. Felix Weingartner, whose Die Symphonie nach Beethoven (Berlin, 1898) is a pamphlet of singularly acute and discriminative criticism, coolly says that the Second is far superior to the First: “The stream of invention has never flowed so fresh and spontaneous in other works by Brahms, and nowhere else has he colored his orchestration so successfully.” And after a eulogy of the movements he puts the symphony among the very best of the new classic school since the death of Beethoven—“far above all the symphonies of Schumann.”
Richard Specht, in his Life of Brahms, writes: “The work is suffused with the sunshine and the warm winds playing on the water, which recall the summer at Pörtschach that gave it life. The comfortably swinging first subject at once creates a sense of well-being with its sincere and sensuous gladness.... This movement is like a fair day in its creator’s life and outshines the other three sections—the brooding andante, the rather unimportant scherzo ... the broad, sweeping finale which, for all its lively, driving motion, strikes one as cheerless and artificial in its briskness. The impression of the unsymphonic nature of this work is probably due partly to a prejudice that expects to see cosmic images and not mere genre pictures in such a composition, and partly to the meter adopted for the first movement. It is remarkable that Brahms did not employ the common time almost invariably used by the symphonic masters from Mozart to Schubert in their opening movements until he came to his Fourth symphony. The round-dance nature of the 3-4 measure in the D major symphony is especially difficult to take seriously, and rightly so; for this is a light-hearted work, a declaration of love in symphonic form.
“Brahms was particularly fond of this dear and tender composition, as might be judged from the little mystifications with which he raised the expectations his friends had of the new work that followed its elder sister within the space of a year. He persisted in describing it as gloomy and awesome, never to be played by any musicians without a mourning band on their sleeve.” (As a matter of fact Brahms wrote to Elisabet von Herzogenberg on December 29, 1877: “The orchestra here play my new symphony with crape bands on their sleeves, because of its dirge-like effect. It is to be printed with a black edge, too.”) “He replied in a tone of waggish secrecy to Elisabet, who was impatiently waiting for the score and scolded him for not rewarding her discretion by sending her the work, which she knew to be ready (‘May the deuce take such modesty!’) and who, incidentally, took exception to his spelling so noble a word as ‘symphony’ with an ‘f’. ‘It really is no symphony,’ he writes, ‘but merely a Sinfonie, and I shall have no need to play it to you beforehand. You merely sit down at the piano, put your little feet on the two pedals in turn, and strike the chord of F minor several times in succession, first in the treble, then in the bass ff and pp and you will gradually gain a vivid impression of my “latest.”’ And he was as pleased as Punch with the glad surprise and delight of the adored woman and of all his friends when they saw this sunny work.”