Concerto for Violin, Violoncello, and Orchestra in A Minor, Op. 102
After the Fourth Symphony Brahms wrote only one more work in which he employed the orchestra, the double concerto for violin and ’cello. Thenceforth until his death his creative activity was devoted to chamber music, piano compositions, and songs for chorus or for solo voice.
This concerto he composed at Thun in Switzerland during the summer of 1887. To Elisabeth von Herzogenberg he referred to it in a letter of July 20: “I can give you nothing worth calling information about the undersigned musician. True, he is now writing down something that does not figure in his catalogue—but neither does it figure in other persons’! I leave you to guess the particular form of idiocy.”
The “particular form” Walter Niemann calls an experiment in the revival of the old Italian orchestral concerto, the “concerto grosso” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so signally illustrated by Handel and Bach, in which the orchestral tutti of the concerto grosso is contrasted with a concertino for a group of soloists.
But here Brahms was experimenting also with a curious concertino consisting of a violin and a ’cello and with unaccustomed combinations of instrumental timbres. In effect his concerto grosso is distinctly late Brahms and a far cry from the concerto grosso of musical antiquity.
Hardly was the double concerto completed before it was performed privately at the Baden-Baden Kurhaus, Brahms conducting and Joachim and Robert Hausmann, a distinguished ’cellist, playing the solo instruments. The same artistic confraternity took part in the first public performance, on October 18, 1887, at Cologne. On a copy of the work that Brahms presented to Joachim he wrote: “To him for whom it was written.”
The first movement (Allegro, A minor, 4-4) opens with an introductory passage in which the orchestra alludes to the chief subject and the ’cello follows with a rhapsodic recitative. The woodwind give out in A major the initial phrase of the second subject. Both subjects are heard in the first tutti. A rising syncopated theme in F major is also to be carefully noted.
The slow movement (Andante, D major, 3-4) is described by Niemann as “most lovely ... a great ballade, steeped in the rich, mysterious tone of a northern evening atmosphere.” Four notes for the horns and woodwind bring on the flowing chief melody
broadly sung by the solo instruments in octaves.
The finale (Vivace non troppo, A minor, 4-4), which has been called the “clearest of rondo types,” abounds in thematic material. The first subject
announced by the ’cello and repeated by the violin, has the gypsy flavor so dear to Brahms. It can be detected in another melody assigned to the clarinets and bassoons against rising arpeggios by the solo instruments, which is prominent in the development. The coda, tender at first and then exuberantly joyous, concludes the double concerto, and at the same time the composer’s employment of the orchestra, in a triumphant A major.