Symphony in C Minor, No. 1, Op. 68
Owing, no doubt, to the experience with the symphony that at last became a piano concerto, Brahms was cautious about trying his hand again at a symphony. In 1862 he had made, however, a version of the Symphony in C minor, without the introduction, of which he wrote to his friend Albert Dietrich, the composer. According to his biographer Walter Niemann, he once remarked it was “no laughing matter” to write a symphony after Beethoven, and the same authority points out that when he had finished the first movement of the C minor symphony he declared to another friend, Hermann Levi, the noted conductor: “I shall never compose a symphony! You have no conception of how the likes of us feel when we hear the tramp of a giant like him (Beethoven) behind us.”
BRAHMS’S BIRTHPLACE IN HAMBURG
This extreme modesty persisted, for Niemann assures us that ten years after the completion of the Fourth Symphony Brahms alluded to that majestic work as “halbschürig” (“mediocre”).
Opening Brahms’s series of four, the Symphony in C minor was given for the first time on November 4, 1876, at the Grand Ducal Theatre, Karlsruhe. It seems that immediately before the orchestral parts were copied for the first rehearsal Brahms abridged the Andante and the Allegretto, saying that he had the Finale to think of. Otto Dessoff, who had left Vienna for Karlsruhe, conducted the performance, as he had done in the case of the “Haydn” variations at Vienna. Brahms had a low opinion of him. He had even written while Dessoff was still in Vienna:
“Now Dessoff is absolutely not the right man for this, the only enviable post in Vienna. There are special reasons why he continues to beat time, but not a soul approves. Under him the orchestra has positively deteriorated.” Three days after the première at Karlsruhe the symphony was repeated at Mannheim, this time with the composer as conductor.
At first the C minor Symphony won little more than a success of esteem. Even Hanslick, Brahms’s Viennese prophet, was not wholly enthusiastic. Typical is the judgment expressed by the revered John S. Dwight in his Journal of Music after the symphony had been made known to Boston, when it was scarcely fourteen months old. He felt it as something “depressing and unedifying, a work coldly elaborated, artificial; earnest, to be sure, in some sense great, and far more satisfactory than any symphony by Raff or any others of the day which we have heard, but not to be mentioned in the same day with any symphony by Schumann, Mendelssohn, or the great one by Schubert, not to speak of Beethoven’s.... Our interest in it will increase, but we foresee the limit; and certainly it cannot be popular; it will not be loved like the dear masterpieces of genius.”
In spite of this dark prophecy, the symphony has long been one of the most popular, and it is now the established fashion to find in it not only magnitude and ruggedness, but pathos, tenderness, and a profound humanity.
A portentous introduction (Un poco sostenuto, C minor, 6-8) prefaces the first movement (Allegro, C minor, 6-8). The first theme is given out by the violins in the fifth measure. The second theme (E-flat major) appears in the woodwind. The character of the movement is austere and epic.
The second movement (Andante sostenuto, E major, 3-4) is imbued with a profound lyricism, which flowers into some of the loveliest pages in all Brahms.
Instead of a scherzo there follows a movement marked “Un poco allegretto e grazioso” (A-flat major, 2-4), which Grove aptly characterizes as “a sort of national tune or Volkslied of simple sweetness and grace.” The opening subject is sung first by the clarinet. The place of a trio is delightfully filled by a contrasting middle section (B major, 6-8).
The stupendous finale begins with an introductory section (Adagio, C minor, 4-4) that touches briefly on thematic material to be developed later, and here that distinguished American critic, the late William Foster Apthorp, must have our attention:
“With the thirtieth measure the tempo changes to più andante, and we come upon one of the most poetic episodes in all Brahms. Amid hushed, tremulous harmonies in the strings, the horn and afterward the flute pour forth an utterly original melody, the character of which ranges from passionate pleading to a sort of wild exultation according to the instrument that plays it.
The coloring is enriched by the solemn tones of the trombones, which appear for the first time in this movement.
“It is ticklish work trying to dive down into a composer’s brain and surmise what special outside source his inspiration may have had; but one cannot help feeling that this whole wonderful episode may have been suggested to Brahms by the tones of the Alpine horn as it awakens the echoes from mountain after mountain on some of the high passes in the Bernese Oberland. This is certainly what the episode recalls to anyone who has ever heard those poetic tones and their echoes. A short, solemn, even ecclesiastical interruption by the trombones and bassoons is of more thematic importance. As the horn tones gradually die away and the cloudlike harmonies in the string sink lower and lower—like mist veiling the landscape—an impressive pause ushers in the Allegro non troppo, ma con brio (in C major, 4-4 time).”
Concerning the rest of the movement Apthorp adds: “The introductory Adagio has already given us mysterious hints at what is to come; and now there bursts forth in the strings the most joyous, exuberant Volkslied melody, a very Hymn to Joy, which in some of its phrases, as it were unconsciously and by sheer affinity of nature, flows into strains from the similar melody in the Finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. One cannot call it plagiarism: it is two men saying the same thing.”
With regard to this symphony, Hans von Bülow has often been misquoted. As Philip Hale puts it: “Ask a music-lover, at random, what von Bülow said about Brahms’s Symphony in C minor and he will answer: ‘He called it the Tenth Symphony.’ If you inquire into the precise meaning of this characterization, he will answer: ‘It is the symphony that comes worthily after Beethoven’s Ninth’; or, ‘It is worthy of Beethoven’s ripest years,’ or in his admiration he will go so far as to say: ‘Only Brahms or Beethoven could have written it’.”
What Bülow actually set down in words was this: “First after my acquaintance with the Tenth Symphony, alias Symphony No. 1, by Johannes Brahms, that is since six weeks ago, have I become so intractable and so hard against Bruch pieces and the like. I call Brahms’s first symphony the Tenth, not as though it should be put after the Ninth; I should put it between the Second and the ‘Eroica,’ just as I think by the First Symphony should be understood not the First of Beethoven but the one composed by Mozart which is known as the ‘Jupiter’.”