Symphony in E-Minor, No. 4, Op. 98
When this symphony was brought out at Meiningen, under the direction of Hans von Bülow, on October 25, 1885, there was a great deal of discussion about the choice of key and actually some dismay. E minor as the key for a symphony was looked at askance, even though Haydn and Raff had both used it. The suggestion has been made that Brahms picked out E minor because of its “pale, wan character, to express the deepest melancholy.” This key has also been described as “dull in color, shadowy, suggestive of solitude and desolation.”
Haydn perhaps felt strongly the key’s doleful implications, for his E minor symphony is the “Symphony of Mourning.” Raff’s E minor symphony, on the other hand, is by no means the autumnal affair that Brahms’s has been called. Its title, “In Summer,” tells us that!
Whatever the motives may have been that determined Brahms’s choice, it fell on E minor, and he proceeded to compose. The work was written at Mürz-zu-Schlag in Styria in the summers of 1884 and 1885. And at Mürz-zu-Schlag in the latter year the manuscript was endangered by fire. Brahms had gone out for a walk. On his return he found that the house where he lodged was burning. Fortunately he had devoted friends there who were rushing his papers out of the building. Brahms pitched in with the rest and helped get the fire under control. The precious manuscript was saved.
Brahms, in spite of his mature years and all the important work that he had put to his credit, was again somewhat timid about a new symphony. In a letter to Hans von Bülow he described it, oddly enough, as “a couple of entr’actes”; he also termed it “a choral work without text.” Yet he was eager for opinions from such valued friends as Elisabeth von Herzogenberg and Clara Schumann. He felt that the symphony had failed to please a group of men, including Hanslick, Billroth, Richter, Kalbeck, to whom he had played a four-hand piano version with Ignaz Brüll. To Kalbeck he said: “If persons like Billroth, Hanslick, and you do not like my music, whom will it please?” Had he forgotten Elisabeth and Clara?
The audience that heard the Meiningen première liked the symphony. Indeed, a vain effort was made to have the scherzo repeated. Nevertheless, the symphony was slow in winning general favor. In Vienna, where Brahms resided, it disappointed his friends and delighted his enemies. Hugo Wolf, an arch-enemy, was then writing musical criticism. He devoted a bitter article to the work, in particular poking fun at the key—at last a symphony in E minor! Brahms’s friends, on the contrary, celebrated the key, in order, it is said, to help cover up their disappointment in the music. It was usual to hear the symphony called grim, austere, forbidding, granitic. However, eventually it made its way, and now there are those who would rank it first among its author’s four.
The initial theme of the first movement (Allegro non troppo, E minor, 4-4), given out by the violins answered by flutes, clarinets, and bassoons, is of a thoughtful and somewhat mournful character, but it could hardly be termed forbidding. Rather it invites to meditation. The second theme, introduced by the wind instruments, is harmonically and rhythmically one of Brahms’s most fascinating inspirations. Some undiscourageable seekers after resemblances have discovered a likeness in the thirteenth and fourteenth measures to a passage in the second act of Puccini’s opera “Tosca,” which followed the symphony after fifteen years. Such resemblances are often mere coincidences.
The second movement (Andante moderato, E major, 6-8), with its unearthly melody announced in the Phrygian mode by the horns, to be taken up immediately by oboes, bassoons, and flutes,
has been called the most hauntingly beautiful page in all of Brahms. Of this section Elisabeth von Herzogenberg wrote to the composer: “The Andante has the freshness and distinction of character with which only you could endow it, and even you have had recourse for the first time to certain locked chambers of your soul.”
Kalbeck, who finds that the whole symphony pictures the tragedy of human life, compares the Andante to a waste and ruined field, like the Campagna (as it then was) near Rome. But in the ensuing scherzo (Allegro giocoso, C major, 4-4) he sees the Carnival at Milan. The finale reminds him of a passage in the “Oedipus Coloneus” of Sophocles: “Not to have been born at all is superior to every other view of the question.” Yet there are those who deny the pessimistic interpretation; who find a rugged, full-blooded vigor in the finale as well as in the scherzo, and who attribute the more specifically thoughtful portions of the work to the reactions inevitable to any sensitive and meditative spirit.
Be all that as it may, the finale (Allegro energico e passionato, E minor, 3-4) is of special interest because it is cast in the classic form of the passacaglia or chaconne. It is built up on a majestic theme eight measures long, a noble progression of chords, which recurs thirty-one times, appearing in the high, middle, and low voices alternately.
As to the distinction between those old, patrician dance forms, passacaglia and chaconne, the doctors remain in absolute contradiction, some maintaining a chaconne to be what the others define as a passacaglia, and vice versa.
The curious may be interested to know that Simrock, the music publisher, is said to have paid Brahms 40,000 marks for the symphony—the equivalent in 1885 of $10,000.
Incidentally, the E minor symphony was the last of Brahms’s compositions that their author heard performed in public. It was played at a Philharmonic Concert in Vienna on March 7, 1897, less than a month before his death. This was the last concert that Brahms, already fatally ill, ever attended. Miss Florence May in her “Life of Brahms” gives an affecting account of the occasion:
“The fourth symphony had never become a favorite work in Vienna. Received with reserve on its first performance, it had not since gained much more from the general public of the city than the respect sure to be accorded there to an important work by Brahms. Today, however, a storm of applause broke out at the end of the first movement, not to be quieted until the composer, coming to the front of the artists’ box in which he was seated, showed himself to the audience. The demonstration was renewed after the second and third movements, and an extraordinary scene followed the conclusion of the work.
“The applauding, shouting house, its gaze riveted on the figure standing in the balcony, so familiar and yet in present aspect so strange, seemed unable to let him go. Tears ran down his cheeks as he stood there, shrunken in form, with lined countenance, strained expression, white hair hanging lank: and through the audience there was a feeling as of a stifled sob, for each knew that they were saying farewell. Another outburst of applause and yet another; one more acknowledgment from the master; and Brahms and his Vienna had parted forever.” He died on April 3, 1897.