Tour in Holland—Third String Quartet—C minor Symphony—First performances—Varying impressions created by the work in Vienna and Leipzig—Brahms and Widmann at Mannheim—Second Symphony—Vienna and Leipzig differ as to its merits.
A journey to Holland early in 1876 brought unmixed gratification to the master. He conducted the Haydn Variations, and played the D minor Concerto at Utrecht on January 22 before an audience which received him with warm greeting, and gave every possible evidence of appreciation of his works. Immense applause followed each movement of the concerto, and at its close, when enthusiasm was at its height, two youthful ladies advanced to the platform, each bearing a cushion on which a wreath was placed, one decorated with ribbons of the Austrian colours (black and yellow), the other with those of Holland (red, white, and blue), which they smilingly presented to the composer. Brahms, not always inclined to receive tributes of the kind with urbanity, entered thoroughly into the happy spirit of this occasion, and showed plainly by his manner of accepting the compliment his pleasure at the charming way in which it had been offered. He was the guest during his several days' stay at Utrecht of Professor and Frau Engelmann, in whose house he at once became at home, dividing his time between walking, talking, playing with the children, making music with his hostess, seeing friends, and was in genial mood throughout the visit. It may be remarked en passant that Brahms in a companionable frame of mind was not accustomed to let his friends off easily. His constitution was so robust, his spirit so active, his interests so numerous, that he liked, and expected others to like, to sit up talking with vivacity until the small hours of the morning, and would rise after about five hours' rest as unwearied and energetic as though he had had what would be for most people a normal amount of repose. It was a matter of course wherever he stayed that the means for making a cup of coffee should be left every night at his disposal for the next morning, and he generally returned from an early walk at about the hour when the household was beginning to stir.
After leaving Holland the master took part as conductor and pianist in concerts at Münster, where he directed the Triumphlied, Mannheim and Wiesbaden, playing the D minor Concerto on each occasion. He was, of course, the guest at Münster of Grimm and his wife. At Mannheim he stayed with his friend the well-known capellmeister Ernst Frank, who in the course of his career was associated as conductor with the musical life of Würzburg, Vienna, Mannheim, and Hanover. The Wiesbaden concert is still vividly remembered by the present Landgraf of Hesse, who, then a young lad, heard Brahms for the first time on the occasion, and received an impression which laid the foundation of his enduring enthusiasm for the master's art.
Staying in the summer at Sassnitz in the Isle of Rügen, Brahms there completed his third String Quartet in B flat major, and announced the work in September to Professor Engelmann, to whom it is dedicated. It was played in Berlin before a private audience towards the end of October by the Joachim Quartet party, and by the same artists for the first time in public at their concert of October 30 in the hall of the Singakademie, on both occasions from the manuscript. The first concert performance after publication was that of the Hellmesberger party on November 30 in Vienna.
The general remarks offered in the preceding chapter on Brahms' chamber music for strings are to be applied to the Quartet in B flat major. Of its particular characteristics we may note the joyousness of the first movement, and the weird fantastic pathos of the third, in which a special relation is maintained between the viola and first violin. In the theme—of distinguished simplicity—and variations, with which the work closes, we have a concise but beautiful example of the composer's facility in this form.
The String Quartet in B flat was the first of the three composed by Brahms to be heard at the Popular Concerts, London. It was played on Monday, February 19, and Saturday, March 3, 1877, by Joachim, Ries, Straus, and Piatti. The A minor was performed on Monday, October 31, 1881, by Straus, Ries, Zerbini, and Piatti, and the C minor on Monday, December 7, 1855, by Madame Norman-Néruda, Ries, Straus, and Franz Néruda. These (Op. 51, Nos. 1 and 2) were not immediately repeated.
The great event of the year 1876 in the career of Brahms was the appearance of the long looked for symphony. As in the case of the Schicksalslied and the completed Triumphlied, the composer chose to produce his work for the first time at Carlsruhe, preferring, maybe, to test it for his own satisfaction in the comparative privacy of a small audience before submitting it to the searching ordeal of performance in either of the great musical centres of the Continent. The musical life of Carlsruhe had suffered sadly by the departure of Levi in 1872, and it was not until the appointment of Dessoff to the post of court capellmeister, on his resignation of his duties in Vienna in 1875, that the city began to regain some of its former artistic prestige. The performance on November 4, 1876, from the manuscript, of Brahms' first Symphony by the grand ducal orchestra under Dessoff, in the composer's presence, was a musical event that revived the recollections of a brilliant past, and added a new and abiding distinction to the artistic traditions of the small capital.
The work was heard a few days later in Mannheim, and on the 15th of the month in Munich; on both occasions under the composer's direction. Four other performances from the manuscript quickly followed—in Vienna (Gesellschaft), December 17, in Leipzig, January 18, and Breslau, January 23, 1877, in each case under the composer, and in Cambridge, March 8, 1877, under Joachim's direction.
The Symphony in C minor, whose appearance marks the period of Brahms' achievement in the highest domain of absolute music, and the last that remained to him for conquest, is in the first place remarkable from the fact that it cannot properly be ranged beside the works in the same form produced by either of the two masters who were, chronologically speaking, his immediate predecessors. By its accomplishment, no less than by its aim, it must be regarded as the immediate successor to the symphonies of Beethoven in the same sense as these were the direct descendants of the symphonies of Mozart and Haydn, and it establishes Brahms' right to be accepted in its own domain as the heir, par excellence, of one and all of these masters. This alone were much. Still more important, however, is the fact that our composer has known how to graft upon the symphony form inherited from Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn, the giant stock of Bach's learning and resource, studied and absorbed by him until they had become a part of his own artistic individuality, in such a manner as to revivify it root and branch, and make it a supple instrument in his hand, not for the mechanical imitation of what had been done before him, but for the 'highest ideal musical expression of his own time.'[51] Few who listen with quickened ears to an adequate performance of the C minor Symphony can be in doubt that whilst in outward form and manner of construction it may be regarded as at once the epitome and the latest result of the past history of classical instrumental art, it is in spirit representative of its own time and even anticipatory of the future; that it not only reflects the soul of the musician, poet, and philosopher, but is suggestive of the higher vision of the prophet. It is this fact, for those who accept it as a fact, that constitutes the highest significance of Brahms' first symphony, and lends a real meaning to Bülow's well-known apophthegm of 'the three B's': Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms.
The shrill, clashing dissonances of the first introduction at once place the listener in the atmosphere of stern grandeur, passion, mystery, that surround, not this or that human life, but existence itself, in its apprehension by human intelligence; and the allegro to which it leads seems to the present writer to present as near an analogy as art can show to the processes of nature, built up as it is—first and second subjects and their treatment—from a few notes; from what one of the Vienna critics called 'mere twigs of thematic material'; from germs which are produced and reproduced, are transformed and reformed, and developed into a great organic whole instinct with noble, living melody. The solemnly fervent andante sostenuto, the graceful, innocent allegretto with its sufficiently contrasted trio, afford the mind the refreshment of change of tone after the stormy splendour of the first movement; but the note of tragedy is resumed with the first sounds of the wonderful adagio that precedes, and essentially contains, the allegro of the fourth movement. Here, for some twenty-eight bars, the tension of feeling increases till destiny itself seems to be held in suspense; then, with the resolution of a chromatic chord, the horn sounds the unexpected major third of the key in a six-four of the tonic triad, and, continuing its strange, passionate cry, gradually disperses the mists of doubt and apprehension that have held the hearer as in a thrall, and carries him forward to the sublimity of joy that dwells in the final allegro.