After a trio in D major, the first part is repeated, but much altered.
The third movement (Andante, B-flat major, 6-4) opens with an expressive melody, given first to a solo ’cello (an instrument that has a particularly important part in this movement), which resembles Brahms’s song “Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer,” not written, however, till 1886. A second melody, introduced by piano and clarinet in F sharp, recalls another song by Brahms, “Todessehnen,” written in 1878. The first melody comes back in the ’cello and dominates the coda, against trills and arpeggios in the piano.
The finale (Allegretto grazioso, B flat major, 2-4) is a rondo on a grand scale, the first of whose three themes follows:
Symphony in F Major, No. 3, Op. 90
Brahms finished the third of his symphonies at Wiesbaden in the summer of 1883. In October he returned to Vienna with the completed score, which he immediately took to Hans Richter, by that time the conductor of nearly everything in Vienna. Richter brought it out at a Philharmonic Concert on December 2. The reception was mixed. Though Brahms’s adherents applauded fervently, groups of Wagnerian followers of Anton Bruckner and Hugo Wolf were there to hiss, and hiss they did! It remains for Berlin, where Joachim conducted the second performance of it anywhere at an Academy Concert on January 4, 1884, to bestow the “unqualified approval” that Brahms had written Hans von Bülow he desired.
Such was the enthusiasm in Berlin that Brahms himself conducted two more performances of the symphony there later in the month, and he also conducted it successfully at Wiesbaden on January 18. The triumph of triumphs, however, came at Meiningen on February 4, when Bülow actually led the work twice through at the same concert, and the repetition won an even greater ovation than the first performance. Before the year 1884 was out the Third Symphony had been performed in many places on the Continent, in England, and in the United States, and always with acclaim. Yet it annoyed Brahms that many critics should pronounce this symphony by far the best of his compositions. Expectations that he feared would not be fulfilled were thus aroused, for Brahms, with all his background of achievement, had in his nature a streak of incorrigible modesty.
The adjective “heroic” has often been associated with the Third Symphony of Brahms, as in its Italian form “eroica,” it is attached to the Third Symphony of Beethoven. Indeed, Richter, in a toast, christened this symphony, while it was still in manuscript, Brahms’s “Eroica.” Hanslick, though concurring with Richter, points out that the heroic quality is limited to the first and the last movements. This “heroic” element, however, “is without any warlike flavor; it leads to no tragic action, such as the Funeral March in Beethoven’s ‘Eroica.’ It recalls in its musical character the healthy and full vigor of Beethoven’s second period, and nowhere the singularities of his last period; and every now and then in passages quivers the romantic twilight of Schumann and Mendelssohn.”