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: