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.