What Bülow actually set down in words was this: “First after my acquaintance with the Tenth Symphony, alias Symphony No. 1, by Johannes Brahms, that is since six weeks ago, have I become so intractable and so hard against Bruch pieces and the like. I call Brahms’s first symphony the Tenth, not as though it should be put after the Ninth; I should put it between the Second and the ‘Eroica,’ just as I think by the First Symphony should be understood not the First of Beethoven but the one composed by Mozart which is known as the ‘Jupiter’.”
Symphony in D Major, No. 2, Op. 73
Having launched a first symphony, Brahms composed a second within a year. However, he kept the writing of it so secret that nobody, we are told, knew anything about it till it was completed. Then, when he did divulge the secret, he was very demure. In September, 1877, he wrote to Dr. Billroth of Vienna, who was a patron of music as well as an eminent surgeon: “I do not know whether I have a pretty symphony; I must inquire of skilled persons.” He meant Clara Schumann, Otto Dessoff, and Ernest Frank. Mme. Schumann recorded on September 19 that he had written out the first movement. Early in the following month he played it to her, as well as part of the finale.
Meanwhile he had delighted in mystifying his friends before letting them hear any of the work by describing it as gloomy and awesome and referring to its key as F minor instead of D major. To Elisabeth von Herzogenberg he wrote in November, 1877: “The new symphony is merely a Sinfonie, and I shall not need to play it to you beforehand. You have only to sit down at the piano, put your small feet on the two pedals in turn, and strike the chord of F minor several times in succession, first in the treble, then in the bass, fortissimo and pianissimo, and you will gradually gain a vivid impression of my ‘latest’.” The day before the first performance he again wrote to Frau von Herzogenberg: “The orchestra here play my new symphony with crepe bands on their sleeves because of its dirge-like effect. It is to be printed with a black edge, too.” Such were Brahms’s little jokes.
When the symphony was actually performed in public, at a concert of the Vienna Philharmonic, under the direction of Hans Richter, Brahms’s friends found it anything but a lugubrious and forbidding composition. The date of that first performance, by the way, is variously given as December 20, 24, and 30, 1877, and January 10, 1878, of which December 30 is favored. The success with the audience at the première was progressive. If at first the response was lukewarm, when the Allegretto grazioso was reached there came an insistent demand that it be repeated, an encore which Richter granted.
Today the Second Symphony is usually regarded as lyrical, suave, even Mendelssohnian, a work of serenity and sweet peacefulness, bearing much the same relation to the austere, dramatic, and often tempestuous First Symphony that Beethoven’s “Pastoral” bears to the preceding Fifth, with its conflict between Man and Fate.
Still, not everybody views the D major symphony in quite this gentle light. Walter Niemann in his life of Brahms maintains that the D major is by no means a blameless, agreeable, cheerfully sunlit idyl. Nothing, he declares, could be further from the truth! He describes the period between the 1860’s and 1880’s as having a heart-rending pathos and a monumental grandeur as its artistic ideal. “Nowadays,” he goes on, “regarding things from a freer and less prejudiced point of view, we are fortunately able to detect far more clearly the often oppressive spiritual limitations, moodiness, and atmosphere of resignation in such pleasant, apparently cheerful, and anacreontic[!] works as Brahms’s Second Symphony.”
He points out that the Second, though nominally in the major, has a veiled, indetermined, Brahmsian major-minor character, hovering between the two modes. “Indeed,” he adds, “this undercurrent of tragedy in the Second Symphony, quiet and slight though it may be, is perceptible to a fine ear in every movement.” And he sums up the whole matter by putting down the Second Symphony as really a “great, wonderful, tragic idyl, as rich in sombre and subdued color as it is in brightness.” He even sees mysterious visions of Wagner, who was by no means a friend of Brahms, in the mystic woodland atmosphere of the work, recalling “Das Rheingold” and “Siegfried,” and in many sombre and even ghostly passages.
The opening movement (Allegro non troppo, D major, 3-4) is remarkable for the lyricism of its themes. After the so-called fundamental motive of the first measure (’cellos and double-basses), the melodious chief theme is given out by horns and woodwind.
