Notes for: July 21, 2021
To Wagner, Brahms was a traditionalist whose music belonged to the past. To Schoenberg, he was a progressive whose innovations influenced Schoenberg’s own musical ideas. In a way, both were right. Brahms’s reputation as a traditionalist and a conservative came from his championing the music of Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, and from his use of traditional Classical structures in his own music. What he did within those structures, however, was another story. While he understood traditional sonata form, he was innovative in his treatment of it. As Jan Swafford notes, “A Brahmsian movement is often made of succinct melodic ideas that begin to transform as soon as we hear them, and continue to evolve and recombine throughout, accompanied by the sort of abrupt key changes that used to be confined to the development section.” This is the technique that an admiring Schoenberg named “developing variation,” and that Brahms uses in the A Major Piano Quartet.
The first movement of this lyrical and expansive Quartet gives a good sense of how the technique works. Instead of traditional thematic development, Brahms develops a wealth of motives incrementally and in complex relationships. Brahms opens with a striking two-part thematic statement: The piano begins a gentle, irregular motive, in triplets, which the cello answers with a flowing phrase in eighth notes. The strings repeat the triplet motive, immediately after which these two ideas begin evolving harmonically and melodically. Meanwhile, the two contrasting meters – triplets against eighth notes – play out against each other throughout the sonata-form movement.
The beautiful second movement shows Brahms’s affection for Schumann. Tranquil, at times ardent, and melodically rich throughout, the Adagio is striking for its long, arching piano themes, the muted sonorities of the strings, and especially the strange, somewhat ominous arpeggios that twice interrupt the melodic flow before closing the movement. Brahms next presents a Scherzo that is surprisingly light and amiable, although the minor-key trio, which opens with a fiery canon, is made of sterner stuff. The vivacious Finale is marked by exuberant, Hungarian-style themes that sweep the music to a joyful conclusion. It is marked, too, by a continuation of rhythmic irregularities. At the start of the movement, for instance, Brahms seems to be having a good time disguising where the beat falls. This playing with meter is another element that increasingly will become a distinguishing feature of Brahms’s musical style.