Notes for: August 3, 2010
In 1890, Brahms announced to his friends that he was giving up musical composition. Although only 57, he now found the task of composition exhausting, and he feared that his declining physical strength might impair his creative faculties. However, a visit to the German city of Meiningen the following March persuaded him to postpone his retirement – he never fully retired – and led instead to one of his most haunting works, his Clarinet Quintet.
Although a small city, Meiningen had one of the finest court orchestras in Europe, and Brahms went there occasionally to hear his works played. In 1891, he was impressed by the unusually beautiful playing of the principal clarinetist, Richard Mühlfeld. Mühlfeld had joined the orchestra in 1873 as a violinist, but after teaching himself to play the clarinet, he had become one of the most accomplished clarinetists in Europe. Brahms was so awed by both Mühlfeld’s artistry and the musical possibilities of the clarinet that he decided to write some chamber music for the artist and his instrument.
During the summer, consequently, while vacationing at Ischl near Salzburg, Brahms produced two works for Mühlfeld – the Trio in A Minor, Op. 114, and this quintet. As expected, the first performance of the quintet took place at Meiningen in November, the artists being Mühlfeld and the string quartet led by Brahms’s friend, Joseph Joachim. The same artists gave the first public performance in Berlin in December, and then played the quintet with great success in several other European countries. Encouraged by this reception, Brahms in 1895 produced two more works for Mühlfeld – sonatas for clarinet and piano, Op. 120.
By general consensus, the quintet is one of the two greatest works in chamber music for clarinet and strings, the other being the Mozart Clarinet Quintet. Both works strike a perfect balance between providing virtuoso display opportunities for the clarinet and blending the instrument with its stringed colleagues to produce a variety of texture and tone color. In addition, the Brahms quintet has the sweet-sad quality that we often hear in the late music of Brahms, and the closing pages rival those of the Third Symphony in their sunset beauty.
The first movement opens with four measures for the strings that are notable for two reasons. First, the music is deliberately vague in tonality – it can be either D major or B minor – and the B minor is not fully established until after the clarinet enters in the fifth bar. Second, each of the first two measures, in 6/8 time, contains a sequence of a dotted half-note and six 16th notes, all in thirds. This pattern is to be important not only throughout the first movement but also in the fourth. It crops up in the second movement as well. Note also the staccato figure in the strings that leads to the second theme played by the clarinet. In the development, this figure will be turned into a march quasi sostenuto (almost sustained).
The melody of the second movement is presented by the clarinet accompanied by muted strings and pulled along by gentle syncopation. A clarinet cadenza ushers in a highly rhapsodic middle section, piu lento (more slowly), in which the same theme is ornamented with florid arabesques by the clarinet and offset by rich tremolos and harmonies in the strings. “It is unlike anything else in classical music,” comments the British musicologist Donald Francis Tovey, “but if one has the good fortune to hear a genuine Hungarian band whose leader happens to be a clarinetist, one will be thrilled on recognizing exactly Brahms’s treatment of the instrument here.”
The third movement opens with a short section, marked andantino (a trifle slow), in 4/4 time. The bulk of the movement, however, is a swift, scherzo-like development of this material, most of it to be played in a subdued voice.
As with Mozart, Brahms ends his Clarinet Quintet with a theme and variations. The theme contains two 16-measure sections, the second of which is repeated, and the five variations follow that general format. In the third variation, however, the second section brings in a figure of 16ths that clearly suggests the opening measures of the first movement. This reference continues in the fourth variation and is strengthened in the fifth variation by a shift in rhythm from 2/4 to 3/8. With this preparation, the coda returns to the quintet’s opening measures, adding a sense of nostalgia to the haunting sunset shading of the close.
Notes for: July 25, 2023
By 1890, Brahms had begun telling friends that he was giving up composing – he was simply having too much difficulty developing new ideas. His resolution didn’t last long, though. Like Mozart before him, he was inspired by a clarinetist to write one of his greatest works. Early in 1891 he spent a week at an arts festival in Meiningen. There he met Richard Mühlfeld, the brilliant principal clarinetist of the Meiningen orchestra. Brahms and Mühlfeld became friends, and Mühlfeld entertained Brahms with performances of many works, including the Weber Clarinet Concerto and Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet. Brahms was smitten by Mühlfeld’s exceptionally sweet tone and by the unique sound of the clarinet, with its rich three-octave range, its endless nuances of color and mood, and its huge textural palette. Inspiration began to flow once more, and that summer Brahms composed two pieces for Mühlfeld: the Clarinet Trio, op. 114, and what he called “a far greater piece of foolishness,” the magnificent B Minor Clarinet Quintet.
The Clarinet Quintet has been called Brahms’s autumnal masterpiece, the reflective work of an aging composer who is a master of his craft. “Autumnal,” however, while accurately suggesting a rueful sadness, doesn’t fully convey the rich emotional range and the energy of this expansive, tautly constructed work. While the overall mood is one of quiet nostalgia, there are many moments of urgency and passion. From its earliest measures, the first movement sets the stage for much of what will follow. It presents two of the themes that will recur in various guises throughout the four movements. It establishes an ambiguous shifting between major and minor modes that will persist throughout the Quintet. And it introduces the clarinet with a delicious, slow upward sweep that presages the riches to come. The clarinet’s ability to evoke many moods is further demonstrated in the second movement – where a sweet, calm song gives way to a floridly ornamented, Hungarian-style rhapsody – and in the third, with its flowing andantino and rhythmical presto. In the last movement Brahms turns to a favorite form, a theme and five variations, before ending with a moving coda that brings back the Quintet’s opening theme. It’s a deft summing up, with variations that are, in Jan Swafford’s words, “portraits of the clarinet in its nuances of timbre, articulation, and dynamics, ending on a dying series of chords, piercingly lonely.” Other effects add to the sense of something coming to an end. Each movement, for example, ends either piano or pianissimo, and the first movement as well as the last closes on a somber note.
Mühlfeld (whom Brahms had affectionately nicknamed “Fräulein Klarinette”) premiered the Quintet that fall in Berlin, to great acclaim.