Notes for: August 7, 2007
Brahms and his mother were unusually close. As a boy in Hamburg, while his father was earning a living as a performing musician in the city’s waterfront taverns, Johannes’s mother Christiane managed the house. A cultured and educated woman, she introduced the boy to German literature and Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible. And after he left home to pursue his career as a musician, her teachings remained with him, and they maintained a warm and loving correspondence.
In February, 1865, now a resident of Vienna, Brahms received a telegram from his brother urging him to return immediately to Hamburg if he wanted to say goodbye to his dying mother. She died before he could reach her bedside, and he went into an extended period of depression. To regain his peace of mind, he decided to spend the month of May at Baden-Baden, a resort in Germany’s Black Forest. There, in a room that, in Brahms’s words, “looks out on three sides at the dark, wooded mountains, the roads winding up and down them, and the pleasant houses,” he wrote the hauntingly beautiful Horn Trio.
A trio for violin, horn and piano was without precedent. Mozart, Beethoven and Schumann had written chamber works involving the horn, but no one previously had substituted the horn for the more agile cello in one of the three equal parts of a piano trio. And yet what gives this trio its character is its “rightness” for the horn – after hearing the trio once, we can conceive of no other instrument in the horn’s role. In fact, to increase the work’s commercial appeal, Brahms published it with the cello as an optional alternative to the horn, but he liked that alternative no more than would we.
Much of the explanation lies in Brahms’s resourceful exploitation of the horn’s characteristic weightiness of tone. In addition, there are good acoustical reasons why the trio is uniquely horn music. Brahms wrote the work, not for the modern valve horn, but for its predecessor, the natural horn or waldhorn. The valve horn, invented earlier in the 19th century, is, as we shall explain, far more versatile than the natural horn, but by 1865 it had not yet attained the natural horn’s beauty of tone.
The natural horn can play in full tone only 16 notes – for the technically minded, the harmonic series of the instrument’s fundamental key. Moreover, these notes are not spaced equally over the instrument’s range; the lower pitches are further apart, and the notes become closer as the instrument ascends the scale. The performer can sound additional intervening notes by inserting his hand in the bell of the horn shortening the air column, but these “stopped” notes have a muffled tone. The valve horn, in contrast, can play the full chromatic range without noticeable variation in the tone quality.
Long before the valve horn was developed, the “open” notes of the natural horn became the basis for traditional horn calls, and we still make that association. Brahms, of course, emphasized these “open” notes in the themes of his trio, and judiciously assigned the “stopped” notes subordinate roles. This disposition gave the themes, and the music as a whole, a “horn call” quality, as demonstrated by the first theme of the first movement.
Further, a horn player sounds his instrument by vibrating his lips and raises the pitch by increasing lip tension. This increased lip tension also increases emotional intensity, and Brahms fully understood and used this correlation. Significantly, in Brahms’s trio the horn reaches the upper end of its range, a high E flat, only at two dramatic moments – at the climax of the adagio second movement and in the coda of the finale.
The trio opens with the only first movement in Brahms’s chamber music that is not in sonata form – apparently, the composer thought the horn unsuited to the demands of rigorous thematic development. Instead, the movement follows an A-B-A-B-A pattern. Brahms told a friend that the “A” theme occurred to him “on wooded heights among fir trees,” and the mellowness of the music suggests his woodland reflection. The “B” section is more animated for contrast. The first two “A’s” begin and end in the tonic E flat, but the third “A” takes on a magical quality by stating the theme pianissimo in the remote key of G flat (six flats).
The scherzo uses the added weight of the horn for a marvelous touch. About half-way through the main section, the vigorous theme, initially in equal quarter notes, is repeated with every third note extended a full additional measure – that is, four beats instead of one. The middle section features the horn in a characteristically Brahmsian sweet-sad interlude.
The third movement is an intense adagio, and Brahms’s friends and biographers suggest that he may have intended it as an elegy for his mother. It again follows an A-B-A-B-A pattern. The music rises to the trio’s climax in the third statement of “A.” However, listen for the wonderful passage in the second “B” where the theme temporarily gives way to a “pre-echo,” in slow tempo, of the do-re-mi-so fanfare theme of the finale.
With the finale, Brahms relaxes the tension. In contrast to the underlying seriousness of the first three movements, the music here is in rollicking 6/8 meter, with the horn clearly recalling its traditional role in the hunt.
Notes for: July 17, 2018
The melody that opens the Horn Trio came to Brahms during a leisurely early-morning walk in the Black Forest, near Baden-Baden, in the summer of 1865. For years it was Brahms’s habit to spend the spring and summer months combining vacation with work, buoyed by pleasant company and the beauties of nature. This particular spring, however, his pleasure was tempered by sadness over the recent death of his mother.
Not surprisingly, the Trio is a memorial for his mother. Beyond that, one of the instruments Brahms chose - the valveless Waldhorn, or natural horn - had strong childhood associations. His musician father had played it, and as a child Brahms had learned to play it too. Although horn players were turning to the new, valved French horn, Brahms was much fonder of the darker, more muted sounds of the natural horn and preferred that it be used in performances of the Trio. “I would be apprehensive about hearing it with the valve horn," Brahms wrote to a friend. "All poetry is lost, and the timbre is crude and dreadful right from the start." Not surprisingly, Brahms wrote the Trio in the key of E-Flat, the Waldhorn’s natural key.
The Horn Trio is a marvelous blend of elegy, nostalgia, and high spirits. Brahms was as usual breaking musical ground. The very combination of instruments was a striking departure from the expected violin-cello-piano scoring. It was the first and only time, too, that Brahms wrote a chamber piece whose first movement is not in sonata form. Rather, it is an Andante that, with its ABABA pattern, moves leisurely away from and back to the gentle, somewhat melancholic theme that opens the work. The second movement is a robust Scherzo, with typically Brahmsian rhythmic inventiveness and darker hints in the minor-key trio section. The full weight of Brahms’s mourning for his mother arrives with the elegiac third movement, whose mood Brahms makes explicit in his tempo marking: Adagio mesto (“sad adagio”). But it is a gentle sadness, in keeping with the spirit of the early movements. In another nod to the past, Brahms links this movement to the next with a German folk tune that his mother had sung to him. The tune appears at the end of the Adagio and then, speeded up, becomes the theme of the exuberant Finale. The clouds lift in this irresistible closing movement, as the three instruments merrily let loose and the Waldhorn indulges in cheerful hunting calls.
Brahms was the pianist for the Trio’s premiere in December 1865, and in the following years he performed it many more times. But despite his wishes, the obsolescent natural horn rarely became the horn of choice for performers.