jan 1, 1861 - Piano Quartet in G Minor, Op. 25

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Later orchestrated by Schoenberg in a ridiculous way.

One of his relatively early chamber pieces, written just before he moved back to Vienna. It looks back to Vienna's illustrious past as wel as forward to its Modernist future, in particular to thematic techniques that Arnold Schoenberg would later hail in a famous lecture called "Brahms the Progressive." Brahms cast the quartet in four mvoements: an expansive opening one; an introspective intermezzo; an Andante con moto; and a breathles Rondo alla Zingarese, that is, a rondo finale in "the Hungarian style."

Brahms's supportive critic Eduard Hanslick praised his friend as "possibly the most interesting among our contemporary composers," but he found the themes of the quartet "insignificant.. dry and prosaic." Indeed, the work generally did not have long lyrical melodies as found in Schubert or Tchaikovsky. Just as in Wagner's use of leitmotifs, Brahms built large musical entities out of small musiucal particles. Like Wagner, Brahms often created motifs rather than full-blown melodies. Sophisticated motivic elaborations and transformations were no longer limited to the development section, but were now present from teh outset, for the most part determining how the music would proceed from moment to moment. Whether one was writing opera or chamber music or symphonies, it became a crucial compositional problem during the latter part of the century to resolve the fundamental tension between "the brevity of the musical ideas and the monumentality of the formal designs," in the words of the musicologist Carl Dahlhaus.

The intricate motivic work of the G Minor Quartet begins with its opening measures in which the first is transposed in m. 5, freely inverted in mm. 2-3 and 6-8, and presented harmonically in m. 4. Schoenberg called this Brahms's technique of "Developing variation." The concentration on minute motivic relations requires active engagement and response from the listener.

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