jul 1, 1876 - Symphony No. 1

Description:

Written for over a decade.

The symphony had certainly taken Brahms a long time to complete. After his unsuccessful attempt to write one in the mid-1850s, the project had languished. In the summer of 1862 he had tried again and had been able to show friends his first full-fledged symphonic movement; after some further revisions and the later addition of a slow introduction, it became the first movement of the First Symphony. Yet once again Brahms set the symphony project aside. Encouraged by the response to the Haydn Variations, he returned to it in the summer of 1874, resuming work not with the next movement in order of performance but, rather, with the finale. It was only when the outer movememtns were in place that he quickly filled in the middle movements, an Andante sostenuto in an ABA form, with an agitated middle section, and an Un poco allegretto e grazioso, which, like most of Brahms's third movements, functions as a brief interlude.

In C Minor, referencing Beethoven 5. Also allusions to Schumann's Manfred, Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, and Beethoven 9. A high level of allusion was a regular fixture in Brahms. These subtleties were typically intended for insiders, not for general listener. His music was as laden with symbolism as Beethoven's Ninth itself, but unlike the works of the New Germans it contained no built-in decoder key, no public aids to interpretation, and hence no single message.

It did not take long for critical debates to arise about whether his symphonies were truly orchestral or rather more like blown-up chamber music, which was the Wagnerian view espoused in attempts to diminish Brahms' accomplishment.

In his First Symphony, Brahms was contending not just with Beethoven's Fifth in C Minor. One of the most contentious points between the New Germans and their opponents was the historical status of the Ninth Symphony. Wagner had notoriously called it, in suitably religious terms, the "redemtpion of Music from out of her own peculiar element into the realm of universal art," and "the human evangel of the art of the future." In other words, Beethoven's union of music and text, of vocal and symphonic media in the last movement, closed the door on the further development of abstract instrumental music. Lisztian program music and Wagnerian synthesis, the Gesamtkunstwerk, were the inevitable future for music.

Brahms's response was to revisit the finale of the Ninth and cast it as a non-programmatic and purely instrumental work. Thus, Brahms's First Symphony is goal oriented; that is, its destination is the fourth movement, which opens with a slow, minor-key introduction. This Adagio has a solemn opening phrase that turns out to be a foreshadowing of the main theme of the movement played in ultraslow motion and at a very high register. The music accelerates and grows increasingly turbulent; it is not clear where all this is heading until a dramatic timpani roll is sounded, and the tonality shifts from minor to major. Commentators have employed many metaphors for the moment when a majestic alphorn theme sounds forth, like the sun breaking through the clouds. Brahms had written this pastoral theme years earlier and included it in a birthday greeting he sent to Clara; it may well have carried some personal meaning between them. In the birthday greeting it has words that pparody old German folk songs: "High in the mountains, deep in teh valley, I greet you a thousandfold!" The alphorn theme is followed by another kind of emblem, this time a religious one, when a choir of trombones, horns, and bassoons intones a choralelike theme.


By alluding to Beethoven's joy theme but omitting the voices and words, Brahms seemed to be correcting what he felt was teh wrong turn Beethoven had taken half a century before. What Wagner had interpreted one way, Brahms took completely differently. Brahms's friend, the musicologist Friedrich Chrysander, argued that, far from being the "weak and impotent imitation" the New Germans were calling it, Brahms had created "a counterpart to the last sections of the Ninth Symphony that achieves the same effect in nature and intensity without calling on the assistance of song." This alone was enough to show that Brahms's attitude toward tradtiion was not merely reverential or unimaginatively derivative but active, participatory, and anything but uncritical. In Chrysander's words, he had "led the way back from teh symphony that mixes playing and singing to the purely instrumental symphony," ending the eclipse of the latter genre and restorign its historical validity. As we shall see, teh subsequent history of the genre confirmed his success.

Added to timeline:

Date: