Johannes Brahms: The Complete Works for Solo Piano, Vol. 4
Piano pieces op. 76 · Two Rhapsodies op. 79
Fantasies op. 116
Andreas Boyde, pianoAndreas Boyde knows all about the dangers of “effective”
Brahms recording: cheap showmanship, an excess
of sentimentality and falsely understood “heaviness”
too often kill the musical substance of Brahms’ music.
Andreas Boyde’s approach could not be farther from
this: his interpretations do not avail themselves of
Brahms-clichés but fascinatingly reveal the structures
of the composer’s works, enabling the soul of Brahms’
musical world to resound in the most natural manner
possible.
„Brahms’s return to solo piano works:
Op. 76, Op. 79 and Op. 116
Idyllic rural locations in the summer had a
catalytic effect on Brahms as a composer;
the lack of urban distractions and the beauty
of his surroundings stimulated extraordinary
productivity, and he would return to Vienna in
time for autumn with numerous items ready
for publication. In 1877–79, he summered in
Pörtschach am Wörthersee, in Carinthia. This
particular three-year period saw the completion
of his Second Symphony, the violin concerto
for Joseph Joachim and also the G major
Violin Sonata. It also saw the completion of the
Op. 76 Acht Klavierstücke [Tracks 1–8] in 1878
and, the following year, the Op. 79 Zwei Rhapsodien
[Tracks 9–10] for solo piano.
The completion of Op. 76 represented
Brahms’ return to solo piano music after a
gap of fifteen years. It is difficult to know why
Brahms published no solo piano works between
1863 and 1878, namely after the Op. 35 Paganini
Variations. These fifteen years were crucial
ones in professional terms; they witnessed
Brahms’s transformation from a rather awkward
and virtually unknown figure into a composer
of tremendous reputation who had proved his
might across all genres with the exception of
opera, a lion within European musical circles.
Certainly Brahms wrote large amounts of music
involving the piano in this period, including
his extremely popular waltzes and also sizable
chamber works; but given the sheer quantity of
solo piano music from his younger, pre-Viennese
days (and the fact that he was still a performing
pianist to some extent), the eschewal of the
genre for such a long period is noticeable.
Following the interruption, it is clear that
Brahms had thoroughly rethought his conception
of solo piano music. While many
elements of his compositional style remain
recognizable from the ‘virtuoso’ days, the later
piano works, Op. 76 to the final Op. 119 are
not only more intimate in tone, but also much
smaller in scale, as if the expressive intention
of each piece has been highly concentrated.
The scholar Karl Geiringer suggested that this
turning away from a large-scale, orchestral
mode of writing was at least in part because
of Brahms’s decreasing technical ability as a
pianist; however it is important to note that
these pieces are shorter without necessarily
being much easier. Certainly, accounts of
Brahms’s own playing, particularly later in
life, stress not his virtuosity or accuracy, but
his expressivity (a friend, Richard Heuberger
particularly recalled the deeply moving, intimate
quality of his playing.) The pianist and
composer Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, one of
Brahms’s dearest friends and traditionally one
of his most acute critics, was utterly charmed
by these new works when Brahms played
some of them to her on a visit in September
1878. While Brahms’s sonatas and variation
sets tend to be admired, it is through the
‘small’ piano works that most pianists come to
Brahms and develop their love of his music.
In itself, the writing of small piano works
was common during the nineteenth century
– one need only think of Schumann’s famous
collections such as Carnaval, or Chopin’s
Nocturnes, or Grieg’s Lyric Suite, Schubert’s
Moments Musicaux or even Beethoven’s late
Bagatelles. But Brahms had not written piano
miniatures since his Op. 10 Ballades. It has
been suggested by Brahms’s first biographer
and friend Max Kalbeck that Brahms’s concurrent
work on the Schumann and Chopin Complete
Editions inspired both the small scale and
the intensely lyrical tone of the piano pieces,
but the range of styles encompassed in Op. 76
also bear witness to Brahms’s familiarity with
and love of Schubert and the much earlier
composer François Couperin. Hence, the set
functions almost like a catalogue of historical
styles in smaller-scale piano writing: one can
hear echoes of Schubert’s well-known F minor
Moment musical in the delightful intermezzo
Op. 76 No. 2; the scholar Denis Matthews has
pointed out the affinity between Op. 76 No. 4
and Couperin’s Les Baricades Mystérieuses;
Op. 76 No. 7 recalls the melody of Chopin’s
Nocturne in F minor, Op. 55 No. 1, and in Op. 76
No. 6, Brahms even quotes himself, recalling
a melody from one of his most popular sets
of miniatures, the Op. 52 Liebeslieder-Walzer,
specifically No. 17 Nicht wandle, mein Licht.
Never had Brahms’s profound knowledge of
musical literature borne such rich and varied
fruit on such a small branch.
A different approach is taken in the Op. 79
Rhapsodies, which are dedicated to Elisabeth
von Herzogenberg. These works are on a
larger scale and much more unified in their
tragic tone. In January 1880 Brahms premiered
the Rhapsodies from manuscript at a concert
dedicated to his own works that included
the Second Symphony, the Triumphlied, and
the Alt-Rhapsodie. In describing this concert,
Max Kalbeck (Brahms’s first biographer) points
out that Brahms used, at that stage, the title
Caprice for the works. If the title of caprice
was interchangeable with rhapsodie, what,
indeed, is to be inferred from Brahms’s titles at
all? It was wholly alien to his nature to use programmatic
titles, hence he selected the most
non-committal names he could find. The titles
intermezzo, caprice and rhapsody have hardly
any fixed definitions or formal models, hence
Brahms could make of them what he willed.
Certainly, the title intermezzo had strong associations
with Schumann, who included many
short intermezzi in his early piano works, and
had also composed six larger-scale intermezzi
in his Op. 4, not to forget the poetic source of
his beloved song-cycle Dichterliebe, Heinrich
Heine’s Lyrisches Intermezzo. Brahms himself
used the title in his Op. 5 Piano Sonata, in
which an intermezzo precedes the finale, and
also for the slow movement of his Op. 25 Piano
Quartet. The caprice has strongest associations
with fiendishly difficult solo violin writing
(Paganini’s twenty-four Caprices are the most
famous example), although virtuoso pianists
also used the title for their showpieces. In both
cases, Brahms retains some aspect of the older
usage (slower tempi for the intermezzi, greater
technical difficulty for the caprices). However,
Brahms gives new significance to these
titles, recasting the intermezzo and caprice as
opposing partners in which the former is lyrical,
the latter more agitato, but both share an
intensely expressive and emotional world.
Brahms similarly recast the rhapsody genre;
this was typically a loosely-structured singlemovement
work with some folk-character,
e.g. Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, or Dvor?ák’s
Slavonic Rhapsodies. Brahms retained only
the idea of a larger-scale single-movement
form with no defined structure (something he
had done previously with the Alto-Rhapsody
op. 53) – but there is no question of the structure
being loose. When he wrote to Elisabeth
von Herzogenberg proposing the title of Rhapsody
for these pieces, her reply revealed her
sympathy with Brahms’s desire to conceal
his intentions: ‘I am always most partial to
the non-committal word Klavierstücke, just
because it is non-committal; but probably that
won’t do, in which case the name Rhapsodien
is best, although the clearly defined form of
both pieces seems somewhat at variance with
one’s conception of a rhapsody.’
Despite the shared titles of intermezzi and
caprices between Op. 76 and Op. 116 [Tracks
11–17], the latter actually belong more to a final
group of piano works together with Opp. 117-119
which appeared from November 1892 onwards.
Op. 116 was, once again, composed mainly over
a summer, but this time in Ischl (an Austrian
spa town) in the summer of 1892. Unlike Op. 76,
this set is far more coherent and connected;
apart from something of a family resemblance
between the thematic material of each piece
(an insistence on falling thirds in the caprices,
the use of motion in seconds tying together the
intermezzi), the pieces are all in closely related
keys of A, E, D and G, and overwhelmingly in
the minor mode. Also, the emphasis has shifted;
while Op. 76 is evenly split between slow and
fast pieces, the balance in the seven pieces that
constitute Op. 116 tips more towards the lyrical.
While much of this essay has focussed on
what has changed in Brahms’s piano writing,
one key element has remained the same –
the underlying principle of varying thematic
material. So while Brahms never wrote a
variation set for piano after 1863, all of these
late works contain variations, reworkings
and reassemblings of their thematic material,
generating a musical prose which is characteristically
Brahmsian. That said, the perception
of Brahms’s outstanding compositional
technique is emphatically secondary to the
overwhelming mood of intimacy; these works,
while they may impress, are written in order
to move. Richard Heuberger felt that with
these pieces, Brahms had moved from the
‘fresco’ to the ‘miniature’, from writing music
of breadth to music of depth. Even though
these late works are ‘smaller’, their thematic
material is used with so much precision and
economy that the resultant musical forms are
compressed into the smallest dimensions,
concentrating the emotional impact to the
utmost. In all his works, early or late, for piano
or for other media, one is reminded of a quotation
Brahms copied as a young man into the
compendia of sayings and aphorisms entitled
Young Kreisler’s Treasure-Chest; a quotation
from Johann Gottfried Herder which declares:
‘Everything is transformed, nothing dies. In
beautiful transformation, loss becomes gain.’
Natasha Loges