Symphony No. 4 in E Minor, Op. 98                                    Johannes Brahms

Johannes Brahms was born on May 7, 1833 in Hamburg and died in Vienna on April 3, 1897. One of the dominant composers of the late nineteenth century, Brahms greatly enriched the repertory for piano, organ, chamber music, chorus, and orchestra. His Symphony no. 4 was composed in the summers of 1884 and 1885 in the Alpine village of Mürzzuschlag. It is scored for 2 flutes, piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets,3 trombones, timpani, triangle, and strings.

            Brahms’s final symphony marks not only the culmination of his career as a symphonist, but stands as a monument near the end of a century, looking back with nostalgia at a nearly two-hundred year old tradition. This is, of course, a rather imposing posture for a symphony, but this work is imposing from virtually every standpoint. When one considers the anguish and confusion that was entering German and Austrian culture at the fin de siècle, is it surprising that Brahms, a staunch defender of musical absolutism would view his world in essentially tragic terms?  Only a composer with great fortitude and skill would dare compose a four-movement “classical” symphony in a post-Wagnerian world that seemed to reject a work of this kind. Brahms, however, remained true to his aesthetic. His Fourth Symphony is a work of tremendous power that reconciles old forms with new harmonic thought.

            The formal tools used by Brahms in this work are telling. Each of the first three movements contains elements of traditional sonata form. The finale reflects the composer’s continuing fascination with the music of Bach (Brahms was one of the original editors of the first edition of the complete works of Bach) in returning to the Baroque passacaglia, a form that involves the presentation of an eight-measure theme that is worked out in continuous variations.  Brahms’s passacaglia, marked Allegro energico e passionato, presents a sharply profiled theme in triple meter (typical of Baroque passacaglias) that rises in step-wise fashion and ends with a cadential formula. This theme is then followed by thirty variations and a coda. The variations themselves are carefully crafted to fall into three larger divisions. The first of these divisions enfolds eleven variations, some of which (variations eight and nine) use another Baroque device called bariolage, whereby the violins rapidly move their bows across two strings. The second division (variations twelve to fifteen) begins with a highly expressive flute solo. The listener may sense here that the tempo has slowed by half, but this is only an illusion. Brahms simply has changed to meter in such a way as to have one measure become the equivalent of two (i.e., three-four meter becomes three-two). After some chorale-like variations featuring the horns and trombones, the original meter is restored in variation sixteen as the onset of the third overall division of the movement. Fifteen new variations ensue as a kind of recapitulation, followed by a coda, in which the tempo does, indeed, increase.

Space does not permit a similarly close reading of all the movements of this magnificent work. There is one particularly Wagnerian moment in the first movement, that strikes the author of these program notes. This comes at the onset of the movement’s recapitulation, in which the opening theme’s time values are elongated, with the end of each phrase punctuated by a mysterious rising figure. Is it possible that Brahms was evoking here the opening gesture from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods)? Another special moment comes in the symphony’s second movement, where the theme contains haunting and moody shifts between the antique phrygian mode and its parallel major and minor keys. Also noteworthy is the fine use of the French horn throughout the work, as well as the pervasive aura of tragedy and heroism. The exciting third movement in C Major with its addition of the bright timbre of the triangle is an example of the latter spirit, but this movement’s brevity and placement cannot overshadow the work’s darker side, the immense passacaglia-finale being the truer representation of this symphony’s essential nature.

Notes by David B. Levy © 2011/2025