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. 3 was composed in 1883 and was first performed in Vienna on December 2 of that year with the Vienna Philharmonic under the direction of Hans Richter. The work is scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabasson, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, and strings.

The Third Symphony of Brahms is at once the shortest, simplest and the most complex of the four symphonies he composed between 1876 and 1884. The year of the composition of the Third Symphony, 1883, marked thirty years since the publication of the article, “New Paths,” that appeared in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, written by his mentor, Robert Schumann, and that touted the then twenty-year-old Brahms as the legitimate heir to Beethoven’s muse. The year was also marked by the death, on February 13, of Richard Wagner—a figure who believed that only he himself was entitled to that lofty claim. Brahms’s indebtedness to Schumann is clearly evident in the Third Symphony, which echoes Schumann’s own Symphony no. 3. Common wisdom dictated that Brahms and Wagner were representatives of two mutually exclusive artistic positions, but from musical grounds, there are compelling reasons to call this view into question.

Both Brahms and Wagner were symphonic composers grounded solidly in the nine symphonies of Beethoven. The principal difference lays in their artistic goals, but not always in the means used to attain them. Wagner focused (almost) exclusively on opera, while Brahms continued to compose symphonies, sonatas, chamber music, Lieder, choral music, and in other traditional instrumental genres. What might be identified as a Wagnerian feature in Brahms’s Third Symphony is the application of leitmotif-style techniques that serve to unify its four movements, often in a highly dramatic fashion. The most important of these motives is presented in the first three measures of the work (F, A-flat, to the F an octave higher). The influence of this motto, often identified as a cypher for Frei aber froh (“Happy, but free”), pervades the entire piece, sometimes in hidden or transformed ways, a favorite device of Wagner. Schumann, as we know, also was fond of using musical codes of this type. Interestingly, the transition from the opening theme to the second key area of the symphony’s first movement presents an unusual chord found in the “Sirens’ chorus” from Act One of Wagner’s Tannhäuser. We know that Brahms admired this opera greatly, and he even possessed its autograph manuscript for a while. It is quite possible that Brahms’s use of this chord was in memory of his deceased “rival.”

But if we permit Brahms to remain the bastion of abstract musical logic devoid of poetic text, this motto is a significant gesture for its melodic and harmonic implications- especially in the symphony’s finale. Another case is the serene second theme from the second movement. The return of the descending arpeggio theme in the finale’s coda, a musical gesture first heard in the earliest moments of the first movement serves to confirm the symphony’s cyclic nature. Another example of the work’s interconnectedness is the appearance of mysterious chords in the second movement that reappear unexpectedly and with great dramatic impact in the development section of the finale.

The true beauty of the Third Symphony is that its complexity is couched in the surroundings of the simplest and most appealing melodiousness. Brahms possessed the gift of creating tension through modal and metrical ambiguity—techniques that he learned from the study of music of Schubert and Schumann. The rhythmic complexities of this symphony are extraordinary, even for Brahms, and the conflict of the major and minor modes remain unresolved until near the end of the work.

Program Note by David B. Levy, © 1995/2018/2026