"It’s hard to put into words all the magnificent things this work contains, you can only listen to it over and over again with reverence and admiration.”  Thus did a 21-year-old Richard Strauss sum up what generations of listeners have felt about the Brahms Fourth ever since its premiere 139 years ago.  The symphony begins gently like a boat floating on the water, and ends with a dramatic blaze of sound, triumphant but at the same time dark and ominous.  In between, we hear innumerable shades of emotion in the course of a veritable musical journey through four contrasting movements that beautifully complement one another.

Brahms was one of the most historically-conscious among the great composers.  He knew the music of the Baroque era better than any of his contemporaries, and made frequent references not only to the generation immediately preceding him but also to the music of more distant eras.  Such references abound throughout the symphony.  The opening Allegro, whose tender opening soon gives way to more energetic musical utterances, ends with a sequence of harmonies coming from early music.  The slow movement, in turn lyrical and grandiose, likewise contains sonorities from bygone times.  By contrast, the third movement, designated as Allegro giocoso ("fast and joyful”), contains few obvious references to the past.  In fact, this is quite a “modern” movement in its unconventional orchestration.  Three instruments that were silent in the first two movements—and that were definitely not part of the scoring in every symphony at the time—join the orchestra here:  the piccolo flute, the contrabassoon, and the triangle.  The latter doesn’t appear anywhere else in Brahms, who usually used the timpani as the only percussion instrument in his orchestral writing.

It is the last movement where Brahms’s homage to the Baroque era is the most obvious.  As the composer himself told his friends, he took a movement from Bach’s Cantata No. 150, a passacaglia, as his inspiration, although he considerably expanded on his model.  A passacaglia is, essentially, a set of variations over a bass line or a chord progression.  Passacaglia themes are usually quite brief, to allow for a large number of variations in which many new voices are superimposed on the theme.

The passacaglia theme borrowed from Bach consists of only eight notes.  Brahms added a single note to what Bach had written, but that note is crucial:  it is a chromatic note outside of the main scale that opens up a whole world of new harmonic possibilities.  The variations follow each other so quickly that we don’t perceive each one as a separate entity.  Our ear focuses, instead, on the large-scale form that emerges from the well-planned grouping of the single units.  At the beginning, we perceive a steadily rising line as the instrumental voices layered on top of the passacaglia bass become more and more elaborate.  After reaching a grandiose climax, the music becomes calmer and the notes of the bass theme begin to move twice as slowly as before.  The slower variations include a haunting flute solo, another one with prominent clarinet and oboe parts, and finally a magnificent variation for three trombones, in E major.  This is immediately followed by the recall of the movement's beginning, and the energetic ending where Brahms masterfully combines the passacaglia theme with a recall of the opening melody of the first movement.

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— Peter Laki