Run Time: Approx. 42 minutes

I’d like to begin this note by offering two photographs of Johannes Brahms. From the right stares the face most familiar to us: the bearded, austere man of his later decades. From the left peers a boyish young face that takes many people by surprise. Handsome, with piercing grey eyes, the young Brahms seems so distant from the composer we know now that he almost appears to be someone else entirely.

In the introduction to his biography of the composer, Jan Swafford joked that he privately referred to his book as Brahms ohne Bart—“Brahms without beard.” The formidable whiskers are an almost too-perfect embodiment of the man who worked hard to ensure that he would not be easily known. He never married, and he set out to destroy his correspondence and compositional sketches, intent on being remembered only through his music. Luckily, he did a slightly shoddy job of it, and enough material survives to form a reasonably full picture of who he was.

In the documents that escaped his fireplace and the accounts of those who knew him, we find a determinedly solitary and guarded man, but that is not what we hear in his music. When considering Brahms, I have often felt that I’m looking at two contradictory figures, a dichotomy Swafford so aptly captured in his quip about the man behind the beard.

His insistence on a tightly controlled life left him in a prison of his own making. He declared himself a happy bachelor, insisting that an artist must eschew personal attachments, yet we know that he was in love with Clara Schumann, his closest companion and the widow of his beloved mentor, Robert. He was reluctant to share his inner thoughts even with his dearest friends, yet his music is filled with earnest emotion.

He insisted that music should be absolute, possessing no story or program. Yet his scores are full of personal references: musical portraits of friends, private messages, and even cryptograms. He railed against Wagner and the direction in which he and his followers were pushing music, yet he kept a manuscript fragment of Wagner’s Tannhauser and quoted a theme from it in his Third Symphony.

As some audience members may recall from last season’s notes on the Third Symphony, Brahms adopted the credo Frei aber froh—“Free but happy,” as a response to his friend violinist Joseph Joachim’s motto, Frei aber einsam, “Free but lonely.” Both felt it their duty to overcome their passions, as Brahms put it, but at least Joachim, who did eventually marry, acknowledged there was a tradeoff.

I don’t buy Frei aber froh. It feels to me like he was trying—unsuccessfully—to convince himself of this. From the gulf between the bearded Brahms and the man beneath, emerges a restless desire that pervades his music. If there was a single word assigned to describe the ethos of his music, I believe that word would be longing. The feeling is ever present even in the ostensibly pastoral Second Symphony, tinging the work from its carefree opening through the triumphant final bars. This is no accident, but a carefully constructed tension that Brahms creates through his expert use of musical ambiguity.

What to listen for

Darker colors: trombones and timpani

In historical practice, trombones were largely absent from symphonies, appearing instead in sacred music. Attendees of our previous Masterworks concert might recall the somewhat striking orchestration of three trombones but no horns, flutes, or oboes. This would be nearly unheard of in a classical symphony, but in sacred oratorio it was standard practice.

In his First Symphony, Brahms withheld the trombones until the last movement, evoking the traditional use of the instruments with a chorale that echoes the sound of sacred music. In the Second Symphony, he releases the trombones from their traditional cage, using them instead to impart a bitter taste to the sweetness of the opening. As biographer Jan Swafford puts it, “Their quiet, ambiguous dissonance appears like a chilly shadow falling across a summer meadow.”

This may seem trivial, but Brahms actually received a letter from an audience member complaining that his use of the trombones and timpani ruined the symphony’s bright facade. “I have to confess,” the composer responded, “that I am a severely melancholic person, that black wings are constantly flapping above us, and that in my output—perhaps not entirely by chance—that symphony [the Second] is followed by a little essay about the great ‘Why.’ If you don’t know this, I will send it to you. It casts the necessary shadow on the serene symphony and perhaps accounts for those timpani and trombones.”

Harmonic Ambiguity

A quick music theory lesson:

We categorize chords largely by their stability: whether they sound complete, or how much they seem to want to move or resolve to another chord. Think of the poles of a magnet. Consonant intervals feel settled together, while dissonances create tension that seeks resolution to a more stable harmony.

Even different voicings of the same chord can have varying levels of stability, depending on which note is in the bass. We consider root-position tonic chords to be the most stable harmony. Put simply, if a piece is in C major, this would be a C major chord with a C in the lowest voice.

Brahms is a master of clouding his harmonic intentions. He often withholds clear resolutions for long periods of time. Dissonant chords are strung together, creating a restless feeling, and when he finally arrives at a resolution, he often chooses less stable versions of a chord, or adds notes to suggest a different harmony. Take the second theme of the first movement, for example. The melody is in A major, but his frequent emphasis of the note F-sharp, which does not belong to the A-major chord, makes us wonder, even if we don’t consciously know it: are we in A major or F-sharp minor? Essentially, is this happy or sad?

In the second movement, listen to the resolutions—the way the tension eases. Does it somehow feel incomplete? Here, Brahms withholds a root-position tonic chord for nearly the entire movement, not allowing us to fully exhale until the final measures.

Rhythmic Ambiguity

In the opening of the second movement, as the cellos play their languid, sighing melody, what meter do you think the music is in? On what beat in the measure does the music start? I wouldn’t know either if I hadn’t seen the score. This is a frequent device in Brahms’s music, one that keeps us unmoored and searching, perhaps echoing the “great why” he referred to in his letter. The combination of harmonic and rhythmic instability propels the music forward in its restless grappling, lending the resolutions even greater weight.

Please forgive the intellectual leap, but after spending considerable time trying to explain Socrates’ philosophy of love, I can’t help feeling that his argument is made manifest in Brahms’ work. What is this constant search for resolution, stability, and happiness if not desire? I think Socrates might say that Brahms understood love better than he realized.