Johannes Brahms (1833-1897): Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Opus 68   

Unlike Haydn, who wrote his first symphony in his early twenties and kept going until he had amassed more than a hundred, Brahms waited until his early forties and stopped at four. Of course, symphonies had changed considerably in this interval of over a century. Brahms himself observed: “A symphony is no laughing matter nowadays.”   

Brahms had other reasons for procrastinating. When urged by Schumann and others to make the attempt, he insisted: “I shall never write a symphony. You have no idea how the likes of us feel, when we hear the tramp of a giant like him behind us.” The “giant” was Beethoven, whom even Haydn regarded as “that Great Mogul.”  

After hearing a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Brahms set out in earnest to write his First, finishing it, after a few false starts, in 1876. The first performance took place in Karlsruhe on November 4, 1876.   

Conductor Hans von Bülow immediately pronounced the work “Beethoven's Tenth.” Indeed, there is some similarity between the theme of Brahms' last movement and the finale of Beethoven's Ninth. When someone pointed this out to Brahms, he replied: “Any ass can see that.”    

It was also von Bülow who made the familiar coupling of the three “B's,” when he said: “I believe it is not without the intelligence of chance that Bach, Beethoven and Brahms are in alliteration.”  

These kinds of remarks served only to embarrass Brahms and inflame his critics. Hugo Wolf reported: “The art of composing without ideas has decidedly found in Brahms one of its worthiest representatives…. He understands the trick of making something out of nothing.”   

But it was the influential critic Eduard Hanslick who insured the First Symphony's success. After the Viennese performance, he wrote: “The new symphony displays an energy of will, a logic of musical thought, a greatness of structural power and a mastery of technique such as is possessed by no other living composer.”  

“The gloomy, painfully struggling first movement,” writes biographer Karl Geiringer, “is dominated by a sort of musical motto, which plays an important part in the Introduction, supplies the counterpoint to the main subject, and is the leading feature in the second subject and the development…. The two middle movements, however, are lighter and shorter…(providing) the indispensable moments of relief in the dramatic action of the whole composition. For not only the first movement, but the beginning of the Finale, conjures up a vision of a gloomy Inferno. Everything in this last movement seems to be hastening towards a catastrophe, until suddenly a horn solo sounds a message of salvation. Then the broadly flowing, hymn-like Allegro proclaims its triumph over all fear and pain.”

Program Notes by Charley Samson, copyright 2022.