In the second half of the nineteenth century it was above all Brahms who kept the traditional forms of chamber music alive. In doing so, he found himself in direct opposition to his leading Austro-German contemporaries; but while he could never reconcile himself to the ideals of Liszt and his ‘music of the future’, his admiration for certain of Wagner’s works was both genuine and open. That admiration was hardly reciprocated, though after he had invited Brahms to perform his ‘Handel’ Variations Op 24 Wagner reportedly conceded that something could still be done with the old forms ‘when someone who knows how to handle them comes along’.
Brahms’s knowledge of the great chamber works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert was as deep as it was wide—indeed, for many years his awareness of his predecessors’ achievements was an inhibiting factor in his own creative output. His determination to leave for posterity only those works of his that he felt lived up to their example led him to destroy many of the pieces he composed during his early years, among them several string quartets. Aside from the Scherzo in C minor for violin and piano, the earliest of his chamber works that has come down to us is the B major Piano Trio Op 8. Significantly, Brahms revised it thoroughly more than thirty years after he had composed it. As we shall see, two of the movements in the last of Brahms’s piano quartets, Op 60, also had their origins in the mid-1850s, though again he reworked them at a later stage.
The String Sextet in B flat major Op 18, the first of Brahms’s two works of the kind, was completed in 1860. The model behind its scoring is likely to have been Louis Spohr’s C major Sextet Op 140—a work that was well known to the Schumann circle. Brahms’s Sextet shows a fondness for exploiting the contrast of light and shade between two opposing groups drawn from within the ensemble—as in the opening bars of the first movement, the dark-hued theme of the slow movement, or the main subject of the finale, which alternates the three lower instruments with a second trio made up of the two violins and first viola. Only the cheerful Scherzo, with its ‘bouncing’ staccatos reminiscent of the peasants’ merrymaking from Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony, will have none of such brooding sonorities.
The slow movement’s theme echoes the famous Baroque tune known as ‘La follia’, but the notion of writing a variation piece in the key of D minor with a calm D major interlude at its centre is one that stems from Bach’s solo violin Chaconne—a piece Brahms later transcribed for piano left-hand. Brahms thought highly enough of the Sextet’s slow movement to transcribe it, too, for piano, and to present it to Clara Schumann as a birthday gift.
The bulk of the String Sextet in G major Op 36 was composed in the autumn of 1864, with the finale being added the following spring. It is a work intimately bound up with Brahms’s recurring memories of Agathe von Siebold, the daughter of a Göttingen professor to whom he had briefly been engaged in the summer of 1858. Her name is encrypted in the closing theme of the first movement’s exposition, which revolves insistently around the notes A–G–A–H–E (the H is the German equivalent of our B natural). The slow movement has associations with a different side of Brahms’s complex love-life. The piece is a highly individualized variation form based on a deeply expressive theme he had quoted nearly a decade earlier in a passionate letter to Clara Schumann, and the ascending shape of its initial phrase is clearly related to the opening movement’s main subject. Towards the end, the music dissolves from minor into major, allowing the piece to come to a radiantly calm close.
The shimmering main theme of the finale gives rise at the start of the central development section to a moment in which we seem to hear the counterpoint of Bach filtered through the gossamer texture of a Mendelssohn scherzo. The piece as a whole is one that alternates passages of orchestral brilliance with others of a more dance-like character, and it rounds the work out in a mood of ebullient self-confidence.
Brahms’s two string quintets are scored for the Mozartian ensemble of two violins, two violas and cello. The String Quintet in F major Op 88, composed in the spring of 1882, is unique among Brahms’s chamber works for strings in being cast in three movements, rather than four. The design is explained by the dual function of the middle movement, as slow movement and scherzo rolled into one. Its two opposing sections—a sombre Grave, and a lilting Allegretto in the major that returns later in varied form as a scampering Presto—are based on a pair of piano pieces Brahms had composed in the 1850s, in the style of a sarabande and gavotte.
The regular tread of the opening movement’s main theme is offset by a rhapsodically lyrical second subject in the radiant key of A major, whose syncopated melody is given out initially by the first viola. The same juxtaposition of keys is to be found in the finale—a piece whose fleeting counterpoint seems to owe a debt to the last movement of Beethoven’s C major ‘Rasumovsky’ Quartet Op 59 No 3.
Brahms was in his late fifties when he composed his String Quintet in G major Op 111, in 1890, and he planned it as his swan-song. As we shall see, what made him change his mind about turning his back on large-scale composition was his meeting the following year with the clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld.
The Quintet’s exuberant opening cello melody eventually gives way to a lyrical waltz tune given out by the first viola, before the exposition is rounded off with a yearning violin theme that provides the material for the subdued opening bars of the central development section. Here, the extrovert tremolos of the work’s beginning are transmuted into a mysterious rustling sound, out of which, in a wonderful inspiration, emerges a vastly expanded and broadened version of the closing theme.
The Adagio is brief but telling. Its melancholy D minor theme, given out by the first viola, has more than a hint of the gypsy style, and it seems to hark back to the variation slow movement from the Op 18 String Sextet. The intermezzo-like third movement is in the minor, too—a yearningly expressive waltz, with syncopated inner parts lending the music a feeling of subdued agitation. There are further echoes of the Hungarian gypsy idiom in the finale, which sets off as though it were to be in B minor, before swinging round to the home key with a ‘bouncing’ melody of infectious cheerfulness.
Brahms’s first two published string quartets evolved over a long period of time. Although he completed a preliminary version of at least the C minor work in the mid-1860s, it was not until 1873, and after several intervening revisions, that he at last approved them for publication. None of Brahms’s works is more organically unified than the String Quartet in C minor Op 51 No 1: not only does each idea grow with unerring logic out of the last in a process of continual development, but the main subject of each movement clearly arises out of the same germ. The dramatic motif hurled forth at the start of the finale appears to set out in the key—F minor—of the intermezzo-like preceding movement, while the rise and fall of its melodic shape echoes the opening movement’s main theme. Moreover, the finale’s initial notes recall the theme of the slow movement, and the relationship between the two pieces becomes still more apparent when the finale’s theme later returns in a more subdued and tranquil form.
It was Brahms’s friend and biographer Max Kalbeck who first drew attention to the significance of the fact that the opening theme of the String Quartet in A minor Op 51 No 2 revolved around the notes F–A–E, in allusion to Joseph Joachim’s personal motto, ‘Frei, aber einsam’ (‘free, but lonely’). Those notes are followed by a more incisive rhythmical motif which is to become the focus of much attention during the movement’s central development section.
The sonority of the slow movement’s opening stage is unusually lean, with a fully harmonized quartet sound emerging only gradually. The middle section is a dramatic, agitated passage in the minor; but the outburst is short-lived, before Brahms introduces a resigned, lyrical theme in the major, that eventually brings the piece to its gentle conclusion.
The third movement makes a nostalgic return to the world of the eighteenth-century minuet. But this is no straightforward minuet: in place of a trio, Brahms writes a delicate scherzo-like passage in a quicker tempo, so that the piece as a whole fulfils a dual function.
The finale derives much of its tension from a metrical conflict between theme and accompaniment. The conflict is resolved towards the end, where the theme is transmuted into a gentle waltz in the major. But such whimsy will not do for long, and the work finishes back in the minor, hurtling inexorably towards its accelerated conclusion.
The String Quartet in B flat major Op 67, composed in 1875–6, is a more light-hearted affair than its predecessors. The ‘hunting’ theme of its opening bars may bring to mind Mozart’s ‘Hunt’ Quartet K458, also in B flat major, though the hemiola cross-rhythm that soon appears is nothing if not thoroughly Brahmsian. That new rhythm anticipates the ingratiating second subject, with its ‘rocking’ figure, where there is an actual change of metre.
Following the slow movement, with its Mendelssohnian main theme, Brahms writes a gently agitated intermezzo in the minor. It is one of his great viola solos, and in order to make its part stand out the remaining three instruments are muted throughout. As in the Clarinet Quintet Op 115, the finale is a set of variations which gradually works its way around to reintroducing the theme of the opening movement. In the final bars, the variation theme and the first movement’s ‘hunting’ subject are combined with deceptive ease.
In the autumn of 1862 Brahms sent Clara Schumann the first three movements of a quintet in F minor for two violins, viola and two cellos—the same ensemble that Schubert used for his great C major Quintet D956. She was unreservedly enthusiastic, but Brahms’s other musical mentor, Joseph Joachim, felt the music was too powerful to be conveyed adequately by a string ensemble. Brahms clearly took Joachim’s advice to heart, because the following year he rescored the work as a sonata for two pianos. This time, it was Clara Schumann who, after playing the work through, begged Brahms to think about its instrumentation yet again. The final version, the Piano Quintet in F minor Op 34, represents what can be seen as an amalgam of Brahms’s two earlier scorings.
In opting for the dark key of F minor, and a beginning that has the main subject given out in stark octaves followed by a dramatic outburst of semiquavers (sixteenth-notes), Brahms seems deliberately to recall the opening bars of Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’ Sonata Op 57, and the opening movement’s recapitulation finds him borrowing another idea from the same work. Like Beethoven, Brahms fuses development and recapitulation into an uninterrupted flow, with the music’s tension maintained by means of a single note tapped out drum-like in the bass. In both works the note is a repeated C that is dissonant to the reprise of the main theme which unfolds above it. So unstable is this moment in Brahms’s piece, and so completely does one stage of the movement merge into the next, that the true recapitulation appears to begin only with the explosive return of the semiquavers.
The finale’s slow introduction is the most sombre portion of the work, and only gradually do its tortuously chromatic phrases acquire a more diatonic aspect, so that the music may lead seamlessly into the uncomplicated theme of the Allegro itself. Towards the end, the piece appears to be heading towards a resigned conclusion, before a much quicker coda, based on a rhythmic transformation of the rondo theme, brings it to a headlong finish.
Ever since, as a teenage keyboard virtuoso, he had toured with the Hungarian violinist Eduard Rémenyi, Brahms had been fascinated by the gypsy style. The finale of the Piano Quartet in G minor Op 25 is by no means his only attempt to reproduce the gypsy sound, but it is certainly the most spectacular. The Quartet begins in much more subdued style, with a ‘winding’ theme given out initially by the piano alone, in an atmosphere of quiet tension—as though the music were about to erupt at any moment. That eruption, when it occurs, is of tremendous force, its momentum propelled by a new, tautly sprung motif accompanying the theme in semiquavers. Since his central development section concentrates largely on the opening subject Brahms curtails its reappearance at the start of the recapitulation, joining it only for what had been its forceful restatement; and from this point on, the music continues to develop almost continually.
Following the shadowy, intermezzo-like second movement, with its uplifting trio in the major, the slow movement is a broad, hymn-like piece. Its smooth melody eventually gives way to a jagged idea in dotted rhythm, and to a more animated episode in which distant military-style music can be heard. Just as it appears to be dying away altogether, its tune erupts with force—as though a window had suddenly been thrown open, allowing the street-music to invade the room. The material of this violently contrasting episode never recurs; but towards the end, a fragment of the main theme on the violin is accompanied by a blaze of horns and trumpets from the piano, before peace returns.
The Piano Quartet in A major Op 26 is a much more leisurely work—indeed, the breadth of its conception is such as to make it the longest of all Brahms’s chamber pieces. Its opening movement is dominated by the gently swaying first theme, whose ‘rocking’ motion returns as a punctuating reference-point throughout the exposition. Of the wealth of thematic ideas, it is the last, with its sharply defined rhythm, that is seized upon as the springboard for the development section.
The opening Allegro’s ‘rocking’ figure also forms the mainstay of the slow movement—a deeply felt, nocturnal song, whose air of mystery is enhanced by a hushed series of sweeping arpeggios on the piano. Not until the ending of the piece do those arpeggios at last find peace, allowing the movement to sink to a serene close.
As befits the large canvas of the work as a whole, both the Scherzo and its trio are fully worked-out sonata movements in themselves. As for the energetic finale, its main theme derives its peculiar effect from one of Brahms’s favourite conundrums: a metrically complex theme is played against an obstinately regular accompaniment, lending the music a curiously dislocated feel. As in the finale of the G minor Quartet the arrival of the coda coincides with an increase in tempo, and in the dizzying last pages we seem to find ourselves back in the gypsy encampment.
The Piano Quartet in C minor Op 60 is at once the first and the last of Brahms’s three works of the kind. He originally composed it in the mid-1850s, as a work in three movements, and in the key of C sharp minor. Brahms tried the piece through in this form with Joachim, but he remained dissatisfied with it, and it was not for a further two decades that it reached its definitive version. When he entered it in his catalogue of works, Brahms noted: ‘Movements 1 and 2 earlier; 3, 4 Vienna [18]73–74.’ Since the first version of the work clearly had no scherzo, the question remains as to the source of its ‘earlier’ second movement. The answer may well lie in its form—not a conventional scherzo and trio at all, but a through-composed movement that may have formed the finale of the 1856 score.
For all the consolatory warmth of its slow movement, this is surely the bleakest of all Brahms’s chamber works. When he sent it to Fritz Simrock for publication, in August 1875, he told him: ‘You should have a picture on the title-page—a head with a pistol against it. I shall send you my photograph for the purpose … Since you seem to like colour printing, you could use blue frockcoat, yellow breeches and riding boots.’ Brahms’s description of the appropriate apparel was a reference to the protagonist of Goethe’s famous epistolary novel, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (‘The Sufferings of Young Werther’), in which the eponymous hero commits suicide over his unrequited love for a woman who is already betrothed. Whether or not in the mid-1850s the young Brahms felt a Werther-like guilt about his deepening attachment to Clara Schumann, there can be no mistaking the music’s tragic impulse.
The work begins in an air of brooding intensity whose uneasy calm is shattered by a sudden rushing scale from the strings, precipitating a forceful variant of the initial motif. Much later on, the recapitulation transmutes that scale into a ghostly echo of its former self, and thenceforward the music continues to develop—so much so that it does not find its way back to the home key until the final page.
The Scherzo second movement progresses in one uninterrupted sweep from beginning to end, though a new idea presented at roughly its mid-point acts as a form of quasi-trio, before ominously subdued repeated notes from the viola lead to the return of the opening material.
The chain of evenly descending melodic thirds that inaugurates the slow movement’s theme came in Brahms’s late years to stand as a symbol of death; but here, with the music in major rather than minor, the melody seems to convey instead an atmosphere of subdued ecstasy.
A feeling of barely suppressed tension runs through the opening pages of the finale, which forcibly recall the main theme of Mendelssohn’s great C minor Piano Trio Op 66. Just as the conflicts of Mendelssohn’s finale are eventually resolved with the emergence of a triumphant chorale theme, so the first stage of Brahms’s piece comes to rest with a quiet chorale-like melody played by the strings. The chorale melody is heard again in an embellished form in the central development, before Brahms whips up the excitement in preparation for the stormy return of the main theme which marks the start of the recapitulation.
Brahms was in his early twenties when he composed the first version of his Piano Trio in B major Op 8, but hardly had the firm of Breitkopf und Härtel accepted it, in June 1854, than he confessed to Joachim that he would gladly have held on to it, in order to make alterations. For a performance in Vienna in 1871, Brahms made cuts in the opening movement; but thirty-five years after the work’s publication he returned to it yet again. ‘You cannot imagine how I trifled away the lovely summer’, he told Clara Schumann in the autumn of 1889. ‘I have rewritten my B major Trio and can now call it Op 108 instead of Op 8.’
Brahms’s revision amounted to a process of recomposition in which only the Scherzo—a piece of Mendelssohnian lightness—emerged more or less untouched. The broad opening melody of the first movement, for the piano and cello, survived intact, but the exposition’s rather static latter half, with a latent fugue subject clearly destined for elaboration at a later stage, was jettisoned, as was the entire development section.
In the slow movement, Brahms replaced the first episode with new material, beginning with a long cello melody; while a second episode in the form of an agitated Allegro was also discarded. However, the wonderfully serene opening of the movement, with the piano’s chorale-like phrases answered by a contrasting idea on the two stringed instruments, was a youthful inspiration that clearly satisfied the mature Brahms. So, too, was the fact that the finale is not only in the minor, but fails firmly to establish the home tonality at all until its closing pages. Nor does the ending provide a resolution—indeed, the music finishes as despairingly as it began.
The Trio in E flat major for piano, violin and horn Op 40 was composed in 1865, in forest surroundings outside the town of Baden-Baden. Its opening movement is unique among Brahms’s chamber works in not being cast in sonata form. Instead, it alternates two ideas in rondo fashion, the second of them slightly more agitated than the first. One consequence of this unorthodox beginning is that the Scherzo, rather than being a sectional piece, is a through-composed sonata form.
The slow third movement begins with rolled chords deep in the bass of the piano, like some infinite sigh of regret. The atmosphere of mourning is heightened by the sustained, winding theme introduced at the first entrance of the violin and horn. The piano’s rolled chords return, to be followed by another sinuous theme, played this time in dialogue by horn and violin alone. This second theme, closely related to the first, is to weave its way through the remainder of the piece, until a more consolatory version of the same idea provides an unmistakable pre-echo—albeit in slow-motion—of the finale’s bucolic main theme.
The finale’s ‘hunting’ theme is enlivened by off-beat accents and, later, by a characteristically Brahmsian cross-rhythm which has the bar divided simultaneously into two beats by the violin and horn, and three by the piano. For all its rondo-like character, this high-spirited piece is actually a sonata movement, complete with a repeat of its exposition.
In June 1880, Brahms began work simultaneously on two new piano trios—one in C major, the other in E flat. He completed the opening movement of each, and showed them to some of his closest friends and advisers. But for all Clara Schumann’s preference for the E flat major piece, the always self-critical Brahms eventually destroyed it. Two years later, he took up its companion-piece again, and completed it with the addition of three further movements. It was published in December 1882 as his Piano Trio in C major Op 87.
The opening Allegro contains an unusual wealth of thematic material: an imperious first subject given out in octaves by the violin and cello alone; a shadowy, chromatic subject, a further smooth idea played by the strings in octaves, and a gracious closing theme in dotted rhythm. The central section finds room to elaborate all of these except the last; and in characteristic fashion, Brahms carries the music’s developmental character right through to the reprise of the second subject. There is also a substantial coda, in which a sweeping augmented version of the main theme as heard in the development makes a splendid return.
The slow movement is a set of variations on a melancholy theme in A minor, whose ‘short–long’ rhythm has a Hungarian flavour. The penultimate variation, in the major, transforms it into a smooth, expansive melody of great beauty. The Scherzo is in the minor, too: a mysterious, fleeting, piece whose predominant dynamic marking is pianissimo. Its shadowy character is offset by the C major confidence of the soaring melody in the trio section. As for the finale, it is one of those good-humoured rondos at which Brahms was so adept. Much play is made of the staccato repeated-note figure with which the piano accompanies its opening theme; and towards the end the theme reappears in a subdued augmented form, as though in echo of the procedure adopted in the opening movement.
The summer of 1886 found Brahms at the Swiss resort of Hofstetten. There, in the idyllic surroundings of Lake Thun, he completed three strongly contrasted chamber works: the grandly conceived F major Cello Sonata Op 99, the relaxed and lyrical A major Violin Sonata Op 100, and the dramatic Piano Trio in C minor Op 101. The Trio is one of Brahms’s most concentrated and intense scores. Its forceful opening theme has two limbs: a sinuous line in the upper voice, and a rising scale in the bass. These two ideas propel the greater part of the movement; and even the more relaxed second subject is based on a broadened version of the rising scale.
The Presto non assai shares the spectral character of the corresponding movement in the Op 87 Trio. This time, the strings are muted, and the middle section—hardly a trio in the conventional sense—does little to disturb the nocturnal atmosphere.
The slow movement, with its recurring pattern of a single bar of three beats followed by two of two beats, has the piano and strings alternating, as they had done in the Adagio of the Op 8 Trio. The pulse quickens for a middle section maintaining both the music’s metrical irregularity and its basic alternation between the instrumental forces.
The finale sets off with what could be described as an intensified ‘hunting’ rondo theme. In fact, as in the Op 40 Horn Trio, the piece turns out to be a sonata form, and its concentration on the minor is almost unrelieved until the onset of the coda. Even there, however, the music’s dramatic sweep remains undiminished, and the work ends as powerfully as it began.
In the spring of 1891 Brahms’s attention was drawn to the playing of Richard Mühlfeld, the principal clarinettist of the court orchestra at Meiningen. Attracted by the warmth and delicacy of Mühlfeld’s tone, Brahms composed both his Trio Op 114 and his Clarinet Quintet that summer, and the two works were premiered at the same concert, in December. The two clarinet sonatas for Mühlfeld followed in 1894.
The inspiration behind the Trio in A minor for piano, clarinet and cello Op 114 may have been the clarinet, but it is the cello that frequently takes the leading role. Both principal subjects in the outer movements are initially given to the stringed instrument, and at the start of the work the cello is actually heard on its own, with a rising theme whose shape is perfectly complemented by the predominantly falling intervals of the second subject, in the major. Between the two subjects, the music reaches its first climax, approached by a brief series of rapid scales on the clarinet and cello; and it is these scales, sounding at first like the rushing wind, that are to stamp their mark on much of the central development. The scales make a distant return in the coda, sweeping the music to a ghostly close.
The slow movement shares its aura of autumnal serenity with that of the Clarinet Quintet, and since it does so without any equivalent to the Quintet’s more agitated episode, its atmosphere of profound serenity is more complete. The entire piece gives the impression of a continuous, meditative improvisation.
The third movement is a Brahmsian intermezzo par excellence—a waltz of infinite gracefulness, whose easy-going atmosphere of charm is scarcely ruffled by a slightly more athletic trio section. By contrast, the finale is a muscular piece with more than a tinge of the gypsy style to it. This time, there is no question of a subdued close. Instead, the music gathers force to bring the work to an ending of altogether symphonic weight.
In scoring the slow movement of his Clarinet Quintet in B minor Op 115 for the wind instrument with muted strings, and in casting its finale as a set of variations, Brahms was clearly paying homage to Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet K581. At the same time, the notion of beginning a work in the key of B minor with a theme that sets off in an unambiguous D major was borrowed from Haydn, both of whose B minor quartets (Op 33 No 1 and Op 64 No 2) open with a similar deliberate deception. Moreover, the earlier work of that Haydn pair begins, as does Brahms’s Quintet, with the sound of the two violins on their own.
In the slow movement’s serene outer sections the clarinet’s broad theme is shadowed in syncopated quasi-canon by the first violin, while the second violin and viola provide a murmuring accompaniment. The middle section turns to the minor, but for all its overwhelming contrast this section is essentially an elaborate rhapsodic variation on the movement’s opening melody. Here is the last manifestation of Brahms’s love of gypsy music—and no instrument could express it more vividly than the clarinet. But perhaps the most profound inspiration of the piece occurs in its closing bars, where the middle section’s wild improvisatory flights of fancy make a return in a form of distant echo, and at something like a quarter their original speed, allowing the music to die away in a haze of nostalgia.
The D major third movement combines a gentle intermezzo with a scherzo. Its smoothly flowing opening theme eventually gives way to a transparently scored quicker variation that forms a miniature sonata movement in its own right. It is, indeed, so fully worked out that the music never returns to its original tempo, though Brahms cannily allows the movement to come full-circle by having its last bars mirror the closing moments of the opening section.
The finale is constructed in circular fashion, too, but this time the frame of reference is much larger. In common with the finale of the Op 67 String Quartet, it is a set of variations; and as in that earlier work the concluding variation weaves the first movement’s main theme into its fabric. At the end, the work comes to rest with the dying strains of the opening movement’s conclusion.
Like the Piano Quintet in the same key which he completed thirty years earlier, Brahms’s Clarinet Sonata in F minor Op 120 No 1 begins with a broad phrase given out quietly in bare octaves. The shape of its initial four notes is transferred to the bass line of the movement’s serene, almost chorale-like second theme; and Brahms points up the connection between the two ideas at the start of the central development, where they are heard simultaneously. This brooding piece subsides in a resigned coda, with an arpeggiated piano part evoking the sound of a harp.
Resignation is the keynote, too, of the slow movement, whose drooping phrases seem to typify the introspective melancholy of so much of Brahms’s late music. The third movement, by way of contrast, is a piece of positively rustic charm, though the bleak, syncopated piano-writing of its middle section invokes a rather darker atmosphere.
The Sonata ends in exuberant mood, with a rondo in the major. The chimes of its initial three repeated notes run like a guiding thread through the piece; and both the repeated notes and the quickly moving figure heard beneath them are later broadened to form an important subsidiary theme.
The opening movement of the autumnal Clarinet Sonata in E flat major Op 120 No 2 would seem to have been tailor-made for the feminine sensitivity of Richard Mühlfeld’s playing. (Brahms’s nickname for him was ‘Fräulein Klarinette’.) The music itself is seamless, and the sinuous outline of its opening phrase governs virtually the entire discourse. The reflective mood is shattered by the second movement—a powerful, full-blooded rhapsody in the minor that seems to look back to the world of Brahms’s youth. Like his first published piano work, the dramatic Scherzo Op 4, it is in the dark key of E flat minor; and its contrasting middle section, in B major, recalls both the key and the broad melodic style of one of the trios in that early piece.
The finale’s gently flowing theme gives rise to a series of increasingly intricate variations. Eventually an acceleration in pace coincides with a turn to the minor, recalling the turbulence of the Sonata’s middle movement. The work ends forcefully, though with the major mode firmly re-established.
The Op 120 sonatas were published in no fewer than three forms: in order to ensure the widest possible dissemination for the music, Brahms had prepared additional versions for viola and piano, and for violin and piano. For the viola version, he took advantage of the opportunity to write in double stops or chords for the instrument; but since the viola’s range is similar to that of the clarinet, the music required little other alteration. In their viola manifestations the Op 120 sonatas are more than just substitutes for the original version; it can be argued that the dark, husky tones of the stringed instrument are no less suited to the music than is the smoother sound of the clarinet.
The Cello Sonata in E minor Op 38 was composed in two distinct stages. First, in 1862, came three movements: an Allegro, an Adagio and an Allegretto. Then, three years later, Brahms added the fugal finale, and at the same time decided to suppress the original slow movement since the work in its four-movement form was, as he said, ‘too stuffed with music’.
The Sonata’s peculiar atmosphere, at once melancholy and intense, results at least in part from the fact that its concentration on the minor is almost unrelieved. Even the opening movement’s contrasting second subject retains the minor mode; and although there is a more consolatory third theme in the major, it reappears in a plangent minor-mode transformation in the bars immediately preceding the onset of the recapitulation.
The middle movement is in the style of an old-fashioned minuet. There is, perhaps, a touch of wry detachment about its courtly elegance; and Brahms begins it with understated wit, quoting a phrase that is clearly an ending rather than a beginning, before the cello enters with the minuet theme itself. The same phrase is used as the starting-point for the more smoothly flowing theme of the trio section, still in the minor.
Brahms brings all his contrapuntal art to bear on the gruff fugal finale, using its theme, borrowed from Bach’s The Art of the Fugue, both in its original form, and in inversion. The countersubject played by the pianist’s left hand shortly after the beginning (at the point where the cellist enters with the fugue subject itself) reappears later as the main melody of a more tranquil episode in the major. Towards the end, the tempo increases and all the threads are gathered together in a vertiginous coda.
Considerably grander in conception is the Cello Sonata in F major Op 99, designed for the cellist of the celebrated Joachim Quartet, Robert Hausmann, who had launched himself on a solo career in the previous year. Its opening movement unfolds largely against a background of dramatic tremolos, which are transferred at the end of the exposition from piano to cello, swaying in rapid alternation across ‘open’ and ‘stopped’ strings. As if unable to contain himself, the pianist bursts in again with the tremolos at the start of the central development; more arresting still is the mysterious approach to the recapitulation, where the tremolos appear pianissimo in the cello’s lowest register, while the pianist plays a series of long-held chords outlining the shape and harmony of the main theme, as though its melody had become frozen into immobility. The idea is one Brahms took up again, though to rather different effect, at the parallel point in his Fourth Symphony.
For his slow movement, Brahms moves into the distant and radiant key of F sharp major. The opening theme is a double one—the piano playing a slowly rising melody, while the cello has a pizzicato idea in shorter note-values. The highly original use of pizzicato returns in an expanded form following a more agitated middle section whose theme is briefly recalled in the movement’s calm closing bars.
In the impassioned Allegro passionato the pianist finds himself having to play the double line of the rapidly moving theme legato with his right hand alone, while the left has a widely spaced accompaniment. The smoothly unfolding melody of the major-mode trio offers a brief moment of relaxation, but for prolonged respite from the Sonata’s pervasive intensity we have to wait for the genial finale—a piece in which Brahms again makes very individual use of pizzicato. Particularly striking are the closing moments, where the cello plucks at the rondo theme’s outline, transforming its smooth rhythm into a playful ‘Scotch-snap’, before the music gathers momentum again to bring the work to a rousing close.
On 30 September 1853 Brahms called at the Schumanns’ home in Düsseldorf, bearing a letter of introduction from Joachim. The following month, Joachim himself paid a surprise visit, and Schumann proposed that a composite ‘greetings sonata’ for violin and piano should be composed in his honour. Schumann himself wrote the slow movement and finale, his pupil Albert Dietrich the opening movement, and Brahms the scherzo. Schumann eventually complemented his contribution with two further movements, to form a sonata of his own, but Brahms’s Scherzo in C minor is the only portion of the original work that has remained in the active repertoire. In later life, Brahms became only too aware of the shadow of Beethoven. At this stage, however, he felt no such inhibitions: boldly, he set his scherzo in Beethoven’s favourite dramatic key of C minor, and he even went so far as to base it on the ‘fate’ rhythm from the Fifth Symphony. The trio section, in the major, is a sweeping, passionate melody for the violin which makes a triumphant return in the coda, rounding the piece off in majestic style.
A quarter of a century elapsed before Brahms composed any further music for violin and piano; and of his three violin sonatas, only the last was to return to the forceful style of the C minor Scherzo. The first two sonatas are predominantly lyrical works, and both make use of material from actual songs. The Violin Sonata in G major Op 78 was written between 1878 and 1879, at roughly the same time as Brahms’s Violin Concerto. The goal of the entire Sonata is the theme of its rondo finale—a quotation from Brahms’s Regenlied and the closely related Nachklang, both setting words by Klaus Groth that use rainfall as a metaphor for tears. Like the songs, Brahms’s melancholy finale is in the minor, only resolving into the major near its close; and the songs’ repeated-note dotted rhythm also informs both the main subject of the Sonata’s opening movement, and the slow movement’s march-like episode. In addition, the main theme of the slow movement makes two reappearances during the course of the finale.
Not content with using a single song theme, the Violin Sonata in A major Op 100 contains reminiscences from at least three—principal among them Wie Melodien zieht es mir leise durch den Sinn (‘It is as though melodies were passing quietly through my mind’), which appears as the opening movement’s second subject. Another song written at the same time as the Sonata was Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer. Its climax occurs at the words, ‘Komm, o komme bald’ (‘Come, oh come soon’), which are set to the same interval of the rising third that initiates the rondo theme of the Sonata’s finale. Komm bald is the title of another of Brahms’s songs, and the melodic shape of its introduction is echoed in the Sonata’s opening bars. All these songs were dedicated to the contralto Hermine Spies, who was staying in nearby Berne. Brahms was by no means impervious to her attractions, and according to Max Kalbeck the Violin Sonata was written in anticipation of a visit from her.
The middle movement is one of Brahms’s characteristic fusions of slow movement and scherzo. Its alternating sections, although outwardly strongly contrasted, are subtly linked through their common rising and falling melodic shape. As for the rondo finale, its theme is one of the great melodies conceived for the rich sound of the violin’s lowest string. The piece, however, is not without its shadowy moments, and the music’s opposing moods are not reconciled until the closing bars.
The prolific summer months of 1886 also saw the start of another violin sonata, conceived on an altogether grander scale than its two predecessors. It was, however, not until 1888, again in Thun, that Brahms completed the dramatic Violin Sonata in D minor Op 108. Much of the work’s tension lies beneath the surface (the sotto voce beginning, for instance, with the subdued agitation of the piano’s syncopated accompaniment), and it is not until the finale that the latent violence is allowed to erupt with full force.
The opening movement is remarkable for the static nature of its development section, traditionally the sonata form’s moment of greatest harmonic instability. Having written an unusually restless exposition, Brahms sets the entire development over a repeated pedal note on the dominant (A), counterbalancing it in the movement’s coda by a similar pedal on the tonic.
The serene slow movement has one of those double themes of which Brahms was so fond, in which what at the outset appears to be merely accompanimental subsequently assumes a thematic life of its own; while the third-movement (a scherzo marked Un poco presto e con sentimento) inhabits a similar shadowy world to that of the piano trios Opp 87 and 101. The forceful finale brings with it a suggestion of a tarantella, but it also has an almost chorale-like episode—a distant reminder, perhaps, of the calm second subject in a much earlier D minor work by Brahms: the Piano Concerto No 1.
Misha Donat © 2008

The Op. 42 Notturno for viola and piano is an arrangement of the 1796-97 Serenade in D, Op. 8, which was scored for violin, viola and cello. But it was not the composer who reduced it to piano and viola here. F. X. Kleinheinz did the arrangement and presented it to Beethoven, who corrected it and approved it for publication in 1804. In the same year Kleinheinz also fashioned an arrangement of Beethoven's Op. 25 Serenade for flute (or violin) and piano, with the composer once more making emendations he deemed necessary for publication, at which time he assigned the opus number 41. There were other instances where Beethoven allowed another hand to transcribe his music: the Op. 104 String Quintet (1817) was an arrangement (now attributed to Kaufmann) of the Op. 1 Trio, No. 3, and the Op. 64 Sonata for Cello and Piano was an arrangement by an unknown party of the Op. 3 String Trio. And there are more such instances.
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Felix Mendelssohn composed three violin sonatas (two of which have only in the last 50 years been re-discovered and published) and, as he moved toward and into his thirties, a pair of cello sonatas. Three-quarters of the members of a standard string quartet are thus satisfied; and the other quarter will quickly tell you that Mendelssohn also, in fact, satisfied, or at least tried to satisfy, them -- for in 1824 he composed something most remarkable for the time: a Sonata for viola and piano in C minor.
Mendelssohn's Viola Sonata is not actually unique for its day -- other composers had applied, were applying, and would apply the instrument to the genre. But still there certainly aren't many Classical or early-Romantic viola sonatas. The sonata is by date early Mendelssohn; Mendelssohn was 15 when he signed his name to the piece on February 14, 1824 (he was in fact just a week and a half past his 15th birthday). There is, however, nothing juvenile about the music it contains, and if in his adulthood he wrote superior music, that is a comment not regarding the Viola Sonata's shortcomings, but rather Mendelssohn's own outstanding -- if not always fully used -- gifts.
The composer was himself a keen violinist and violist in his youth (it is well-known that he played one of the viola parts in an early performance of his Octet in E flat), and he clearly understands all of the difficulties that come hand-in-hand with composing for viola. He is sure to keep the piano writing transparent and lean so that the viola and its musically unwieldy register can shine through at any moment.
There are three movements. 1. Adagio -- Allegro, in the usual sonata-allegro form; 2. Menuetto (Allegro molto), with a slightly slower, chorale-like trio section; and 3. Andante con Variazioni, in which the violist occasionally drops out so that the pianist might let loose a bit and draw some thicker, more opaque sounds from the instrument.
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Robert Schumann's little-known Märchenbilder (Fairytale Pictures) for viola and piano (alternately for violin and piano, by the composer's own indication) were composed during March of 1851, during his brief and relatively unhappy tenure as conductor at Düsseldorf. Chronologically, these four fantasy pieces occupy the space between the two sonatas for violin and piano, though they can hardly be said to inhabit the same emotionally conflicted world. Instead, they draw the listener into that same glistening world of fantasy and childlike imagination that, many years earlier, drew from him some of the most beloved piano music in the repertory. However, twenty years of further experience and the first signs of approaching madness grant to these seemingly simple portraits an almost desperate sense of escapism lacking in the earlier piano works.
The first of the four Märchenbilder, marked Nicht schnell (Not fast), features a somber melody in D minor that recurs throughout the piece in a variety of guises. Lebhaft (spirited), which follows, is a kind of truncated rondo that contrasts its main, exuberant, theme with two much gentler digressions, while pitting the violin and piano against one another in friendly competition. Rasch (swift or brisk), a vehement moto perpetuo, follows. A secondary motive, announced by the piano in the fifth bar of the piece, is of rhythmic interest and considerable importance. The final piece of the group is set in the traditionally happy key of D major, but is nevertheless marked Langsam, mit melancholischem Ausdruck (Slowly, with melancholy expression). Its sonorous texture seems to presage the Adagio of Johannes Brahms' D minor violin sonata.

BARON Frédéric Alfred d’Erlanger was a banker,
born in Paris but with a German father and
American mother, who moved to London in his
teens. He was naturalized British and long resident in
London, where he was involved in promoting music and
was later a trustee of the London Philharmonic Orchestra
and on the board of the Royal Opera House, Covent
Garden. He was also a composer, his teacher being Anselm
Ehmant, a close friend of the family, and although his
catalogue of works is not huge, throughout his life there
was a steady stream of first performances bythe most
celebrated artists and orchestras of the day. Many record
collectors will have come across him as the composer of
the ballet music Les cent baisers, recorded by Dorati and
the London Symphony Orchestra after its success when
danced at Covent Garden in 1935.
D’Erlanger had first appeared as a composer with his
opéra comique Jehan de Saintré, produced in Aix-les-
Bains in 1893 and in Hamburg the following year. He first
appeared at Covent Garden as a stage composer in July
1897, under the pseudonym Frédéric Regnal, with the
opera Inès Mendo after Mérimée’s comedy. Later, with
theGerman title Das Erbe, it was produced in Hamburg,
Frankfurt and Moscow.
If we track his music through his published works,
andlater through performances at the Queen’s Hall
Promenade Concerts, we find a Prelude for violin and
piano published in 1895 and an album of six songs in
1896. He appeared at the Proms in September 1895 with
a Suite symphonique, and by 1900 had published a Violin
Sonata in G minor and in 1901 a notable Piano Quintet,
which was given a rousing reception at the 1902 ‘Pops’ at
St James’s Hall. New works appeared at regular intervals
during his life: just following the Proms we find the
Andante symphonique Op 18 for cello and orchestra in
October 1904, and the symphonic prelude Sursum Corda!
in August 1919. There was also the Concerto symphonique
for piano and orchestra from 1921 and the gorgeous
Messe de Requiem of 1930, a work admired by Adrian
Boult, who arranged its broadcast in 1931 and a public
performance in Birmingham in 1933, where it was revived
as recently as March 2001. The briefly popular orchestral
waltz Midnight Rose was recorded by Barbirolli in 1934.
Possibly d’Erlanger’s most famous work was his opera,
in Italian, after Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
Someone with d’Erlanger’s connections would only con-
sider the best as his collaborators and he asked Luigi Illica,
Puccini’s librettist, to write the libretto. Its first production
at the San Carlo Theatre in Naples in 1906 was interrupted
by a volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius. The Naples
production spawned early recordings by Amedeo Bassi and
Alessandro Bonci of Angel Clare’s aria in Act I. Produced
inLondon in 1909 with no less a cast than Emmy Destin
as Tess and Zenatello as Angel Clare, it was revived in 1910
and later produced at Chemnitz and Budapest. Tess was
revived by the BBC in 1929 in an English version. In 1910
his opera Noël was produced atthe Paris Opéra and
subsequently in Chicago, Philadelphia, Montreal and
Stockholm.
So d’Erlanger’s Violin Concerto was the work of a
significant emerging composer when it was written in
1902. It was first performed by Hugo Heermann, then still
the long-standing professor of violin at the Hoch’sche
Konservatorium in Frankfurt, and he played it in Holland
and Germany before it was taken up by Fritz Kreisler and
given its British premiere at the Philharmonic Society
concert at Queen’s Hall on 12 March 1903. Published
byRahter of Hamburg in 1903, it was later played at
Bournemouth in 1909, 1920 and 1928, as well as at the
Queen’s Hall Proms (by Albert Sammons) in 1921.
Notable for the transparency of its scoring, d’Erlanger’s
concerto launches straight into the first subject, an-nounced by the soloist in triple- and double-stopped
chords without an orchestral introduction. The soloist
soars away in running semiquavers, eventually presenting
a more lyrical version of the theme and immediately
moving on to the singing second subject. A succession
ofrising trills by the soloist leads to a cadenza-like
unaccompanied middle-section before the first subject
reappears in the orchestra. The lyrical second subject
returns in various keys and with a short coda, Allegro
animando, the horns herald the close and a brief gesture
of dismissal.
The composer’s treatment of the orchestra—with
constantly varied touches of instrumental colour, and
often with only two or three instruments playing, typically
answering each other—is particularly characteristic in the
gorgeous slow movement. A nine-bar introduction creates
a nocturnal atmosphere with bell-like notes on flute and
harp over hushed strings. The cor anglais then sings the
plaintive first subject, immediately repeated and extended
by the soloist. After thirty-one bars it is taken up by the
clarinet, the soloist now accompanying with arpeggiated
chords across the strings. The second subject follows on
the strings with rising decorations by the soloist. The first
theme is repeated, now in F minor, with muted accom-
panying strings. A haunting romantic motif is heard on the
horns and will be heard several times before the end.
Eventually a cadenza-like passage of running semiquavers
presages the return of the cor anglais and a brief
orchestral climax before, musing on the horn’s romantic
motif, the music fades on the soloist’s long-held pianis-
simo top C.
The finale comes as a great surprise—a diaphanous
scherzando, all fairy gossamer. The music falls into a
succession of sixteen related short episodes. The first
theme starts in
and proceeds in
, its leaping triplet
motion giving it the feel of a saltarello. A contrasted theme in
appears in the strings in the fifth episode, and in the
next the first theme of the first movement returns in
staccato crochets. The writing for the soloist is brilliant
throughout, though d’Erlanger does not feel the need for
another cadenza.

澳大利亚已故指挥家 Charles Mackerras 指挥苏格兰室内乐团和爱乐乐团（英国）演奏贝多芬交响曲，第一至第八交响曲由苏格兰室内乐团演奏，第九交响曲由爱乐乐团演奏。录音于 2006 年，2007 年发行。

Recording details: February 1992, All Saints, Durham Road, East Finchley, London, United Kingdom

Hyperion2013下半年度的重點專輯之一，廣受世人喜愛的德佛札克大提琴協奏曲加上世界級的大提琴家—同時也是英國的國寶級人物史帝芬．伊瑟利斯，將會引出至為驚人的火花。伊瑟利斯等了四十年才終於盼到機會錄下這首大提琴曲目的巔峰之作，並且由定期合作夥伴丹尼爾．哈丁和馬勒室內管弦樂團聯袂獻藝，這個醞釀多時的想法如今果真成為豐碩甜蜜的果實。伊瑟利斯提到這首協奏曲時這麼說「德佛札克以帶有民歌簡單直接的性質描繪出情感歷程的力量，將史詩和感人至深的自白融為一體，無法抗拒。當然，不只作品本身，伊瑟利斯的演奏同樣結合情感能量和簡潔俐落的特色，這也使得他在詮釋這首樂曲時更顯圓滿。其他收錄曲目除了協奏曲的原始版結尾之外，還有藝術歌曲Lasst mich allein(讓我獨處, Leave Me Alone)改編而成的管弦版，此曲在協奏曲的二三樂章同樣可以聽到類似的段落。另一首較少人知道的Ａ大調大提琴協奏曲是作曲家早期所寫但是從未管弦化。收錄於此的版本(同樣是首次錄音)是德國作曲家根特．拉斐爾(1903-1960)所完成(福特萬格勒與其他指揮皆曾演出他的作品)。伊瑟利斯對此表示「沒錯，和後來的Ｂ小調協奏曲比起來或許算不上是傑作，但是同樣的道理，難道因為弟弟是天才就該忽略哥哥嗎？我就喜歡Ａ大調協奏曲的優美旋律，極富新異的靈感、典型的鄉土精神—還有瀰漫全曲的純然愉悅感」
Hyperion is delighted to present the world’s best-loved cello concerto performed by one of the world’s best-loved cellists: national tr easure Steven Isserlis. Isserlis has waited 40 years to record this pinnacle of the repertoire, and here with his regular collaborators, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra and Daniel Harding, this long gestation has proved to be overwhelmingly fruitful. Isserlis writes of the concerto that ‘the power of its emotional journey, expressed with Dvorák’s characteristically folk-like simplicity and directness, offers an irresistible mix of the epic and the touchingly confessional’. The combination of emotional power and simplicity is also a feature of Isserlis’s playing, and part of what makes him such a consummate performer of this work.
This album puts Dvorák’s B minor cello concerto in context, including not only the original ending, but an orchestral version of the song Lasst mich allein which is quoted in the concerto’s second and third movements.
Isserlis has also recorded a version of Dvorák’s first cello concerto, a little-known work from the composer’s early period which he never orchestrated. This version (in what is almost definitely its premiere recording) is by German composer Günter Raphael, whose works were performed by Furtwängler among others, and is extensively rewritten from the composer’s original. To turn to Isserlis’s own words again: ‘Of course, it is not a masterpiece on the level of the later B minor concerto; but is it fair to lock up an older child just because their younger sibling is a genius? I love the A major concerto for the beauty of its melodies, for the freshness of its inspiration, for its typically rustic spirit—and for the sense of sheer joy that bubbles through the entire work.’
The birth of the world’s most beloved cello concerto came as something of a shock to its father. On 10 December 1894 Dvorák wrote to his friend Alois Göbl: ‘I have actually finished the first movement of a Concerto for violoncello!! Don’t be surprised about this, I too am amazed and surprised enough that I was so determined on such work.’ In fact, the concerto was almost written for the piano or violin, for both of which Dvorák had already written concertos. According to his son Otakar, Dvorák disliked the cello, ‘since it sounded too much like muttering’; he felt that it was heard to best advantage in the orchestra and in chamber music rather than as a solo instrument. (It is curious how otherwise intelligent men can be so deluded at times.) For the concerto’s eventual instrumentation we have to thank the insistent Czech cellist who inspired and even collaborated on the work’s composition, Hanuš Wihan (1855–1920). But we also have to be grateful to three rather disparate and unexpected sources of musical inspiration: a glorious series of waterfalls; an Irish-American writer of musical comedies; and an ailing Czech Countess.
Dvorák spent most of the time between late 1892 and early 1895 in America, teaching at the newly formed National Conservatory of Music in New York. In 1893, on his way back to New York after a blissful summer spent among the Czech community in Spillville, Iowa, he visited Niagara Falls. It was reported that Dvorák, having stood for five minutes as though hypnotized, exclaimed: ‘Lord God, this will become a symphony in B minor.’ (Thirty-five years later, Maurice Ravel visited the Falls, and is said to have announced: ‘Quel majestueux si bémol!’—‘What a majestic B flat!’. Was this drop of a semitone an early symptom of global warming?) Dvorák’s epiphany did not result in a symphony (his final work in that genre, the Symphony No 9 in E minor, ‘From the New World’, was pretty much complete by that point); but the grandeur, heroism and nobility of the Cello Concerto in B minor could perhaps stem from that pivotal moment.
Some months later, Dvorák’s ideas about the failings of the cello as a solo instrument were challenged when he attended a concert in which the Irish-American cellist and composer Victor Herbert, better known for musical comedies such as Babes in Toyland, performed his own second Cello Concerto. Here was a lyrical work in which the cello sang out over the orchestra; Herbert described how Dvorák embraced him after the performance, insisting with characteristically loud-voiced enthusiasm that the concerto was ‘famos! famos!—ganz famos!’. And then, once he had embarked on his own concerto, Dvorák’s inspiration was intensified in a poignant way when he learned of the illness of his sister-in-law Josefina, the Countess Kounic, back in Bohemia. Dvorák, like several composers before him (Mozart and Haydn among them), had been in love with his wife’s sister before settling on his wife Anna. Indeed, his feelings may not have changed that much over the years; his great-grandson, ‘Tony’ Dvorák, reported in the 1990s that the family were still gossiping about the relationship. Be that as it may, Josefina’s fate was to have a strong effect on this concerto.
If the genesis of the concerto was somewhat convoluted, its subsequent history was even more so. Dvorák began to sketch the work in November 1894, making a false start in D minor before settling on B minor; the concerto in its original form was completed by 9 February 1895 (Otakar’s birthday—a nice present!). There were to be many subsequent revisions, however, several of them made in collaboration with Wihan, who advised Dvorák on the virtuoso passages in the solo part. Most of these suggestions, written into the manuscript copy by Wihan himself, have become generally accepted (even though Dvorák insisted that in certain passages his original ideas remain in the printed edition as ‘ossias’). But Dvorák drew the line when Wihan tried to insert a cadenza into the last movement. Writing to his publisher, Simrock, Dvorvák raged: ‘I shall only give you the work if you promise that no one, including my respected friend Wihan, makes alterations without my knowledge and consent; also not [i.e. do not print] the cadenza which Wihan has put into the last movement—it must stay in its original form, as I felt and imagined it.’ (Quite right, too: apart from being totally superfluous, Wihan’s cadenza is pretty horrible—and fiendishly difficult. Not a good combination.)
Nevertheless, Dvorák intended that the premiere of the concerto, to take place in London on 19 March 1896, would be given by Wihan. In the event, though, Wihan was otherwise engaged on that date; and Dvorák, having at first protested to the impresario (‘I am sorry to announce you that I cannot conduct the performance of the celo conzerto. The reason is I have promised to my friend Wihan—he will play it’), accepted an English cellist, Leo Stern. Stern was also engaged for the Prague premiere some three weeks later. One imagines that Wihan must have been chewing his carpet, especially since he had already given a private performance of the concerto with Dvorák at the piano some months before; but Stern seems to have done everything in his power to please Dvorák—including trying to learn Czech, and even sending Dvorák some rare pigeons (pigeons being, along with trains, boats and beer, among the composer’s abiding passions). And so Stern won out, probably through sheer determination (how little the music world has changed!); and Wihan had to wait until 1899 for his sole performance of the concerto under the composer’s baton, in Budapest.
About the concerto itself, little need be said; the power of its emotional journey, expressed with Dvorák’s characteristically folk-like simplicity and directness, sweeps aside all description. The orchestral writing, with particularly prominent parts for solo flute and clarinet, is as commanding as that in Dvorák’s symphonies. From the portentous opening, through the magical appearance of the second subject in the horn (from about 2'13''), the cello’s heroic entry in B major (at 3'31''), the thrilling start of the recapitulation with a soaring transformation of the second subject (11'12''), to its triumphant ending, the first movement offers an irresistible mix of the epic and the touchingly confessional.
In the G major second movement one can surely feel Dvorák’s homesickness for his beloved Bohemia. Nostalgia and a love of nature seem to frame every note, particularly in the gentle opening theme, and in the birdsong we hear in the accompanied cadenza (from 7'20'') that adorns the return of the first section. It is in this movement, too, that we feel Josefina’s presence most strongly: in the central minore section Dvorák quotes from a song of his own that Josefina had always loved—Lasst mich allein (Leave me alone), Op 82 No 1 (from 2'50'').
The finale is a large-scale rondo blessed, as the programme note for the first performance put it, with a ‘well-nigh embarrassing plenitude of subject matter’. Well, perhaps not embarrassing; but certainly Dvorák conjures theme after theme of ravishing beauty—including a third subject in the slow movement’s pastoral key of G major (at 5'59'') imbued with a sense of home-coming that, had the concerto remained in its original form, would have impelled the work towards a joyous conclusion.
The end of the concerto was to undergo a transformation, however. A month after Dvorák returned to Bohemia, Josefina died; and in her memory he extended the final coda with reminiscences from both the first and second movements—including another quotation from her beloved song, this time played by a solo violin, along with flute and clarinets (track 3, at 10'45''). Even in retrospect, this alters the overall impression of the concerto; a work that might have come across as largely celebratory is layered with a sense of farewell. It is interesting to compare this coda with another deeply moving end to a cello concerto, that by Elgar. With the latter, one can feel that the coda is an essential part of the overall plan; with Dvorák’s one is perhaps aware that it is an afterthought—but it is none the less heart-rending for that.
A word about editions: given the many stages through which the B minor Cello Concerto passed, it is not surprising that there is some controversy about which edition is most authentic. A couple of autograph sources exist; but it is very possible that the first edition, which differs considerably from both these manuscripts, best represents Dvorák’s final thoughts. (Curiously—and flatteringly for Dvorák—Brahms, who admired the concerto hugely, had a hand in the proof-reading.) Alas, the engraver’s copy prepared for the publishers, which must have contained many revisions, is lost; so it is impossible to be absolutely certain about which version constitutes the holy grail. For this recording, I have picked and chosen from the various sources, while retaining most of Wihan’s cellistic improvements. (In only one brief passage—track 1 from 10'51''—I have, like most of my colleagues, departed from both the printed versions; I have tried again and again to play the original, but it persists in sounding to me like a donkey having a nervous breakdown, which surely cannot have been Dvorák’s intention. So I have rather reluctantly settled for the generally accepted alternative.)
For interest’s sake, we offer here the (surprisingly abrupt) original ending of the concerto, as it was before Josefina died—see track 5. Also, in order that the song Lasst mich allein, quoted in the concerto’s second and third movements, may be heard in a version closer to its original form, we present it here (track 4) in an orchestral arrangement that I was lucky enough to find some years ago in a catalogue of antique music. The words of the song, in which the singer begs to be left alone with her dreams, are touchingly apt.
It is strange that Dvorák never seems to have mentioned that the B minor Cello Concerto was not his first effort in the genre. And yet, almost thirty years earlier, in 1865, he had composed a Concerto in A major for a cellist-colleague in the Regional Theatre orchestra in Prague (where Dvorák played the viola for some years), Ludevít Peer (1847–1904). (1865 was a prolific year for the young composer, which also saw the composition of his first two symphonies and the set of love songs Cypresses, later arranged for string quartet, also inspired by his love for Josefina.) Dvorák never orchestrated the A major Concerto, and when Peer later moved to Germany he took the cello-and-piano manuscript with him; Dvorák probably assumed that it had been lost. However, once the manuscript eventually turned up—it is now in the British Library—it was inevitable that it would be published. Dvorák himself spoke later of his ‘mad’ early period when he was just beginning to find his musical voice; it is safe to say that, had he come across the concerto in later years, he would either have destroyed or heavily revised it. The original version lasts almost an hour, much of the cello part consisting of rambling passagework; and yet here and there are glimpses of Dvorák’s latent genius, particularly in the warm-hearted themes.
In 1975 the much-respected Dvorák scholar Jarmil Burghauser published his orchestration of the A major concerto; this edition closely follows the original, and certainly merits attention. But almost fifty years earlier the German composer Günter Raphael had produced a much freer version, revising the concerto as he imagined Dvorák might have done himself had he ever returned to the work. Raphael was a successful composer in his own right, his works being performed by Furtwängler, among many others; he took a bold approach to the task, by his own admission practically rewriting Dvorák’s concerto. On paper, it looks curious—an early work by Dvorák, re-written by a twentieth-century modernist. And yet, in my humble (but convinced) opinion, as music this version works far better than the original. Raphael retains the warmth and charm of the concerto, while sculpting it into a manageable shape. Of course, it is not a masterpiece on the level of the later B minor concerto; but is it fair to lock up an older child just because their younger sibling is a genius? I love the A major concerto for the beauty of its melodies, for the freshness of its inspiration, for its typically rustic spirit—and for the sense of sheer joy that bubbles through the entire work.
Steven Isserlis © 2013