Johannes Brahms, a native of the north-German city Hamburg, settled in Vienna permanently in 1863, where he was offered the position of choirmaster of the Wiener Singakademie, but after about a year he resigned from the position to devote himself fully to composing. The conductor and composer Hans von Bülow and Clara and Robert Schumann were among his life-long friends, and it was Robert Schumann who declared that Brahms was the long-awaited successor to Ludwig van Beethoven. Brahms is generally regarded as having brought to its apex the compositional style that Beethoven had begun, especially in the field of the symphony. However, Brahms was also thoroughly familiar with the works of Mozart, Haydn, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. The music of all of these great masters inspired Brahms, especially with respect to mastery of classical musical form, which was of key importance for his musical expression. It was because of Brahms’s respect for tradition that his music was seen as being in opposition to the progressive approach of the operatic genius Richard Wagner or to the new genre of the symphonic poem introduced by Franz Liszt. However, the notorious “War of the Romantics” was fought much less between the composers themselves than between music theorists who often vehemently defended one side or the other. History, however, showed that both sides of the War of the Romantics were equally important for music’s future development. For example, the leader of the Second Viennese School Arnold Schoenberg proudly claimed himself to be an admirer of and successor to Brahms.
Nothing terrified Brahms more than being compared with Beethoven. Concerning Beethoven, Brahms wrote in a letter to the conductor Hermann Levi: “I shall never write a symphony! You have no idea what it’s like to hear the heavy footsteps of a giant like him behind you!“ As it turned out, Brahms wrote four symphonies, and today they are all an integral part of the standard symphonic repertoire. The composer’s journey to writing his First Symphony was especially difficult. Fourteen years separate the first version of the manuscript, which he sent to Clara Schumann in 1862, and the premiere of the completed symphony. Brahms wrote his next three symphonies noticeably more quickly. After the last one, the Symphony No. 4 in E minor, with the exception of the Double Concerto for violin and cello, he turned away entirely from composing for orchestra, thereafter devoting himself only to writing songs and music for chamber ensembles.
Brahms’s last symphony was premiered in October 1885, and unlike the two before it, Brahms decided to have the Fourth premiered away from Vienna. This took place in the German city Meiningen, and Brahms himself conducted the local court orchestra, of which Hans von Bülow was the music director at the time. The public in Meiningen was enthusiastic, but the Viennese public less so; ultimately, the symphony won over the Viennese as well. Of all of Brahms’s symphonies, it is the Fourth that refers back to Beethoven the most, and at the same time, it is a perfect example of how eloquently absolute music can speak. It has no programmatic content, but many music theorists still regard it as a work of exceptional intellectual seriousness and as one of the most tragic symphonies in the history of the entire genre. The American musicologist Jan Swafford went so far as to declare: “The E Minor ‘means’ many things, but surely part of it is this: his funeral song for his heritage, for a world at peace, for an Austro-German middle class that honoured and understood music like no other culture, for the sweet Vienna he knew, for his own lost loves. In one of the last pieces he wrote in 1896, Brahms would set the E Minor Symphony’s first four notes, B G E C to the words ‘O death, O death!’” Adding to the whole work’s gloomy, even tragic mood is the home key of E minor, which predominates throughout, and unlike in previous symphonies by Brahms and his predecessors, the music does not modulate to the brighter, more optimistic major mode even at the end. The symphony is also remarkable for the economy of musical resources that Brahms employs to construct such a magnificent work; for example, the first movement is based in its entirety on the opening two-note motif. The middle movements, Andante and Allegro giocoso, reveal both Brahms’s feeling for songful lyricism and his sophisticated, playful handling of rhythm. The concluding fourth movement is remarkable not only for its minor-key ending, but especially for having been composed in the form of a passacaglia. The form, originally from the baroque era, is based on a repeating theme, usually in the bass, above which the composer creates one new contrapuntal variation after another. “The conclusion of this movement, searingly, crushingly tragic, is a veritable orgy of destruction, a terrible counterpart to the paroxysm of joy at the end of Beethoven’s last symphony”, wrote the conductor Felix Weingartner in 1909 about Brahms’s very last symphonic movement.
