Johannes Brahms (arr. Detlev Glanert)
When Johannes Brahms was composing his Symphony No. 2 in D major, he was in the midst of his creative life, while his Four Serious Songs came nearly at the end. What could be more contrasting than a “serious” composition and one like Brahms’s Second Symphony that is sometimes described as “pastoral”? And yet the symphony is not the product of a youth starting his career, but rather a work by a man already long famous for his German Requiem, Op. 45, a composition of profound intellectual depth. It is understandable that Brahms was posing existential questions in his late songs, but we understand all the same that he needed to grow into symphonic composing. Therefore, the gulf separating the two contrasting compositions is not as wide as it might seem.
Before Brahms settled in Vienna permanently in late 1871, he had already visited the Austrian capital, and his curriculum vitae reflected a diversity of experiences. Born in Hamburg, he got his first musical training at home (his father made a living as a town musician). Thanks to his teachers Otto Friedrich W. Cossel and Eduard Marxsen, he perfected his craft as a pianist and composer, performed in public, composed, and travelled. He was fortunate to have had talented and inspiring friends like the Hungarian violinist Eduard Reményi, his senior by a few years, the violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim, a graduate of the conservatoire in Vienna, and the married couple Robert and Clara Schumann. He got to know Göttingen, Hannover, Weimar, Bonn, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Leipzig… And his love of travel never left him. Friendship with the Schumann family was especially meaningful for Brahms, and its importance lasted long past the death of Robert Schumann in 1856. Despite all his emotional and professional ties to Hamburg or to Baden-Baden, where Clara and her children were living from 1863 to 1873, Brahms led something of a nomadic existence. Even after having finally settled in Vienna, he enjoyed travelling over the summer holidays or going on journeys to Italy. Speaking of the 1870s, when Brahms wrote his Symphony No. 2, we cannot fail to mention his part in awarding a stipend to support Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) and the start of their friendship. Brahms then spent the 1880s and ’90s as a distinguished composer, pianist, and conductor honoured with various awards and titles.
Our concert programme is not in chronological order; instead it begins with the Four Serious Songs (Vier ernste Gesänge), originally composed for bass with piano accompaniment. It is Brahms’s final work (Op. 121), dated to 1896, when it was composed (completed in May), published (July), and publicly premiered (9 November). Getting back to Antonín Dvořák, at the end of November 1896, he asked the publisher Fritz Simrock in Berlin to send him the edition of Brahms’s cycle, writing that “everyone is talking about the great beauty of these songs, and I don’t know them yet.” Everything now seemed to be speeding up: time ran out for Clara Schumann, who died in the spring of 1896, and Brahms’s own life was moving swiftly towards its end, his last year (1897) being marked by incurable illness. Against this background, we are not surprised by the composer’s choice of texts: quotes from Martin Luther’s German translation of the Bible, specifically from Ecclesiastes, Sirach, and Paul the Apostle’s First Epistle to the Corinthians – the famous 13th chapter that extols love above faith and hope. Whatever relationship Brahms may have had with religion and especially with its institutionalised form, his Four Serious Songs touch upon general, basic themes of human life with great honesty.
Song cycles constitute an important part of Johannes Brahms’s oeuvre starting already with early opuses from the beginning of the 1850s. In total, he wrote over 300 songs with piano accompaniment, and he took an interest in both folk songs and the works of German poets (writing musical settings, for example, of verses by Friedrich Rückert, Joseph von Eichendorff, texts from the collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and much more). Brahms’s preoccupation with the other arts can also be seen from the dedication of his Four Serious Songs to the symbolist painter, graphic artist, and amateur pianist Max Klinger, whose father had died recently. And for his part, Klinger had already expressed his admiration for the composer in his Brahms-Phantasie, a cycle of graphic prints combining images with Brahms’s musical scores (1894). The songs were premiered in Vienna in the composer’s presence by two artists from the Netherlands—the baritone Anton Sistermans and the still very young pianist Coenraad V. Bos. The introverted songs proceed from minor keys to the final section in E flat major, which after all comes across more optimistically than, for example, the third song O Tod, wie bitter bist du.
The beauty of Brahms’s Opus 121 has inspired various arrangements such as a piano transcription by Max Reger (1912) and an orchestral version by Malcolm Sargent (1944). The orchestral arrangement by Detlev Glanert (* 1960, Hamburg) on today’s programme could be called a sensitive completion of Brahms’s work by the addition of four preludes and a postlude. The individual songs are thus joined into a single whole, respecting Brahms’s original work whilst also drawing from the resources of modern musical thought. Glanert, as is clear from his biography, has had plenty of experience with arranging the works of other composers, whether of the Classical (Beethoven), Romantic (Schubert, Schumann), Post-Romantic (Mahler), or earlier periods (Isaak, Scarlatti). The exceptional nature of this adaptation is expressed by the title Vier Präludien und Ernste Gesänge (2004/2005), which we can encounter on concert programmes.
Contrasting with the large quantity of songs, Johannes Brahms wrote only four symphonies. The First Symphony (C minor, Op. 68) had a long gestation period, with sketches for the first movement dating back to the 1860s, but the composer was still making changes to it in 1877 after its first public performances. It was well received everywhere except perhaps in Munich, and in many cases there was also an awareness that in the work Brahms was continuing the legacy of the great symphonies of the Classical era and especially of Ludwig van Beethoven. It was not without reason that the conductor Hans von Bülow called it “Beethoven’s Tenth”. A synthesis of Classicism and Romanticism also characterises Brahms’s Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 73, which he composed swiftly, immediately on the heels of the First Symphony. Brahms began writing it in the summer of 1877 while staying in the Carinthian town Pörtschach, and by the end of the year it had already been performed by the Vienna Philharmonic under the baton of Hans Richter.
The Second Symphony is often seen as a joyous work, lyrical, bucolic, and unusually sunny in the context of Brahms’s music. Whether the composer meant his remarks seriously or ironically, he called the work an expression of his melancholy spirit, almost unbearable for both performers and listeners. In truth, the symphony is not straightforwardly jubilant, and it conceals no lack of shadows, with the composer’s inner turmoil seeming to rise from beneath the surface of idyllic inspiration from nature. Frequent key changes, a large brass section (four French horns, two trumpets, three trombones, and tuba), and contrapuntal resources all highlight an ambiguity that makes the work’s character all the more celebratory and monumental. From the exceptionally extensive first movement (Allegro non troppo) in sonata form, we proceed to a serious and very moving Adagio non troppo and a graceful menuet as the third movement (Allegretto grazioso quasi andantino), and then onwards to the finale (Allegro con spirito), again in sonata form. Unified by a basic three-note motif, thoughtfully structured, and given a special atmosphere by its masterful orchestration, Brahms’s Second Symphony is today a popular work in the repertoire of the world’s leading orchestras.
