How Brahms gave his music to the world

There are two compelling descriptions of Brahms composing: one by Brahms himself talking to his young friend the singer (and later conductor) Georg Henschel on 26 February 1876 during a train journey between Koblenz and Wiesbaden, the other by his biographer Max Kalbeck, who happened to meet him on one of his composing walks. Both in their different ways testify to intense mental activity away from manuscript paper: Brahms composed in the main, not at the piano or at his desk, but in his head. It is no surprise therefore to find his musical handwriting, when he came to write a piece down, characterised by a certain urgency. Of course he sketched and drafted (mostly destroying such material after it had served its purpose); but his writing out of the full form of a composition was usually as a working copy, which had running corrections as he changed his mind on details. The script is characteristically fluent, and all sorts of short-cuts are employed – including notational abbreviations, or ways of forming characters which are really economical (he used to combine leger-lines and note-stems into one stroke of the pen, and he developed a way of writing natural signs with one stroke too). His correction methods needed to be similarly efficient, and the two most common are surely also the two fastest – smearing the ink when still wet, then writing in the revised notation over the smear, or crossing something out in ink and replacing it alongside; on occasions he also used a knife to scrape out mistakes. The meaning of dynamic and articulation signs is usually clear as he wrote them, though the placement of crescendo and decrescendo hairpins can be approximate, increasingly so perhaps towards the bottom of pages.

Commentators from Brahms's century and our own have largely interpreted Schumann's prophetic remark about the ‘powers amassed in the orchestra and chorus’, on which Brahms should draw, as a reference to the Beethovenian symphonic tradition at mid-century and, specifically, the challenges posed by the choral finale of Beethoven's Ninth. Robert Schumann had certainly led his readers in that direction when, earlier in ‘Neue Bahnen’ (‘New Paths’), he refers to sonatas that were ‘veiled symphonies’ among those pieces the twenty-year-old Brahms played for Clara and himself in October of 1853. Nevertheless, it is likely that Brahms and his contemporaries understood Schumann's comment to refer at least as much to orchestrally accompanied choral music as to choral symphonies or symphonic music more generally. Schumann, after all, produced many of his large choral works during the last decade of his life, by which time his own style had veered decisively towards Mendelssohn's more traditional legacy. And when Brahms did finally establish himself as a major force on the German music scene in 1868 he did so with a major choral work of his own, Ein deutsches Requiem Op. 45, the largest piece he was ever to compose.

Given the tremendous success of that work and the various shorter works for chorus and orchestra that followed around 1870 (Alto Rhapsody Op. 53, Schicksalslied Op. 54, Triumphlied Op. 55), it is easy to lose sight of the fact that by 1868 Brahms had already produced a large number of choral works of more modest proportions and that he continued to compose choral music of all types for the next two decades. And whereas Brahms’s status as a composer of choral music is much acknowledged in the choral world, his signficance in this area among musicians at large has been overshadowed by his reputation as a symphonist and chamber music composer.

There exists an early photograph – a shadowy person, a stretch of wall – which dates from 1824: three years before Beethoven's death. It sets the mind racing with the thought that just such a primitive apparatus might well have been turned on Beethoven himself. Just as the early gramophone captured the last castrato, so a spectral image could well have existed of this extraordinary little man who even in his lifetime had become one of the great mythic figures of the civilisation of the West. Only a few years were to pass, and the next generation – Schumann, Berlioz, Chopin (beautifully, in that nakedly revealing tragic late photograph by Bisson) – are all recorded. Musicians, and many others: the heroic age of photography produced, in the hands of Nadar, startlingly immediate images of Baudelaire, which make him peculiarly our contemporary. Such images lend to the historical existence of those depicted something which all the documentation in the world cannot: this immediacy, this contemporaneity, this sense of Now. The invention of the camera created a great dividing line in our experience of the past.

Such thoughts arise when one gazes at the many existing photographs of Brahms. They put him in a different category to Beethoven, whom the passing of time has cut off from us, has reduced to a history-book figure. Brahms, by the aid of the camera, can be imagined as tenuously alive, as a real person to be seen walking about the streets of Vienna. The arguments for the greater truth of character portrayal achieved by the art of the portrait painter are still occasionally rehearsed and (more rarely) justified. It is also true that the typical nineteenth-century photograph is a posed one; whereas we esteem in a photograph a touch of the arbitrary, the fortuitous: the ‘snapshot’.

An approach to the music

The completion of my series of Brahms recordings with the London Classical Players provides an opportune moment to reflect on my approach to them. I have come to Brahms as the latest stage in a long exploration of musical performance from a historically-informed viewpoint which began with the Baroque era, continued into the classical era with Haydn and Mozart, and has stretched through the works of Beethoven and Schubert to the Romantics Mendelssohn, Berlioz and Schumann, and eventually to Brahms, Wagner and Bruckner. The aim has been to seek to restore as much as possible the relationship between the scores, which have not changed, and the instruments, forces and performing styles, which most certainly have. I wanted to find out how things actually were in the performing situation, to get the relationship right in order to enable the music to sound fresh and natural. The use of earlier instruments and playing styles does not force us to be old-fashioned: on the contrary, it ought to help us to re-create these masterpieces afresh. Like Schumann, Brahms has long had a reputation as a poor orchestrator, his textures being seen as overloaded and unclear. Though Brahms's scoring has had many detractors, I have never agreed with their objections. But there is equally no doubt in my mind that using the resources of his own time can tell us much about his orchestration, and about the music itself.

In December 1890, in a letter to his publisher Fritz Simrock, the fifty-seven-year old Johannes Brahms announced his intention to retire from composing: ‘With this scrap bid farewell to notes of mine – because it really is time to stop’. The ‘scrap’ in question was a part of the String Quintet in G major Op. 111, which the composer had completed during the previous summer. In February 1891, this new work appeared in print, together with a thorough revision made two years previously of the early Piano Trio in B major Op. 8, whose original version dated from 1854. The composer thus planned to make his valediction with two major chamber compositions which, like polished bookends, embraced the whole of his long and productive career.

Yet within only a few months of this letter Brahms was hard at work once more. In the summer of 1891, inspired by the skilful playing of Richard Mühlfeld, the principal clarinettist of the Meiningen Court Orchestra, he produced both the Trio in A minor for Piano, Clarinet and Violoncello Op. 114, and the Quintet in B minor for Clarinet and Strings Op. 115. Then, three years later, came still another pair of compositions featuring Mühlfeld's instrument – the two Sonatas for Piano and Clarinet, in F minor and E, major, Op. 120. And it was only with these masterpieces of old age, finally, that Brahms concluded a lifetime's preoccupation with chamber music.