Johannes Brahms - Titanic Records

quotes the Adagio’s A subject in its original E b major (compare Ex. 7), now supported by an accompaniment recycling the horn calls of
that movement’s coda. Second, these horn calls are themselves spun out over a complex modulation from E b back to G minor. More
than a mere déjà vu, the episode transforms Heimweh into both a compositional tour-de-force and into an autobiographical confession,
namely Brahms’s well-documented yearning for the past.
In the coda, all thematic elements “A” and “C” are reconciled in G major, key of the first movement. This peroration brings to life
the poem’s “thrill and quiver,” culminating in a radiant pentatonic frisson. Brahms fashions not a cyclical form à la Franck, but rather a
double retrospective (or Rückblick, as Brahms titled a prescient moment in his Piano Sonata, Op. 5): an allusion to an earlier movement and
to an earlier composition, a chapter of his past. A more lucid demonstration of “Brahms the Classical Romantic” would be hard to find.
Second Violin Sonata, Op. 100
Walther’s “Prize Song” (in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Act III, Scene 2)
Walther von Stolzing:
“Shining in the sunlight of the dawning day, the air full of blossoms and scent with beauties beyond imagination a garden bade
me enter.”
Hans Sachs:
That was a Stollen [“stanza”]. Now, make sure that one just like it follows . . .
Walther von Stolzing:
“Joyfully towering from that holy spot offering the healing abundance of rich golden fruit a glorious tree, its fragant branches at
their very tips awaking my desire.”
Hans Sachs:
You did not end in the same key: that insults the Mastersingers; but Hans Sachs has learned something from this, for this is what
Spring’s all about. Now compose an Abgesang [“aftersong”].
Walther von Stolzing:
What does that mean?
Hans Sachs:
If you’ve succeeded in finding the right pair, their offspring will show it. Like the Stollen but not the same, it [the Abgesang] is
rich in its own rhymes and tunes . . . it will close your Stollen so that nothing will fall out of place.
Walther von Stolzing (continuing his song):
“Listen to the radiant wonder that befell me: a woman stood by my side, so fair and beautiful as I had never seen; she gently
entwined me like a bride; with gleaming eyes she pointed her hand towards what I so fervently desired, the precious fruit of the
Tree of Life.”
Hans Sachs:
Now that’s an Abgesang. See how well the whole piece has come off! But you are a bit free with the melody, though I would not
deem that a fault; only it is hard to follow, and that ruffles our old curmudgeons.
***
Translation of Brahms’s song Wie Melodien zieht es mir
(“Like a Melody It Roams”), Op. 105, No. 1
Like a melody it roams
softly through my mind,
Like a flower in spring it blossoms
and hovers like a fragrance.
Yet the Word comes and seizes it
and brings it before my eyes;
Like a gray mist it pales
and then fades like a breath.
And yet concealed in rhymes
is a fragrance well hidden,
that from the quiet bud
can a moist eye awaken.
— poem by Klaus Groth
During the summer of 1886, Brahms wrote the Second Violin Sonata in Thun, Switzerland, while visiting a writer friend, J.V.
Widmann. The composer and violinist Joseph Hellmesberger premiered this sunny work in Vienna in December the same year. Far
outreaching Op. 78 in its literary associations, Op. 100 incorporates both Wagnerian opera (Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg) and
Brahmsian Lied. Brahms’s stance towards the “New German School,” remember, was trickier than many of his followers wished (or were
savvy enough) to admit. Though he decried Liszt’s music, he glorified Wagner’s. He confided to a friend, Rudolf von der Leyen: “I am a far
older Wagnerite than all the rest of you put together. When Richard Wagner died, my first impulse was to send a fine wreath to Bayreuth
for his grave. Only think, even that was misinterpreted as scorn . . . . It was wonderful to see what lengths men’s tactlessness and blindness
are capable of going . . . .” He pored over Wagner’s scores and musical essays as well; one even finds a quotation from Wagner’s operatic
manifesto, Oper und Drama, in Brahms’s literary diary. And despite Wagner’s stingy praise for his younger contemporary’s variation works
(“He’s no joker”), Brahms volunteered to copy orchestra parts for a concert of Wagner opera excerpts given in Vienna, 26 December 1862.
The Brahms-Wagner connection runs still deeper. As this writer has shown in a 1986 article, Wagner’s Tristan and Brahms’s
contemporaneous song Liebe und Frühling II were affined in procedures of text, setting and harmony. And in an essay of 1990, David
Brodbeck identified harmonic structures in Tannhäuser reinterpreted by Brahms in his Third Symphony.
Similarly, Brahms scholarship over the last hundred years has discussed the thematic relationship between Die Meistersinger and
Brahms’s Second Violin Sonata. Richard Specht, one of his early biographers, recorded a comment he made thereto pertaining: “Do you
think me so narrow that I, too, cannot be enchanted by the gaiety and grandeur of Die Meistersinger? Or so dishonest as to conceal my