program - SVIZ

enabled him to break through to the composers’ circles of the older generation.
In his article ‘Neue Bahnen’ (New Paths), published in the journal Neue
Zeitschrift für Musik in 1853, Schumann wrote enthusiastically, and at the
same time prophetically, that Brahms “is destined to articulate the highest
expression of the time in an ideal way”. Thus some years later Brahms was
deeply saddened by Schumann’s illness, during which time he remained
at the side of the elder composer’s wife Clara, a figure who aroused deep
emotions in Brahms. From that time onwards, Clara represented the ideal
woman, wife and mother to Brahms, and he always sought her approval
with regard to his new works.
In chamber music Brahms succeeded in capturing the full depth of his creative
personality, while at the same time exhaustively exploring a range of formal
and sonic possibilities. In a period of 40 years, between 1854 and 1894 (from
the time of making the acquaintance of the Schumanns onwards) Brahms
wrote twenty-four artistically perfected musical works. Amongst them, in
the period of the ‘first maturity’, we find the String Sextet No. 1, composed
between November 1859 and the summer of 1860, and first publicly performed
by Joseph Jaochim’s expanded string quartet in October in Hanover. The
composer’s own arrangement of the slow movement for piano was dedicated
to Clara Schumann on the occasion of her birthday, on 13 September 1860.
Before Brahms’s work the string sextet barely existed as a chamber music
genre. In fact, Brahms’s sextet could itself be understood more as an attempt at
approaching the symphony than as a pioneering work in the area of chamber
music. It comes close to the symphony in terms of its formal characteristics
and due to its dark, almost orchestral sound world, in which the violas and
cellos dominate the violins. Less symphonic, however, is the approach to
forming the musical texture, in which the melody and accompaniment are
explicitly distinct. The charm of the work lies precisely in this combining of a
dark sound world with an explicit, emotional melody, which is perhaps why
Brahms called the work “a long sentimental composition”.
The cantabile first movement, with its extensive dynamic range, is written in
expanded sonata form, with Brahms taking Schubert as a model: the transition
from the first theme to the second is delayed by a subsidiary theme – an
extended modulation to a distant key. The complex set of variations in the
slow second movement is testimony to Brahms’s study of counterpoint and
ancient music: the variations over a repeating bass line are reminiscent of
the tradition of La Folia variations or the chaconne. The energetic Scherzo
with a dance trio reveal another side of the composer’s personality, adding
the demonic ‘Kreisler’ to the warmth of the young Brahms of the second
movement (Kreisler was Brahms’s pseudonym, after the emotional, confused
composer from Hoffmann’s work Tomcat Murr). Both of these personalities
combine forces in the final movement, which interweaves the forms of rondo,
sonata movement and variations. Rather than a classical finale, here Brahms
approaches the ‘heavenly length’ of the finales of Schubert’s works.
PROGRAM / PROGRAM
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Katarina Šter
Prevod / Translation: Neville Hall