Saturday, March 30, 2019—Garrick Ohlsson plays Brahms—CAMA's Masterseries at The Lobero Theatre, Santa Barbara

Anne Bothwell’s Lament, so called because
it includes some not-very-specific
complaints about how the baby’s father
treated the mother (any Scot would have
known that Lord Bothwell married Lady
Anne in Denmark, abandoned her and
the baby in Flanders, then went on to
abduct and marry Mary Queen of Scots,
get driven out of Scotland, and spend his
last decade in a dungeon in Denmark.)
This particular Brahms lullaby has the
lilting triple rhythm and drone bass of
the sicilienne, long a cliché for lullabies
and Nativity scenes.
The second intermezzo is more tonally
definite than the first piece of opus
118, but it does not arrive in the home
key of B-flat minor until the very end.
Brahms described the third intermezzo
as “the lullaby of all my griefs,”
with moments of starkness and darkness,
but a middle section of light.
Brahms composed the Variations
and Fugue on a Theme of Handel in 1861,
when he was emerging from something
of a downturn in a career that had been
rising since he met the Schumanns. His
first piano concerto had been badly received
in 1859, as had a “manifesto” he
had co-authored condemning the “New
German School”—essentially, the followers
of Liszt and Wagner—that had been
leaked in 1860 while it was still being
circulated among prominent German
musicians for signatures. Brahms would
avoid written polemics for the rest of his
life, but he had put himself permanently
at the head of the school of musicians
who felt that the future of music lay in
pure music: well-constructed forms that
took Beethoven’s symphonies and sonatas
as their model. The New German
Schoolers also saw themselves as the
heirs of Beethoven, but specifically the
Beethoven of the Ninth Symphony’s choral
celebration of brotherhood: following
Wagner’s lead, they believed music
needed to be about something other
than itself, and the future lay in musical
drama and programmatic tone poems.
So it is no coincidence that a year
after the fizzled manifesto, Brahms produced
a major work in the very traditional
variations and fugue form, on a theme
by Handel, a revered master who had
been dead for a century. (Brahms’ interest
in older music was always unusual
for the time. He was a collector of pre-
Baroque music, gave public performances
of works by Gabrieli and Schütz, and
14 CENTENNIAL SEASON CELEBRATION