Program notes for "BRAHMS ON BRAHMS"
By Emily Reese

Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77
Johannes Brahms
b. Hamburg, Germany, 7 May 1833
d. Vienna, Austria, 3 April 1897
Premiered in Leipzig, January 1, 1879, soloist Joseph Joachim, conductor Johannes Brahms

Johannes Brahms and violinist Joseph Joachim were friends for nearly 30 years by the time Brahms presented Joachim with the Violin Concerto. They met in 1853, while Brahms was touring with Hungarian violinist Eduard Reményi as Reményi’s accompanist. Joachim went to a recital of Reményi’s in Hanover that year, and Joachim was interested in the talents of the accompanist, Brahms. They quickly forged a friendship, and Joachim encouraged Brahms to get in touch with him, should collaborations with Reményi deteriorate.

Deteriorate they did; Reményi was rather ostentatious, if not a bit obnoxious, compared to Brahms’s modest reserve. Months after their first meeting, Joachim and Brahms were together again. Joachim, just shy of two years older than Brahms, was already an accomplished soloist, composer, and conductor. He provided Brahms with performance opportunities, and they were able to feed each other creatively.

Nevertheless, it was decades before Brahms wrote a concerto for Joachim. Joachim’s suggestions were invaluable to the composition of the piece, although Brahms didn’t necessarily always use Joachim’s input to make changes.

Late in his life, Joachim said, “The Germans have four violin concertos. The greatest, the one that makes fewest concessions, is Beethoven’s. The one by Brahms comes close to Beethoven’s in its seriousness. Max Bruch wrote the richest and most enchanting of the four. But the dearest of them all, the heart’s jewel, is Mendelssohn’s.” It’s not an especially flattering quote to Brahms, but Joachim never made it a secret that Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D major was his favorite. When Joachim and Brahms premiered Brahms’s Concerto in Leipzig, the performance opened with Joachim playing Beethoven’s Concerto. Brahms felt that the concert had “too much D major in it,” but overall the public liked his own Concerto.

Brahms’s contemporaries had differing opinions, however. When conductor Josef Hellmesberger led the Vienna premiere of Brahms’s Violin Concerto in D major two weeks after its world premiere in Leipzig, he commented that the work was “not for, but against the violin.” Violinist Bronislaw Huberman rather said, “It is a concerto for violin against the orchestra—and the violin wins.” The Concerto is very symphonic in nature, and often treats the violin less like a soloist than a collaborator to the orchestra behind it.
Joachim’s talents coupled with the partnership he had with Brahms meant that Brahms wrote a very difficult part for the violin. Joachim wrote the cadenza most often heard in the first movement. Brahms’s Violin Concerto was a showy piece, but in a symphonically elegant manner. By this time, Brahms had written his first two symphonies, and the Variations on a Theme of Haydn, and he had a strong understanding of writing for large orchestra.

Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68
Johannes Brahms
b. Hamburg, Germany, 7 May 1833
d. Vienna, Austria, 3 April 1897
Premiered in Karlsruhe, Germany on 4 November, 1876

It is often called “Beethoven’s Tenth,” both admirably and critically. When conductor Hans von Bülow named Johannes Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 in C minor as such, von Bülow meant it as praise. But as more colleagues and critics began to use the phrase, Brahms’s patience wore thin.

Literary critic and author Harold Bloom put forward a theory in 1973 called the “anxiety of influence.” Bloom studied the Romantic poets, and learned that the success of the master poets of the time created anxiety in subsequent writers to achieve a voice of their own, independent of the influence of their predecessors. Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” theory quickly made the rounds in other artistic practices, and the term is aptly and frequently applied to Brahms’s relationship to Beethoven.

Although Beethoven wrote only nine symphonies, he completely dominated the symphonic form through innovation and originality. Brahms was fearful of being compared to Beethoven, and fearful of not living up to Beethoven’s legacy. For this very reason, it took Brahms more than 20 years to complete his Symphony No. 1. The first sketch truly surfaces 14 years before the symphony’s completion. Extant sketches leading up to that time developed into the first movement of his Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor. But given Brahms’s tendency toward self-criticism, it’s also likely that he spent years creating and destroying ideas before finally committing to a first movement.
Brahms showed the drafted first movement to friends Clara Schumann and Albert Dietrich in 1862, but it didn’t contain the lengthy slow introduction, as we know it now. Not much evidence exists that Brahms worked on the symphony again heavily until 1874. The primary theme of the first movement is easy to compare to Beethoven’s 9th, rhythmically and lyrically, an observation not lost on listeners.

The second movement introduces such stark contrast to its predecessor. The E major Andante sostenuto develops so touchingly, closing with a gorgeous violin solo. With all the comparisons to Beethoven, Brahms had his share of innovation in his first symphony, and placing such a lengthy violin solo at the close of a movement is no exception. The charming third movement is brief, but contains brilliant moments of dancing conversation between strings and winds.

The final movement, as with the first, contains a sizeable introduction. It begins in C minor, but quickly moves to C major, set beautifully by the famous Alphorn theme. Shortly after the horns state their case, the equally famous C major primary theme of the final movement flows from the strings, traded shortly thereafter to the winds. Not only was the theme of Brahms’ first movement compared to Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” in Beethoven’s 9th, but the overall arch from tragedy to triumph was likened to Beethoven’s 5th (the two also share the same key relationship of C minor to C major).

The influence of Beethoven upon Brahms is one of the most successful, if not touching, examples of influence in the history of music. The wonderful and inspirational things that are so beautiful in the music of Beethoven are very much the same things that are wonderful in the music of Brahms: brilliant control of thematic development, treatment of form and instrumentation, the ability to conceive a symphony as a whole entity rather than four movements, and perhaps specifically the care to treat the first movement as a journey to the fourth.