Symphony No.4 in e minor op.98

JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897) was only 20 years old when Schumann, in the article "Neue Wege" published in his music journal, announced to all Germany: "He has come! This youth with young blood, over whose cradle graces and heroes have watched". He saw him as a worthy successor to Beethoven's musical legacy and urged the young composer to begin writing in larger orchestral forms. Brahms, however, was unsure of his own knowledge and abilities. After several failed attempts, he told the conductor Hermann Levi: "I will never write a symphony! You can't imagine the courage it takes to make up your mind when you hear the footsteps of the giant behind you!” The giant is Ludwig van Beethoven - along with Johann Sebastian Bach, they were the idols he worshipped. Brahms spent nearly two decades (1854-76) working on his Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68, completing it at the age of 43. A year later, in 1877, he presented the Symphony No 2 in D major, Op. 73. In similar close succession, he composed the Third in F major, Op. 90 (1883) and the Fourth in E minor, Op. 98 (1884-85). The last, Symphony No. 4, was composed, as was his usual practice, during the summer holidays. This time he stayed in the Alpine village of Mürztüschlag in Styria. In the summer of 1884 he wrote the first two movements of the work, and the following summer, in 1885, he composed first the finale of the symphony and then the third movement. He kept his conception a secret, and when asked what he was writing during his holiday, he replied, "Nothing so grand! I put together a bunch of polkas and waltzes". It is hard to believe how, in completing this masterpiece, the 52-year-old Brahms was filled with apprehension about the perception of this opus by his friends, the public. In a letter to the conductor, Hans von Bülow he would share, 'I really fear that it tastes rather tingly like the climate here. Cherries don't ripen in these parts, you wouldn't eat them!". His fears were further exacerbated when, back in Vienna, he and Ignaz Bruhl played the new symphony on piano 4 hands in front of some of his closest friends and devotees. The critic Eduard Hanslick was disturbed already by the 1st movement; the journalist Max Kalbeck recommended him to publish the finale as a stand-alone work and to write a new one. Elisabeth Herzogenberg was alarmed by the complex interplay of melodic motifs and thematic connections: 'One rejoices with all the excitement of an explorer or scholar when discovering the secrets of your creation! But there comes a moment when a certain doubt creeps in... that its beauty is not accessible to every music connoisseur." At the premiere, however - it was on October 25^th , 1885 in Meiningen with the Court Orchestra conducted by the composer - the audience was captivated by the power and scale of the Fourth Symphony. It is the most expressive and tragic symphonic creation Brahms produced. Solertinsky described it as "an instrumental drama that evolves from mournful reflections and emotional flights in the first movement to a tragic catastrophe at the end." In its basic outline, the four-movement cycle (fast - slow - scherzo - finale) bears the attributes of the classical-romantic symphony of the Viennese classics, Schubert and Schumann. But the composer imbues this form with a profound and original dialectic in the development of the dramaturgy. The symphony begins with a chain of descending tercets that pour out into a lyrical melody akin to Bach's chorale "Mein Jesu" ("My Jesus"). The entire first movement moves dynamically through a huge variety of thematic motifs, textures, colours and rhythms, inventively combined in a smooth logical flow. Brahms displays his amazing ability to generate themes and movements from the smallest melodic material. And his great mastery of motivic variation development is brilliantly demonstrated in this work. The tension of the opening Sonata Allegro is balanced by the graphic beauty of the second slow movement, tonally tinged with the archaic Phrygian mode. Unexpectedly, and for the first time in his symphony, Brahms includes a sonorous and energetic Scherzo in the third movement, which he once jokingly described as 'Alexander the Great's March to India'. And after it, in the finale, the sense of growing, relentless tragedy unfolds. Is Brahms contemplating his own mortality, death, in this symphony? Does it encode the artist's foreboding of a future moral and social collapse? The fourth movement is structured in the form of a passacaglia (some scholars describe it as a chaconne), a theme with 30 variations on basso ostinato and coda. The composer took and adapted the 8-bar theme from the then unpublished and unknown 150th Bach cantata Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich ("I long for you, Lord"), which Philipp Spitta, Johann Sebastian's biographer, sent him in 1874, and directed him to the unusual final chaconne in the work's last movement, Meine Tage in dem Leide ("My Days in Suffering"). No one before Brahms had thought to revive and use this archaic form in a symphonic work. In fact, the composer did it for the second time, 11 years after Variations on a Theme by Haydn and his attempt at a piano version of Bach's Chaconne for solo violin. After him, composers of the so-called New Viennese School - Webern and Berg - would use the form in an atonal context.