Programme Notes

JOHANNES BRAHMS (1833-1897)

Symphony No 4 in E minor, Op 98

Allegro non troppo Andante moderato

Allegro giocoso

Allegro energico é passionato

Right from the beginning, it was the sheer grandeur of Brahms's final symphonythat captured its listeners. 'Just back from rehearsal,' the conductor Hans von Bülow wrote to a friend. 'No 4 stupendous, quite original, quite new, individual and rock-like. Breathes incomparable energy from start to finish.' Brahms's final, emphatic statement in symphonic form, was begun in 1884, shortly after von Bülow had offered him the use of the famous Meiningen Court Orchestra, of which he was conductor, as a rehearsal orchestra. It was the beginning of the Meiningen's traditional rôle as Brahms interpreters, and in the summer of 1884 Brahms became the guest of the Duke of Meiningen in the Villa Carlotta on Lake Como. He had it in mind to write another piano concerto, but felt inhibited by the existence of his first two concertos: 'I don't know,' he told von Bülow, 'the two earlier ones are too good or perhaps too bad, but at any rate they are obstructive to me.'

So, he turned his attention elsewhere. 'I do have a couple of entr'actes,' he wrote ironically to the conductor. 'Put together they make what is commonly called a symphony,' and in the summer he proceeded to Mürzzuschlag, near the Semmering Pass, to adopt his customary practice of composing while on holiday. Out of this emerged the first two movements of opus 98. The third and fourth movements were added in the following year and the piece was ready for private rehearsal by the Meiningen in October 1885. .

First, though, with his close friend, the pianist and composer Ignaz Brüll, he played a two-piano version of the symphony for a small audience that included the influential critic of the Vienna Presse, Eduard Hanslick. Hanslick was the man who in 1868 had been publicly ridiculed by Wagner as the pompous Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger. He was nevertheless an influential critic, and he was not much impressed by the new work: he said it made him feel as if he had been beaten up by two enormously clever and witty people ­ perhaps this was the penalty Brahms paid for launching the symphony in reduced form.

At any rate, these preliminaries over, Brahms conducted the first public performance, in Meiningen, on the 25th October 1885, and it had an enthusiastic reception. Next, he prepared to take the orchestra on tour through Germany and the Netherlands, the E minor symphony being given pride of place in their programmes and being rapturously received.

In short, Brahms's Fourth Symphony had been swiftly recognised as a masterpiece, and it now stands as one of the great bastions of the concert repertoire. A work of massive authority, its opening sets the temper of what is to come: 'No one experienced in great music,' wrote Donald Tovey of the first movement, could fail to see that the long, quiet opening sentence is the beginning of a great and tragic work.' The heroic gestures of the Allegro non troppo are succeeded by an Andante in Brahms's most tenderly reflective vein, but the third movement comes as a sharp contrast. It was actually written after the first three, and it is a forceful and jubilant movement given a brilliant glitter by the addition of piccolo, the bright C clarinet and triangle. The audience at the first performance did their best to get an encore, but Brahms refused. Then, what comes afterwards is unlike any other of Brahms's symphonic movements, a sombre eight-bar Passacaglia, the theme being announced by the wind section, and on which he proceeds to construct 32 variations, with a coda. The movement rises to a passionate climax: as Tovey said, the symphony is 'one of the rarest things in classical music, a symphony which ends tragically.'

As it happens, the E minor symphony was the last of his full-scale works Brahms ever heard in performance. At a public concert in Vienna on 7th March 1897, less than a month before his death, he heard Richter conduct the symphony. When the audience realised Brahms was there, they rose from their places to applaud and wave their handkerchieves, giving the deeply moved composer the last and greatest ovation of his life.

Programme Notes by Paul Vaughan ©

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