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Quartet in A minor, Op. 51, No. 2

When Brahms finally produced a string quartet, he did it twofold, with two very different works appearing simultaneously in a single opus number. We know little about the process of composition except that it was in progress long before its 1873 publication, when the composer was already 40.

Like its companion piece in Opus 51, the Second Quartet also went through an extended gestation period; it was finished enough for Brahms to play through for a friend, the scholar Hermann Deiters, in 1868. He finally allowed it to reach performance in Berlin on October 18, 1873, two months before the C-minor quartet was premiered. The performers were Brahms’s old friend Joseph Joachim and his quartet. He filled the music with references to Joachim and to their friendship; it is surprising in retrospect that Brahms did not dedicate this quartet to Joachim (both Opus 51 quartets are dedicated rather to his correspondent and chamber-music partner, Theodor Billroth, one of the most distinguished medical men of the day). Evidently the composer was suffering from a momentary fit of pique with Joachim at the time he sent the manuscript off to the publisher.

The A-minor quartet is filled with a wealth of canon and counterpoint, à la Bach, yet it is a more relaxed work than its compact, tense predecessor. The first reference to Joachim comes right at the outset: the first violin’s second, third, and fourth notes are on the pitches F A E, which Joachim had once employed has his personal motto (they stood for “frei aber einsam”—”free but lonely”). Later on Brahms works this motif, joining it with his own response, F A F (standing for “frei aber froh”—“free but happy”). Though this minor-key quartet tends toward somber moods, the graceful second theme offers relief. The development is extraordinarily rich in imitative counterpoint, used for expressive purposes, not simply to show off the composer’s technique. Joachim’s F A E reappears at the end of the coda.

The second movement’s simple A B A form is considerably elaborated. Schoenberg, a great admirer of Brahms, later marveled at the motivic linking and mirroring in this movement. In the middle section, first violin and cello sing in canon (exact imitation) on a rather “Hungarian” melody (perhaps another reference to Joachim) while the inner voices play an “orchestral” tremolo. When it ends in the “wrong” key, F, the cello moves back to A for a decorated repetition of the A section.

The third movement is a slow minuet whose drooping cadences alternate with a livelier passage in duple meter. Twice there is an interruption in which both themes are combined in an astonishing contrapuntal transformation: first violin and viola play the minuet theme in canon, while second violin and cello simultaneously play a transformation of the livelier theme in canon!

The finale is a lively sonata-rondo on a dancelike theme of Hungarian cast (another possible bow to Joachim). This undergoes lively variation in cross-rhythms and transformation before returning in the lively, but sober, conclusion.

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Quartet in B-flat, Op. 67

The intense effort that Brahms put into the string quartet occasionally revealed itself in his first  published quartets as a straining after effect, attempting perhaps more than the quartet medium allowed. Surprisingly different, then, is his last string quartet, Opus 67, completed in May 1876 and published later the same year. For this quartet, Brahms returned to Haydn, the progenitor of all string quartet writing, and produced a work of wit and charm. His good friend Clara Schumann wrote to him, after hearing a private performance:

I am especially pleased with the third and fourth movements and I cannot decide which delights me the more, the melodious viola solo in the third or the charming theme with its delicate tracery in the fourth. The theme with its playful ending is a pure joy.

On the whole, playfulness is not a quality normally associated with Brahms, and Clara Schumann's comment highlights one of the striking features of this work. When it was performed privately at the home of Brahms's physician friend and correspondent Theodor Billroth in June 1876, a notice appeared in one of the Vienna papers: “The new work is said to be very tuneful and easy to understand.” This was something new and different for Brahms—at least as far as the general public went. The newspaper also recounted that the composer was to receive 3000 marks for the piece from a foreign publisher. The lighthearted tone of the music must have infected the composer’s own sense of humor, for when he wrote to his publisher Simrock in October he was unabashedly whimsical:

You are unbearably slow! The Quartet not yet printed! [Brahms had yet to supply the manuscript!] Why Schuster of Karlsruhe would have had it done long ago!...For a fee I am only asking a paltry 15000 marks. From this sum you will deduct 3000 marks out of inborn modesty; for delay 1500; for further waiting for the arrangement for four hands 1500; for two sketches 750; for cigars, tobacco, eau de Cologne, etc. 2250; for errors in the accounts I shall lose another 3000 and you have already advanced me 600, so there will be 2400 left.

The quartet opens with a rollicking 6/8 theme that could almost stem from Haydn himself, though by the time the first phrase is repeated, the violins and later the cello shift the rhythm to 3/4 against 6/8—and we know that we are in the world of Johannes Brahms, for all his homage to the past. The key relationships, too, are purely classical (the second theme is in the dominant key of F, not some more distant harmonic relationship, as had become common by the late nineteenth century). Brahms intensifies the contrast by rhythmic rather than harmonic means, shifting to 2/4 time for the secondary material, and making clever use of the rhythmic opposition throughout the movement. The slow movement is a broad aria, with a dramatic middle section. The D-minor scherzo is remarkable for its passionate viola solo accompanied by the three remaining instruments with mutes. The finale, in the variation form at which Brahms excelled, also summarizes the entire work. A late variation turns into the opening theme of the first movement, and reminiscences of other parts of the quartet appear in the coda against an augmentation of the varied theme.

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Quartet in C minor, Op. 51, No. 1

Though it was his second quartet to reach public performance (by two months), the C-minor quartet appeared first in publication. Brahms had worked on quartets long before the appearance of his first two in 1873, when he was 40. He claimed at one point to have written and destroyed no fewer than twenty quartets before bringing out the one in C minor!  And he may have begun the two that eventually appeared as Opus 51 as much as twenty years before he finally considered them ready for the light of day.

In 1866 Brahms played part of a “string quartet in C minor” to his friend and confidante Clara Schumann, along with some movements from his German Requiem. If this was an early version of the present C-minor quartet, it took him another seven years to finish it to his satisfaction. In 1868 he played both Opus 51 quartets for another friend, the scholar Hermann Deiters, but still withheld them from publication. Occasionally he would let a group of friends read through the work, then he would take the music back and continue polishing. Finally in 1873 he decided it was ready; in September he sent it to his publisher, and the Hellmesberger Quartet gave the premiere in Vienna on December 11.

The key of C-minor (the same key he used for the first symphony!) and the tense, strenuous manner are clearly Beethovenian. Yet there is of course much here that is pure Brahms. One of the most remarkable features of the work is the way he has saturated every part of the score with the principal musical motifs—hardly a note is superfluous, not derived from the principal figures of the piece. A generation later, Arnold Schoenberg wrote a famous essay, “Brahms the Progressive,” hailing Brahms as a leading contemporary composer for creating a work that has no filler but is “totally thematic” to the smallest details.

The first movement is darkly stormy both in its driven opening theme and in its second subject, which offers no relaxation. The middle movements are less complex in structure, but still melancholy or fatalistic in mood. The Romanze is densely written, with a straightforward A B A B pattern in which the return to the A section is gorgeously scored, giving the impression of greater complexity.

The third movement, normally a place for vigorous dance styles and hints of folk elements, is here subdued, tenuous in character, with a colorful shift to the major for the middle section. The third movement ends in F minor. Brahms opens the finale with a recollection of the first movement’s principal motif, now starting on F so that it links the movements in the most natural manner. In fact, the thematic material of the finale is largely derived from that of earlier movements; it teases us with hints that at some point Brahms will move to C major (as Beethoven would surely have done, and as Brahms himself did in the finale of his still unperformed First Symphony). This expectation remains frustrated; the movement closes with a grim, tragic C minor cadence which can be heard as the final answer to the opening statement from the very beginning of the quartet.

                                                                                © Steven Ledbetter  (www.stevenledbetter.com)

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