Stockport Symphony Orchestra June 2022

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Johannes Brahms (1833 – 1897): Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, opus 15 (1854-58)

1. Maestoso

2. Adagio

3. Rondo: Allegro non troppo

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On a cold February night in 1854, Robert Schumann set out alone from his home in Dusseldorf towards the Rhine, paid his way onto a toll bridge with a silk handkerchief, and threw himself into the river. He had suffered mental illness throughout much of his adult life, but his demonic visions and internal ghostly music had tortured him for long enough. He was rescued by boatmen, and at his own request spent his last years confined to a mental asylum in Endenich, where he succumbed to self-starvation two years later. His beloved wife, Clara, was forbidden from seeing him during this time, but he received regular visits from his mentee and protégé Brahms. The Schumanns had been unerringly good to young Johannes, whose career was launched by Robert’s ringing endorsement as the heir to Beethoven in the leading journal of the day. For his own part, Brahms had rushed back to Dusseldorf on hearing the news of his friend’s suicide attempt, and thereafter spent much of his time helping Clara, pregnant with Robert’s seventh child, recover from the loss of her husband. Their relationship was complex. Brahms recorded that ‘I do not have more concern for and admiration for her than I love her and find love in her. I often have to restrain myself forcibly from just quietly putting my arms around her …’, while Clara’s diary observes ‘The most complete accord between us… It is not his youth that attracts me: not, perhaps, my flattered vanity. No, it is the fresh mind, the gloriously gifted nature, the noble heart, that I love in him’. Whether the pair were ever anything more than lifelong friends remains uncertain.

 

The most famous image of Brahms as the rotund, grey-bearded elder statesman of symphonic music belies his second most famous portrait, in which a fresher-face stares wistfully into the distance. This duality between conservative and progressive is a repeated theme in biographies of Brahms, though the former remains the most popular image, writing symphonies in the mould of Beethoven and railing against the likes of Liszt and Wagner. Despite this, Brahms was not wholly opposed to ‘new’ music. He was conflicted in his opposition to and simultaneous admiration of Wagner, and treasured his manuscript score of Tannhäuser. The young Brahms, then, was not unafraid to write a piano concerto wholly against the grain of popular expectations for the genre.

 

Although his first symphony didn’t reach fruition until 1876,  Brahms toyed with symphonic music in his earlier years, and what we now know as the first piano concerto was in its immature form a double piano sonata and then a symphony. As a concerto, it was by some distance the most symphonic and grandest ever written, surpassing even Beethoven’s epic Emperor concerto in length and scope. Not for Brahms was the facile, circus-music concerto which his audience expected, designed to allow some visiting virtuoso to show off; rather, he wrote a concerto deeply rooted in human suffering and reconciliation, very likely in response to the loss of his friend Robert. He was no doubt hurt when early audiences in Leipzig hissed at its ‘Three-quarters of an hour of labouring and burrowing’, as one critic put it, but Brahms remained confident that his new approach to the genre would endure.

 

The first movement begins with the ominous growl of a low D from the belly of the orchestra, before strings enter with a churning, swirling theme in the unexpected key of B-flat. A more songful second theme and reverential F-major hymn passage seek to part the thunder clouds, but the movement pans out with overwhelming tragedy. The slow movement, a world away in its conciliatory sense of peace, bears the words Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini (Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord) inscribed beneath its first line, and was described by Brahms as a ‘Tender portrait’ of Clara. The finale is largely a sunny conclusion, though at first it plunges back into turbulent waters in a terse manner reminiscent of the finale of Beethoven’s third piano concerto. Ultimately, an expansive coda surges to the finish line with symphonic grandeur.

 

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840 – 1893): Symphony No. 4 in F minor, opus 36 (1877-78)

1. Andante sostenuto—Moderato con anima

2. Andantino in modo di canzona—Più mosso—Tempo I

3. Scherzo: Pizzicato ostinato (Allegro—Meno mosso—Tempo I)

4. Finale: Allegro con fuoco—Andante—Tempo I

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Tchaikovsky's final three symphonies and his operas Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades deal almost obsessively with fate, that intangible concept which had inspired works from Beethoven's fifth symphony to Verdi's La forza del destino and Wagner's Ring. The dark language of fate punctuates the fourth and fifth symphonies, each taking on the mantle of Beethoven 5 in looking fate square in the eye in epic, darkness-to-light struggles. In hunting for a source for this morbid predilection, it is impossible to look past the trauma of 1877, a year which saw the composer wading out into the freezing Moskva River in an attempt to contract pneumonia after rashly marrying Antonina Miliukova against all better judgement. The longlasting pain this marriage caused the composer was wholly out of proportion with the calamitous brevity of their relationship. He would later frequently described her as reptilian but on other occasions was more sympathetic, writing that she ‘Is not to be blamed for my having driven the situation to the point where marriage became necessary. The blame for everything lies on my lack of character, my weakness, impracticality, childishness.’

 

Tchaikovsky’s fortunes at the time were far better with another woman, the extraordinarily wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck, who patronised the beleaguered composer with a handsome stipend of 500 Rubles per month so that he could focus on his art. The only condition to what proved to be a 13-year-long benefaction was that the two never meet, though they exchanged countless intimate letters. The fourth symphony was ultimately publicly dedicated ‘To my best friend’, with letters from the composer to von Meck variously acknowledging it as ‘our’ or ‘your’ symphony. In his gratitude and affection, Tchaikovsky even put aside his ardent opposition to written programmes for symphonic music, and supplied a detailed guide to the symphony’s four movements, summarised below. Ultimately, the fourth symphony marked a happy turning point for Tchaikovsky. In the ensuing decade, he reached the pinnacle of his reputation, publishing Onegin, his violin concerto, second piano concerto, Manfred symphony, Capriccio Italien and 1812 overture to great acclaim. A ground-breaking tour proved an enormous success and was received enthusiastically across Europe, with the notable exception of Brahms in Hamburg.

 

Like the famous recurring ‘dum dum dum dummm’ theme which pervades every movement of Beethoven’s fifth symphony, Tchaikovsky uses a similar motto to represent fate in his fourth symphony. Like Beethoven, he deploys it in the very opening bars of the work, here blared out by the horns and echoed by trumpets. This cataclysmic theme reappears frequently in the outer movements, uniting the piece into a cohesive whole. Of the theme, Tchaikovsky wrote to von Meck that it ‘Is the kernel, the quintessence, the chief thought of the whole symphony. This is Fate, ie, that fateful force which prevents the impulse to happiness from entirely achieving its goal, forever on jealous guard lest peace and well-being should ever be attained in complete and unclouded form, hanging above us like the Sword of Damocles, constantly and unremittingly poisoning the soul. Its force is invisible and can never be overcome. Our only choice is to surrender to it, and to languish fruitlessly.’ The music is similarly bleak, with any brief glimpse of optimism swiftly dashed against the rocks.

 

The two inner movements are less of an auditory assault. The second begins with a melancholically wandering oboe solo, Tchaikovsky writing that ‘You feel nostalgic for the past, yet no compulsion to start life over again. Life has wearied you; many things flit through the memory…there were happy moments when young blood pulsed warm and life was gratifying.  There were also moments of grief and of irreparable loss.  It is all remote in the past. It is both sad and somehow sweet to lose oneself in the past. And yet, we are weary of existence.’ The moments of warmth and gratification manifest as brief respite in some elegant string themes, but resolution is not reached by the end of the movement. The third is of better cheer, as if ‘Heard after one has begun to drink a little wine, and is beginning to experience the first phase of intoxication… you are not thinking of anything. The imagination is completely free and for some reason has begun to paint curious pictures… disconcerted images pass through our heads as we begin to fall asleep.’

 

The finale explodes back into life with the sudden appearance of a trio of percussionists amid a flurry of major key ebullience. All seems well as a cheery Russian folktune (In the Fields There Stands a Birch Tree) is idly quoted. We seem to be heading towards grand triumph, before the Fate motto suddenly rears its brassy head. Is this catastrophe at the last hurdle? Very nearly. With renewed energy, though, fate is firmly hammered into submission, the music careering dizzyingly through the last pages.