Piano Sonata in F sharp minor, Op 2 Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
1. Allegro non troppo, ma energico; 2. Andante con espressione - 3. Scherzo. Allegro; 4. Finale. Introduzione. Sostenuto – Allegro non troppo e rubato.
The twenty-year-old Brahms made a huge impact on Robert and Clara Schumann when he called on them in the autumn of 1853. As Robert described the occasion, in his last piece of published music journalism:
‘Seated at the piano he began to disclose wonderful regions...There were sonatas, or rather veiled symphonies; songs...individual piano pieces of almost demonic nature and charming form...sonatas for violin and piano...quartets for strings – and all so different from one another that each seemed to flow from a fresh spring.’
In her diary, Clara noted the music’s ‘exuberant imagination, depth of feeling, and mastery of form. Robert says there was nothing he could tell him to take away or add.’
Robert’s list of his new acquaintance’s compositions includes many pieces that Brahms, already rigorously self-critical, withheld from publication. Writing to thank him for the article, whose ringing endorsement of his talent had taken him genuinely by surprise, Brahms told him: ‘Above all it forces me to exercise the greatest caution in the choice of pieces for publication.’ He decided that his first two piano sonatas should be his first pieces in print.
The F sharp minor Sonata, although published as Op 2, was completed in 1852, before the C major Sonata, Op 1, and is dedicated to Clara Schumann. It is one of Brahms’s most overtly virtuosic piano works; the first movement’s introduction has a bravura flamboyance that suggests the influence of Liszt – ironically, given Brahms’s later antipathy towards Liszt’s music. The main part of the movement begins quietly, almost furtively, with the opening figure from the introduction continuing to feature as an important motif. The music has a gritty energy which is only partly alleviated by the smoother second main theme.
The second movement was prompted by the words of ‘Mir ist Leide’, an old German song attributed to the minnesinger Kraft von Toggenburg, a reflection on the melancholy of winter (the minnesinger of mediaeval Germany cultivated a tradition of secular poetry and song similar to that of the troubadours of southern France). The opening theme is related to the main motif from the first movement. Quietly inward-looking to start with, it builds inexorably to a passionate climax, before the initial music returns, now in B major instead of the B minor of the start, leading directly into the scherzo third movement.
This, too, takes its cue from the first movement motif or, rather, the second-movement version of it. Its proportions are unusual: a very short and compact, rhythmically propulsive opening section is followed by an expansively lyrical trio. A tensely dissonant transition leads back to the opening, followed in turn by a short coda in which the music of the trio makes a brief reappearance.
The finale is by far the longest movement. The introduction, with its cadenza-like flourishes, carries its two melodic ideas – the initial falling phrase and the gently rising one that follows - over into the main section of the movement. This is full of quietly purposeful energy, which goes into suspended animation in a mysterious central passage of slow, sustained chords. The momentum picks up again abruptly, but just when it seems that Brahms is driving the music to a barn-storming conclusion, he pulls on the reins again, for an improvisatory closing section that balances the introduction.
Carnaval de Vienne, Op 26 Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
1. Allegro; 2. Romanze: 3. Scherzino: 4. Intermezzo; 5. Finale.
Schumann’s original German title translates as ‘Carnival Joke from Vienna’. He began the work early in 1839, towards the end of a six-month stay in the city, where he had gone to explore the possibility of both settling there with Clara Wieck, once they were finally able to marry, and transferring there the music journal which he had helped found in 1833 and had been editing since its early days. Subtitled ‘Phantasiebilder’ (Fantasy Pictures), Carnaval de Vienne consists of two large-scale outer movements enclosing three shorter ones.
The waltz craze had taken hold of Viennese social life long before Schumann’s visit, and so he launches the work with a waltz-fantasy in rondo form. In between the recurring appearances of the opening section are a number of contrasting episodes. In the second of these (and again, later) Schumann indulges in one of his favourite games, playing with the audience’s sense of the music’s rhythm.
That’s one kind of carnival joke. A more blatant one is the allusion to ‘La Marseillaise’ in one of the later episodes of the same movement. The song was banned in Vienna at the time because of its revolutionary associations. Schumann’s quotation of it, while a deliberate attempt to connect with a wider public, seems (at this distance in time, at least) more like sheer youthful bravado than an attempt at making a serious political point.
The three middle movements form a set of contrasting genre-pieces. The Romanze is a tenderly poignant song without words. The frisky Scherzino illustrates another of Schumann’s attitudes to rhythm – allowing a single pattern to dominate. It’s followed by the restless Intermezzo in the dark key of E flat minor, and which, as the Schumann scholar Joan Chissell pointed out, strongly suggests the kind of piano writing to be found among the composer’s great outpouring of songs of 1840.
For his finale Schumann produces a vigorously energetic sonata-form piece. He began with a rondo, he ends with sonata-form – a reversal of what, even in the 1830s, would still have been the expected sequence of events. Another of his carnival jokes, perhaps.
© Mike Wheeler, 2011