John Williams~Suo Gan
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While Jo was teaching Bob and Clara’s brood how to swing from chandeliers, slide down bannisters and do acrobatics on the lawn, Clara was concertizing with Joachim and Jenny Lind at the court of the minor nobility at Detmold. Clara’s unhappiness at her husband’s condition was offset somewhat by her ire at being upstaged by Lind.
Following Detmold, Jo and Clara took a long hike by foot along the Rhine that lasted for over a hundred miles and five days. It was an idyllic, romantic adventure. Ken Russell, in his novella Brahms Gets Laid, drawn from a failed screenplay, argues that this was where Jo and Clara finally tumbled into bed. Jan Swafford, in his definitive biography of Brahms, argues that Brahms’ idealization of Clara, i.e. his Madonna Complex, made the consummation of this relationship impossible. Love can be messy sometimes.
With Clara back in Düsseldorf with the kids, Brahms needed to raise money for himself, so he went on the road as a concert pianist, specializing in the piano concertos of Beethoven and doing better than he expected. But he was beginning to understand that he needed a base, and that might be the job of conducting. Jo began immersing himself in the music of Bach and the works of the Italian Renaissance masters. Clara went on the road again, and Jo settled in to take care of the Schumann children.
Robert’s death in the summer of 1856 put an end to his close relationship with Clara, for her availability made her too dangerous. It would now be purely professional. Clara couldn’t figure him out. Brahms could be a cad when dealing with women.
Jo found a gig at Detmold as the artistic director and house pianist of their three month music festival, a job he held for three successive years. During those thee years, from 1856 to ‘59, Brahms agonized over his piano concerto. It had a strange gestation.
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was one of the most important – and destructive – pieces of music ever written. So many composers heard that amazing finale and said, “Hey, I can do that!” They couldn’t. Mendelssohn tried, and his Second Symphony was a noble failure. Brahms barely got into it before he realized he was in way over his head. He downsized the work to a sonata for two pianos. He up-sized it to a piano concerto.
What Brahms didn’t realize was that the nature of the piano concerto had changed. Beethoven’s final concerto, the “Emperor”, had come four decades earlier, and it had been the last word, a work based on great musical ideas. Since then, the piano concerto had degenerated into a showpiece for the pianist to show off his chops, and sometimes the three movements were strung together into one. Great musical ideas were not supposed to be a part of it. Audiences who bought tickets to the premiere of Brahms’ piano concerto were expecting a short, light showpiece that would show off Brahms’ technique. What they got was something else entirely.
The first performance in Hanover wasn’t a disaster. The opening theme was far too similar to the opening of the Beethoven Ninth except for the different time signature. It was full of great musical ideas and lasted almost an hour. The audience was merely puzzled.
But the second performance in Leipzig was a shipwreck. In that era, it was customary to applaud between movements, something that is not done today. At the end of the first movement, there was a deadly silence from the audience. Brahms began to sweat. There was a deathly silence at end of the second movement. Brahms began to sweat more profusely. At the end of the finale, a half dozen people applauded – and then the hissing began. It sounded like a huge flock of geese. They hissed Brahms right out of the Leipzig Gewandhaus.
The reviews in the press were brutal. What was worse was that the only people to embrace the concerto were Liszt, Berlioz, Wagner and the entire New Music crowd. That was humiliating.
To make it even more confusing for Brahms, he performed his new concerto in Hamburg – and it was a huge hit! “Hometown boy makes good.” Nothing made sense anymore.
This is one of those pieces where you have to concentrate, and it won’t be easy to swallow that behemoth of a first movement (21 minutes), which is the heart of the piece. The picture of Brahms in the video is the composer in his Fifties, and it’s not the way he looked in 1859 when he was 26. He was still the short blonde-haired blue-eyed boy who couldn’t grow a beard to save his life.
The drum roll that opens the movement sounds like the voice of God. Brahms starts off his exposition with that theme he borrowed from Beethoven, and it’s incredibly tense. At 3:40 the piano comes in, working its way around that first subject. The first notes of the second subject at 6:12 remind me of the opening notes of “Home on the Range”. At 10:10 he starts his development section, taking his themes apart and putting them back together in different combinations. At 13:01 he begins his recapitulation in the wrong key, re-composing it. Brahms was not one for copy-and-paste! At 15:49, when the second subject comes in at the correct key, there is a wonderful sense of release. Brahms had an unerring sense of musical architecture. The coda that starts at 19:25 is like a freight train that has lost its air brakes and is hurtling down a grade with ever increasing speed. It’s unstoppable until it slams into a solid wall of D minor at the end.
If you want to bookmark this and listen later, I’ll understand. It’s pretty intense, and you just have to go with it.
Brahms: Piano Concerto #1 in D minor, Op. 15, first movement
Thanks, Luv, for spinning tunes for the troops. ((HUGS))