First, there was the mess created by the divorce of Joseph and Amalie Joachim. Joseph had filed on grounds of adultery, and Amalie waved her character reference from Brahms in the face of the court and the public. She won, and Joseph viewed the character reference as a betrayal. Despite this, he would still pick up his violin and give a magnificent performance of a Brahms piece. The two would converse by letter, but Joseph didn’t want to be in the same room with his old friend
For the summer of 1884, Brahms tried yet another resort town, this time in the Austrian Alps, with the awkward name of Mürzzuschlag. The main event of this summer was the composition of the first two movements of another symphony.
In the summer of 1885, at the age of 52, Brahms finished his Fourth Symphony at the same resort. His friends did not understand the piece, and some suggested suppressing it. But Brahms lurched gamely ahead to Meiningen, where Hans von Bülow would wield the baton. It turned out to be a hit, but Brahms wasn’t sure why.
Lisl and Heinz von Herzogenberg had moved from Leipzig to Berlin where the professor had landed a gig at Joachim’s music school. The couple was blown away by Joachim’s conducting the symphony. Even Clara Schumann loved it when she heard it in a piano arrangement, although Clara’s hearing was on the wane. Vienna applauded it in 1886, but Brahms wasn’t sure why.
It starts somberly. It’s no coincidence that the last piece of music Brahms composed a decade later, a song with a biblical text, starts with the same melody, but set to the words, “O death, O death.” The second subject at 2:28 is only a bit sunnier. Brahms doesn’t repeat his exposition but plunges into his development at 3:58. At 7:32 Brahms pulls out of this dark well and recaps smack in the middle of the first subject where you don’t expect it. Listeners would have expected him to find a way to resolve it in a major key, but at the end, Brahms goes for the uncompromising.
Brahms: Symphony #4 in E minor, Op. 98, first movement
The slow movement starts with horns, not in E Major, but in E Phrygian, an archaic mode that hints at a medieval scene from Wagner.
For the first time in a symphony, Brahms opts for a scherzo, rather than an intermezzo. It’s a full blooded movement in duple time in C Major, and it’s the perfect foil for what comes last.
The finale is a turn back to Bach. It’s a chaconne, a ground bass underlying an eight bar theme which is varied no fewer than thirty times over the course of the movement. It caps a symphony that progresses from a troubling twilight to the darkest night.