The purpose of this essay is to review the depth of Brahms's connection to the music of Ludwig van Beethoven from his earliest days, which eventually lead to the composition and eventual completion of his First Symphony in 1876. Since that date is 14 years after he had written its first movement much as we know it today, the topic has long been one of intense interest to those who wonder about Brahms's compositional practices.Footnote 1 The essay re-examines the usual understanding of what held the Symphony's completion at bay for so long and the source of that understanding. In so doing we will encounter the biographer Max Kalbeck and take a closer-than-usual look at his work as a historian. The essay will conclude with an alternative consideration of factors that could well have been the source of the long gestation.
***
To speak of Beethoven and Brahms in the same breath is almost a platitude; not only was the connection made virtually from the time Brahms first drew attention from the outside world, Beethoven's music was part of Brahms's personal world well before he left Hamburg. At age 10 he performed, with colleagues of his father, the piano part of the Quintet for Winds and Piano in E-flat major (Op. 16) at a benefit concert intended to raise money to further his education.Footnote 2 By age 15 he had performed the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata in public, a considerable feat of virtuosity at the time, and when the Hungarian violinist Eduard Reményi entered the picture, Brahms performed some of Beethoven's violin and piano sonatas with him.Footnote 3
In Brahms's own words, one of the most intense musical moments of his young life occurred upon hearing the Beethoven Violin Concerto performed by a young violin virtuoso named Joseph Joachim, as yet unknown to him. In 1855 Brahms could write to the same violinist, now his best friend: ‘You were playing in Hamburg, it must be many years ago, I was surely your most rapt listener. It was at a time when I was still subject to chaotic infatuations, and I didn't mind at all taking you for Beethoven.’Footnote 4 Here Brahms gives us a fleeting glimpse of himself as a 15-year-old and the effect on him of some of Beethoven's works. Hearing his first performance of the Fifth Symphony, his first performance of the Ninth Symphony at age 20, and of the Missa Solemnis at age 22 would be other such moments.
By the time of his activity with the Frauenchor in Hamburg, Brahms was often asked to perform informally at the end of the rehearsals. In a letter to Clara Schumann dated 28 August 1859, he described the rehearsals, which took place at the home of a well-to-do friend: ‘I have to play a lot, e.g. for my forty girls. At Avé's they always have to have the last sonatas of Beethoven.’ Brahms could comply on the spot.Footnote 5 By 1861 his performing repertory of Beethoven's music included, in addition to the ‘Waldstein’ and the late piano sonatas (op. 109 was one of the favourites), Op. 27 No. 1 quasi una Fantasia, the ‘Eroica’ Variations, Op. 35, the C-minor Variations, WoO 80, and the Fantasy, Op. 77, a work not often played today but one of Brahms's favourites. The Triple Concerto and the fourth and fifth piano concertos sometimes with his own cadenzas, were also in his repertory.Footnote 6 Both violin sonatas in Op. 30, performed on occasion with Joachim or with Eduard Reményi (1828–98), were at the tips of his fingers. Well known is the story of his performance with Reményi and his feat of transposition when the piano at hand was tuned a half-tone too low. Reményi would not retune his violin.Footnote 7 Brahms's colleague in Detmold, the young violinist Karl Bargheer (1830–1902), said that when they were called to play before the reigning Count, he (Bargheer) never knew in what key they would begin.Footnote 8 The music was in Brahms's sinews.
Since Brahms grew up with the Beethoven sound-world in his ears, it isn't surprising that fragments of that sound appear in so much of his music. To mention a few: the extensive two-handed trills of the First Piano Concerto, Op. 15, resonate with the trills of Beethoven's Sonata, Op. 111 (bars 106–117). The opening of the Fourth Symphony must be some kind of homage to the chain of thirds in the third movement of the Hammerklavier Sonata (bars 78–84) – or perhaps those bars had lived subconsciously his mind for years. The immensity of sound in his German Requiem can only have been inspired by the Missa Solemnis. The outpouring of sound in Movement vi from bar 69 as the last trumpets sound and the choral outburst ‘Todt, wo ist dein Stachel’ (from bar 152 in the same movement) have no counterparts in the great choral/orchestra works of the time even considering the Mozart or Cherubini Requiems and works of Mendelssohn and Schumann. But they have their equivalents in Beethoven's Missa; consider the massing of sound in portions of the Gloria and Credo or the series of ‘amen’ at bars 513ff of the Credo, barked out as vigorously as Brahms's ‘Stachel’. Michael Musgrave sees the ‘massive orchestral outburst’ starting at bar 93 in Movement iii as pointing to the spirit of Beethoven.Footnote 9 Brahms's choice of instruments for his Requiem is almost identical to Beethoven's huge roster of instruments, including the rare D Trumpet. And I would maintain that Brahms's voice, so clearly heard right from the start of his German Requiem, rather than the generalized oratorio sound of the religious works of Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn and countless others, was enabled by the way Beethoven eventually found his voice in the Missa once he was well into the Gloria. Are these specific references, or a sound-world internalized by Brahms and simply taken in as material for himself? This is not an ‘either/or’ question. But I think it not a coincidence that Brahms's special love for the long violin solo in the Missa Solemnis has an analogy in the violin solo he wrote for the ending of the Andante Sostenuto of the First Symphony, moved up a heavenly octave in the revision Brahms made shortly after its first performances. That passage is the longest instrumental solo in all of Brahms's works for orchestra.
Robert Schumann may have been the first person to link Brahms with Beethoven in so many words: according to Clara Schumann, he often marked Brahms as a second Beethoven – something she told a visitor in Brahms's presence, prompting her visitor to protest Clara was spoiling the young man dreadfully. Clara's reaction was to laugh heartily. The visitor later wrote in his memoir, ‘who among us at that time could have divined the future greatness of Brahms? Both of the Schumanns did!’Footnote 10
The Schumanns were not alone: during Brahms's visit to Leipzig in late 1853, Hedwig Salomon (later von Holstein), having attended a house concert where Brahms performed, wrote in her diary of his power and intensity otherwise only associated with Beethoven.Footnote 11 In Leipzig at the same time, his friend Albert Dietrich wrote a letter describing the new star on the horizon: ‘If his [Brahms's] music reminds one of anything at all, it is of late Beethoven.’Footnote 12 In 1861, Marie Rückert, a young daughter of the poet Friedrich Rückert, was traveling to a spa in Rügen when she stopped off in Hamburg to visit two friends, daughters of the Hallier family and members of Brahms's Frauenchor. Brahms was a frequent guest in the well-to-do Hallier home, where the arts and literature were held in high esteem. Marie wrote to her father:
I sat at table next to a young artist, Johannes Brahms, a splendid genius who will blaze a new path soon enough, in the meantime he is just here, being lionized by the women and gazed upon in wonder by the men – our music director [meant is either Friedrich Grund, director of the Hamburg Philharmonic Concerts from 1855–63 or possibly Carl Georg Peter Grädener (1812–1883), who had organized his own Women's Chorus] is of the opinion that there is a 2nd Beethooven [sic] tucked away in him – in any event he is eminently gifted and his very playing sweeps everything away, everything about him speaks of power and strength.Footnote 13
That Beethoven's importance to the development of Brahms's music-making is widely understood is evident from the enormous number of writings the topic has engendered. Look at the index of any biography or compilation of works about Brahms, and you will find the entry under Beethoven crowded with items. If one had any doubts, a single look at the catalogue of Beethoven's music in Brahms's personal library would allay them: scores to the nine symphonies, the collected trios, all the violin sonatas, all the piano sonatas, quartets in two volumes, a volume of various variations, minuets and rondos, a page from Beethoven's conversation book, Beethoven's letters to his publisher (Nikolaus) Simrock, the masses, and Fidelio. Much of this music was in original as well as in recent editions.Footnote 14
The question, then, is not how Brahms was influenced, and perhaps at times cautioned by Beethoven, but rather how, in the long run, he found his own voice and freed himself despite the power of the legacy. The question brings us directly to his Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68.
***
Without exception, everyone who has written about Brahms and his First Symphony mentions the so-called quotation found in Max Kalbeck's 2,000-page biography of Brahms: ‘I'll never write a symphony, you have no idea what it feels like, for one such as us, to hear the footsteps of a giant behind one.’Footnote 15 The giant is Beethoven.
However, Kalbeck is in fact our only source for those words and for that sentiment; everyone else has simply copied him uncritically. Given his long association with Brahms and the enormous length and detail of his biography of the composer, Kalbeck's work acquired unquestioning veneration for decades. While the greatest respect is due Kalbeck for his enormous work, questioning it is nevertheless essential. In this case, one has to question the accuracy of his source, an interview with Hermann Levi undertaken about 25 years after the fact, because there is no hint of such a sentiment in the many letters Brahms and Levi themselves exchanged over the course of their friendship, a friendship that spanned the very 12 years directly before the completion of the symphony. In fact the only reliable comment we possess directly from Brahms about writing a symphony comes from the charming memoir that Karl Bargheer wrote of his years with Brahms in the little Duchy of Detmold. Here we know with certainty that Kalbeck has editorialized the comment and altered its impact because we can compare Bargheer's original with the way it appears in Kalbeck's biography and, as a consequence, in the writings of so many others.Footnote 16 I am thinking in particular of Siegfried Kross's influential – and in so many ways insightful – essay, ‘Brahms the Symphonist’, which quotes Kalbeck and draws the usual unwarranted conclusion.Footnote 17 Kalbeck's nervous ‘Ach Gott, if ever I write a symphony’ was in fact a simple statement by Brahms, ‘If ever I write a symphony it will have to look different from this’. He was speaking of his First Serenade, the parts of which were strewn all over his bed as Bargheer walked into his room. Brahms was in the process of enlarging the work for full orchestra, and in Bargheer's account there is no hint of anxiety.Footnote 18
There is more to say about Kalbeck's penchant for inventing stories when it suited his purpose. Readers may know Michael Musgrave's discussion of Brahms's so-called motto ‘Frei Aber Froh’, as a reply to Joachim's ‘Frei Aber Einsam’, and Musgrave's conclusion that it was an invention of Kalbeck's.Footnote 19 Musgrave's deduction is based on the fact that there is no corroborating evidence for the Brahms motto, in contrast to the well-documented references in Joachim's letters of his ‘F-A-E’, even apart from the ‘F-A-E’ violin sonata movement by Brahms. Musgrave has noted additional reasons for caution when using Kalbeck as a source, concluding that Kalbeck didn't know Brahms as well as he portrays and pointing out questionable information about Brahms's background and music.Footnote 20 Most striking of all, there is an elaborate invention of Kalbeck's for which there are multiple examples of the spuriousness of his account. I refer to his description of the Whitsun-weekend house party of May 1896 at the Hagerhof Estate on the Rhine, which took place the same weekend as Clara Schumann's funeral in Bonn just a few miles down the river. The three days of music making had been carefully arranged well before the event, the religious nature of the Whitsun observance having mutated over the years into a long holiday weekend perfect for planning special events. A group of Brahms's wealthy music-loving friends, the von Beckeraths and von der Leyens, were in the habit of organizing elaborate musical weekends at that time – three days of house concerts with distinguished performing guests invited from the cream of German musical life.Footnote 21 The location of the house party rotated among the friends’ homes. This year, by chance, it was on the Rhine River just outside Bonn.
News of Clara's funeral had reached the guests, many of whom were also among the friends most congenial to Brahms. Since several of them planned to attend the funeral they had instructions from the hostess to bring Brahms back with them if at all possible. And so they did. The extraordinary weekend was later described not only by Kalbeck, but in written accounts by five separate eyewitnesses.Footnote 22 The five differ in some small details, but all paint essentially the same picture of the event, of Brahms, what he said and did, and how he behaved. In contrast, one can only marvel at Kalbeck's inventiveness. In his account he claims that the gathering at the Hagerhof was an improvised musical memorial for Clara Schumann. The facts are different: when the guests learned that Brahms had agreed to join the house party, they arranged amongst themselves to avoid mentioning her name so as to protect Brahms's feelings. In Kalbeck's account the mainstays of the musical programme were the works of Robert Schumann and Brahms, but the list of music drawn up in preparation for the weekend discloses that only one of Schumann's works was played, while a great variety of other composers were represented, including a work of Handel which interested Brahms so much he asked for it to be repeated. No changes to the pre-arranged programme were made, aside from the addition of works performed with Brahms himself. Kalbeck describes a scene that is nowhere present in the five eyewitness accounts, claiming that Brahms broke down as he was playing his G-major Violin Sonata with Richard Barth and had to run outside to hide the emotional distress aroused by thoughts of Felix Schumann, in whose memory it had been written. It is impossible to imagine a situation more at odds with the atmosphere described in all the eyewitness accounts, which, while they describe some sombre moments (particularly during the evening of his arrival), also include jolly, even hilarious, moments with Brahms. Kalbeck, who was not present, gives no source.
In view of the above, unwarranted weight has been given to those words, ‘I'll never write a symphony’– if indeed Brahms did mutter them. We know indisputably that he did keep a symphony in mind, and he did finally succeed in writing one. So the question is, what took him so long? I have long thought that there is another constellation of events that does much better at explaining the long delay than does anxiety, whatever role anxiety may have played.
Let's consider Brahms's output from the beginning of his career. Opp. 1–7 comprise music for piano – an instrument he played himself – and art songs, a genre with which he was already intimately familiar, having accompanied in public performances even during his teen years, one of Hamburg's most distinguished singers, Franziska Cornet (1808–1870).Footnote 23 The lost works of his early period also comprise chamber works with instruments and combinations he was familiar with: violin and piano (brother Fritz Brahms was studying the violin, and Brahms had already met Reményi in his teen years) and an early work for cello and piano (the boy Brahms studied cello for about three years).Footnote 24 Op. 8 is chamber music: a trio. Brahms heard chamber music at home, as we know from a letter he wrote to his stepmother after his father died.Footnote 25 He met Joachim and made music with him and his Hanover colleagues, where he encountered at least one outstanding cellist. There he would have heard and perhaps played with August Lindner, a leading cellist in the nineteenth century.Footnote 26 In Düsseldorf he had the chance to hear, and perhaps read, music with the cellist Christian Reimers (1827–1889), for whom Schumann wrote his cello concerto. Reimers, first cellist of Schumann's orchestra in Düsseldorf, was a regular chamber music partner in the Schumann household. Note the prominent, demanding roles for the cello in Opp. 8 and 18. In Hamburg Brahms made music with Carl Georg Peter Grädener and friends from his circle, men who were among the leading instrumentalists in town; it is they who gave the first performance of the Op. 18 Sextet. Consider his experiment with learning to play the organ, and his work with women's choruses: music flowed from those experiences immediately, individually and jointly. Both serenades made use of the small string section and excellent wind band he found in Detmold, instrumental forces Brahms took the opportunity to conduct at the time.
I could go on in boring detail, but readers are sure to see where this is heading. Brahms wrote music for instruments and musical forces for which he had hands-on experience. The great exception was the Piano Concerto, Op. 15, and he never plunged in unprepared again. The volume of correspondence between Brahms and Joachim includes 22 letters about the work as it progressed from a sonata for two pianos to its end form as a piano concerto with full orchestra, an adventure begun in early 1854 and not finished until January 1858. Additional letters to Clara Schumann and Julius Otto Grimm add to our knowledge of its laborious course.Footnote 27
The prevailing problem was his lack of knowledge of instrumentation. Brahms was self-taught with regard to the skills that are learned as a matter of course in a music conservatory. His method was to read copiously, to study any score he could gain access to, and to learn from his own personal experience with the musical forces at his disposal.Footnote 28 There was, however, a certain hit-or-miss to this method. In 1857, his devoted friend Julius Otto Grimm, living in Göttingen and conducting a women's chorus, was looking forward to rehearsing Brahms's Missa canonica with them. But he soon reported back to Brahms that the music was almost impossible to sing ‘because my Altos cannot sing so low as G, F, and A flat. It is barbarously low and [even] a European chorus would have trouble singing it as you wish and imagine’.Footnote 29 Grimm suggested altering the distribution of voices. Brahms answered, ‘What can be done with the impossible alto part in my sacred things? I got so involved in my passion for low alto without considering that they aren't around anymore’.Footnote 30 But three years later Grimm was still writing to him: ‘My girls long for notes which confine themselves to the five lines and four spaces of the staff.’Footnote 31 With his own Hamburg Frauenchor to practice on, and the eventual appearance of Vier Gesänge für Frauenchor Op. 17 in 1860, Brahms had clearly learned to handle women's voices with ease. His problems with orchestration were more severe.
Work on the two-piano sonata began shortly after Schumann's attempt at suicide. By June 1854 Brahms had confessed to Joachim that ‘even two pianos’ were insufficient for him, and by the end of July 1854, Joachim had in his possession a score of the first movement, now reworked as a symphony. Brahms informed Joachim that ‘Whatever good can be found in it I owe to Grimm, who stands by me with the best advice’.Footnote 32 Another letter, this time from September 1854, confesses ‘I don't even understand as much of the orchestration as appears in the movement, since the best of it I owe to Grimm’.Footnote 33 By February 1855, Brahms wrote to Clara Schumann he had dreamt that the symphony had turned into a piano concerto, and that he had played it in great excitement.Footnote 34 But we get some idea of his confusion over instrumentation in the letter he wrote to Joachim on 22 April 1857.
On pages 18 and 19, in the Adagio, wouldn't it be better for the winds to take over the melody? … In the Finale there are some places where the orchestration is still very naked, I am still much too ignorant in this and really don't know how to help myself … I have also landed in some confusion with the horns … Must they be low B flat horns and can't one make more use of them again, perhaps at the end, as D horns? … A thousand thanks to you in advance for all your help with this work. Without you I wouldn't have done it.Footnote 35
In July, Joachim sent him back the score with a guide to his pencilled suggestions, many of them still preserved on the working copy.Footnote 36 It is clear that Joachim had a major hand in the orchestration; Brahms's remark that without Joachim he wouldn't have done it seems entirely justified, a situation he was never to put himself in again.
In the years after 1862 (the date of the first movement of the Symphony), several of his letters confirm that what he most desired was a job with chorus and orchestra. Eight years later he even briefly considered taking Bruch's job in Sondershausen, a small provincial town in Thuringia which nevertheless boasted an orchestra. Bruch could hardly believe it. ‘Curious’, he wrote, ‘you yearn for constraints to all your freedom, and I for freedom from all my constraints!’Footnote 37
Eventually, in 1871, despite his own misgivings and some very bluntly expressed doubts by Hermann Levi, Brahms accepted the prestigious appointment in Vienna as conductor of the orchestra of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. At this juncture his correspondence with Levi was lengthy and frequent, but in the published correspondence there is not one word about Beethoven, giants or footsteps. Because the holographs of the complete correspondence are housed in the Library of Congress, it is possible to confirm that the letters as published by the Deutsche Brahms-Gesellschaft series of Brahms correspondence are essentially identical with the holographs.Footnote 38 In my view, the job in Vienna was something Brahms knew he needed if he were to become a symphonist.
The friendship with Hermann Levi requires some consideration here. The introduction was made by Clara Schumann in 1863; the friendship was lively and important to them both, and it came at a time when these exceptionally talented young men were making their mark in the music world in a big way. When Levi settled in Munich 1869, Brahms was a frequent visitor, usually camping out on Levi's couch. He visited often during the summer of 1873 which he was spending on the Starnbergersee outside Munich, writing the ‘Haydn’ Variations and working on his first two string quartets. There is good reason to believe he was working on the symphony contemporaneously with the C minor String Quartet, Op. 51 No. 1, which would put it in his mind at the time of his visits to Levi.Footnote 39 The friends smoked cigars and drank brandy together, talked about their many mutual friends from Karlsruhe days and surely of many other things. One might easily imagine Brahms, after a few drinks and perhaps a discouraging day rethinking the symphony saying, ‘I'll never write a symphony’, the way many people reading this essay have probably said at one time or other, as the thought of the incomplete PhD dissertation loomed, ‘I'll never get it finished’. A casual remark, remembered by Levi, mentioned to Kalbeck when he came to interview him, quite possibly blown up far out of proportion when it appeared in his influential biography. That is conjecture. But given the verifiable inaccuracies and editorial insertions which have at times appeared in Kalbeck's accounts of events, we have no way of knowing how close Kalbeck's words are to what Levi/Brahms actually said – and reason to think they were something different.
There can be no doubt that Brahms was deeply concerned about what his symphony would have to be in the post-Beethoven era. Every composer had the same concern including the scores of those who did write and publish symphonies in the period between Beethoven and Brahms. Walter Frisch lists about 80, and Christopher Fifield, in his recent book, The German Symphony between Beethoven and Brahms, lists 125, some of which, such as the symphonies of Robert Volkmann, Joseph Raff and Max Bruch, gained enough favour to find their way onto concert programmes and receive multiple performances for over a decade.Footnote 40 In fact, 54 composers published symphonies from 1850 to 1876, defying Wagner's claim that the symphony was dead.Footnote 41 But they all failed to live up to the requirements laid down so perceptively by the critic and editor Gottfried Wilhelm Fink in 1835: ‘To succeed, a symphony has to indicate “a story developed within a psychological context, of some particular emotional state of a large body of people”.’Footnote 42 He called for ‘an entire drama of human emotions’, unity within diversity, and the need for something grand/great for a finale.
It is as if Brahms read those words. The Finale, in particular, suited the emotional state of the large body of Germans who had just seen their lands become one nation. Brahms incorporated the most modern usages: chromaticism, dense rhythmic and motivic coherence, and Liszt's signature practice, thematic transformation. In the first movement the drawn-out rising three note motif of the introduction is transformed into an impassioned, rising three-note Allegro; equally, the mysterious introduction to Movement IV is transformed by tempo, interval size, placement in the scale, and change of mode, to the Allegro tune that ‘every Ass could see’ referred to Beethoven's ‘Ode to Joy’. The movements of the Symphony are subtly connected motivically; the revision Brahms made to the second movement is an especially magical example, inserting the chromatically rising three-note motif of the first movement, having determined after the first seven performances, that greater coherence was needed. Starting with bar 4, the music from the third beat and on to bar 17 was added, beginning immediately with the rising three-note motif and mirrored by the simultaneously descending motif in the bass (viola) line and continuing with diminutions repeated in the next three bars. The first version had initially started with the first 3 2/3 bars as we know them today, but had continued directly to the three-note upbeat to bar 18.Footnote 43
The Finale incorporates thematic motifs from previous movements and satisfies Beethoven's trajectory from the tragic to the triumphant. So much has been written on the topic of thematic coherence in this symphony that there is no need to add to that conversation. But Brahms went beyond in an astonishing way, producing an historical and geographic overview of German culture in music: starting with an Alpine horn call (the Southeast of the newly unified country), going on to an archaic-sounding chorale, chords virtually all in root position (representing the North German), and culminating in the iconic pan-Germanic ‘Song’. The ‘Song’, head theme of the Allegro, was on the one hand immediately reminiscent of Beethoven himself while at the same time it evoked something which had already become so much a part of the national vocabulary as to be considered a folk song.
The exposition, beginning in a proper sonata form, yields soon enough to anything but the standard form.Footnote 44 The famous tune appears only once more in its original form, at what sounds like a repeat to the beginning of the Allegro but which soon shows itself quite suddenly to be the start of an ambiguous development section (bars 201–204). From now on it is heard only in fragments which are extensively developed (for example bars 220–228 and further). Where one might logically expect the tune, after what seemed to be a climax leading to the recapitulation (if that's what it is), what we hear instead is the Horn Call (bars 285ff.). Not all commentators recognize this moment as the recapitulation but, however it is analyzed, what comes next is the material of the second group (starting at bar 301, animato), now in the correct recapitulary key of C major. But an additional development ensues, and as the movement gears up with great energy to what sounds as if it will be a coda, one more surprise is in store: what we hear is not the famous tune but rather an outpouring of sound as the brass and strings play the archaic-sounding chorale (bars 407–416). Brahms has gone backwards in time, and has with immense power ended his Symphony with reference to the deep past of German identity, neatly side-stepping Beethoven and pointing to an alternative strategy – one which showed that the Beethoven model was not the only effective German tradition.Footnote 45
The music critic Richard Pohl (1826–1896), an ardent supporter of Liszt and Wagner, prone to vitriolic reviews in support of Musicians of the Future and certainly not known as an admirer of Brahms's ‘conservative’ music, seems to be the only critic who understood that something special had taken place. At a time when the antagonism between exponents of absolute and programme music was still intense, Pohl was clearly both puzzled and impressed.
The first symphony of Brahms, performed for the very first time – that is a novelty certainly worth a Winterreise! [a somewhat obscure comment, as the date of the premiere was November, not December] … The prevailing mood is of deep seriousness, almost tragedy; expression intensifies from Impassioned to Mighty, and arouses in us the certain feeling that at the basis here lies a particular, logical train of thought, that poetical content is being expressed by means of musical expression.
The first three movements can certainly be explained without the presumption of a programme, but not the following movement. Here the style is at times so dramatic, the musical language so vivid, that against his will one feels drawn to a specific meaning which can only be explained with certainty by the composer himself. But – about this he is silent.
It is just this last movement which is the most important and gripping; in this symphony we become aware therefore, of an artistic intensification to the end, which raises it in rank over its post-Beethoven sisters … per aspera ad astra! Footnote 46
Pohl prized Brahms's final movement over all other symphonies that had come after Beethoven, with the possible exception of Schubert's Ninth, and praised his Adagio (so marked in the first version but changed to Andante Sostenuto in the revision) above all others as well, citing its depth of expression as second only to the Finale, again in contrast to all of his contemporaries. So here is an acknowledgement by a partisan Musician of the Future that Brahms had risen to the challenge of the post-Beethoven symphony, in trajectory and final movement, on his own terms not by breeching the limits of the form but by fulfilling it with his own individual style. At the same time he had defied Wagner's claim that the symphony was dead.
No one will doubt but that Brahms was challenged by Beethoven's symphonic legacy, as were all composers of his generation. The required attributes were common currency, laid out specifically in Pohl's review as he described the virtues of the new symphony he had just heard: ‘large-scale, designed in the broadest dimension and achieved with artistry, unified and meaningful in mood, always noble in expression, ingenious in train of thought’.Footnote 47 The aims were not new, and Brahms's output up to that point demonstrates that these goals were in no way beyond him. Rather, the issue at hand is the time it took him to come to terms with the challenge of achieving them with a symphony orchestra, and the process that allowed him to break through the barrier that had stood in the way of completion.
What role might Brahms's experience as conductor of the orchestra of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde have played on the path to producing his First Symphony? During those years he programmed many works of his predecessors, Handel, Bach and Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn and Haydn. He also programmed Berlioz's Harold in Italy and works of his contemporaries: Anton Rubinstein, Joseph Joachim, Max Bruch, Robert Volkmann and Josef Reinberger. And perhaps the greatest importance of those years was the opportunity they gave him to perform, at least twice, each of his own then-existing large scale works for orchestra with or without chorus, and thus to fine-tune his impressions about their effectiveness – the very opportunity he had been seeking since 1862. Footnote 48
Are we to take it as a coincidence that Brahms was able to bring his Symphony to conclusion within a year after leaving a position which, for three years, had allowed him to have his hands on an orchestra, the same kind of apprenticeship he needed for so much of his other music? My aim has been to mute the sounds of the footsteps: for me the solution to the puzzle of ‘what took so long’ is the answer to the question: ‘how many years before Brahms had his own orchestra to conduct?’
