Symphony No. 4 in e, Op. 98

During the 19th century, newer literary forms dominated, including art song, symphonic poem, and the piano character piece. However, with the general revival of interest in older music, composers sought ways to merge their creative spirit with a growing sense of historical continuity. It is not surprising that Johannes Brahms (1833-97) would take an interest in Baroque compositional forms. His musical style retains the rich contrapuntal language, combined with classical simplicity and phrase structure, that characterized the mature Beethoven. And like Beethoven, Brahms was keen to imbue his works with the learned brilliance of someone like Bach.
As noted above, Brahms made a one-hand piano transcription of Bach’s violin chaconne. Mendelssohn and Schumann also made versions of the piece for violin and piano. But Brahms would carry this study much further by the time he came to write his Symphony No. 4. The finale of that symphony presents one of the most rigorous, yet subtle and charming chaconnes ever composed.
Brahms’ symphonies were products of his maturity. He clearly struggled to escape the stifling influence of his predecessors in this field, namely Beethoven. First attempts at a symphony frequently veered off to become something else: a piano concerto, a quintet, and so on. The four symphonies that did eventually emerge, published 1876-1885, reinforce the old adage: better late than never. The Symphony No. 4 in E Minor provides a fitting capstone to Brahms’ orchestral edifice.
This Symphony offers a new take on the “finale problem,” a feeling that Classic and Romantic sonata-form compositions often lavished attention on the opening movement at the expense of maintaining interest up through the finale. Finales were doomed to be dramatically ineffectual because the opening Allegros had covered all the points and “stolen the show,” as it were. Brahms’ first two symphonies followed the classical model of grand opening movements, but with Symphony No. 4 he follows a Beethovenian strategy and shifts weight toward the end.
The opening movement has become something lyric and haunting. Ingenuous in its motivic construction, it merely whets the appetite for something more. It builds almost entirely on rising and falling intervals (3rds and 6ths), but gradually the mood turns elegiac and brooding. The second movement states its case from the outset, touching on a medieval device (use of the lowered second scale degree of the Phrygian mode, in this case F natural) that carries us outside the modern world. The robust third movement makes the triangle player into a soloist, and the movement as a whole injects some well-timed energy.
In its afterglow, the finale strides out in full voice, stating the chaconne progression in stately gestures from winds and brass. Brahms will not maintain such a rhetorical pose for the entire movement. But by starting from this position of power, he has taken the reins of the invigorated chaconne fully in his grasp. It has been regarded as one of the most sober, intellectual movements in the symphonic tradition, but there is also passion and frivolity. Conflicting opinions of this finale reinforced existing battle lines between Brahms’ supporters (Joachim, von Bülow), who lionized it as the future of music, and the Wagnerians (Wolf, Bruckner), who spat vitriol upon its academicism. Yet it carries its learnedness rather well. For who amongst us notes that it is made up of 32 variations on a fixed eight-bar phrase? Instead, we are swept along by the composer’s seemingly endless variety of mood and texture, all the way to the very doorstep of the sublime, which comes crashing in during the symphony’s final luminous moments. Like Bach at his best, Brahms has embraced an erudite technical strategy and then made us completely forget that it’s even there.

(c) Jason Stell