Piano Quartet in C Minor, Opus 60
JOHANNES BRAHMS

While it is difficult-and dangerous!-to search for biographical significance in a piece of music, Brahms' Piano Quartet in C Minor is one of those works that seems to cry out for such an interpretation. Brahms labored on the quartet for twenty years before it was first performed in Vienna on November 18, 1875. He had begun work on it in 1855 when as a young man of 23 he found himself part of the Schumann household during the cataclysmic period of Robert's rapid decline in a mental institution. Torn between his friendship with the dying Robert and his hopeless love for the suffering Clara, Brahms turned inward. He began three piano quartets during the year 1855 and completed two of them. The last, the most personal and powerful of the three, he put away-this was not music he was ready to take before the public.

But by 1868 he had begun to think about revising it, a process that took several more years. To a friend he tried to describe the spirit of the music: "Imagine a man for whom nothing is left, and who wishes to put an end to himself." When he finally completed the score in 1875, Brahms suggested to his publisher: "On the cover you must have a picture, a head with a pistol pointed towards it. Now you can form an idea of the music! For this purpose I will send you my photograph! Blue coat, yellow breeches and top-boots would do well . . . " The blue coat and yellow breeches refer to the hero in Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther. In that novel, Werther-a young man of sensitive and artistic nature-blows his brains out when the woman he loves marries someone else, and at some level Brahms clearly identified with the romantic young hero whose love was unrequited.

Brahms revised the quartet thoroughly. He transposed it from the original (and unusual) key of C-sharp minor into C minor, and he added an extra movement, a scherzo, to the original three-movement form. He also destroyed his first finale and wrote an entirely new one, as well as completely revising the surviving movements. With his usual self-deprecation, Brahms described the final version to his publisher: "the Quartet is half old, half new-the whole thing isn't worth much!"

Brahms' description of the music as both old and new is quite accurate: to the Sturm und Drangmusic of a composer in his early twenties he brought the technical skill of a seasoned composer in his forties. If the opening movement does not strike the modern listener as music for a man on the verge of suicide, it is nevertheless somber and serious. The piano's opening-a unison C four octaves deep-is quickly answered by the three strings, whose falling half-step will recur throughout. The piano alone has the second theme, unmistakably Brahmsian in its nobility and breadth; in an original touch, Brahms quickly presents four variations on this theme, highly unorthodox in a sonata-form movement. The development is dramatic, with the two-note figure hammering darkly into the listener's consciousness before the movement comes to a quiet close.

The piano introduces the main idea of the Scherzo, built on a propulsive 6/8 meter. This short movement is extremely focused: a brief section for strings marked espressivo functions as a trio section before the menacing pound of the original rhythm returns to drive the movement to its close.

Some critics have regarded the Andante as a love-song, and given the mood of the music and the circumstances of its composition, such a conclusion may well be justified. It opens with a long flow of golden song from the cello-this extended melody is accompanied just by the piano, and only much later do the violin and then the viola join them. The mood of the music is intimate, and that intimacy is only a little ruffled by the extended syncopations of the development. In a wonderful touch, Brahms gives the reprise of the opening theme to the piano, which is accompanied by pizzicato strings, and on fragments of that opening melody this expressive music comes to its quiet close.

By contrast, the Finale returns to the C-minor urgency of the opening. Brahms' marking-Allegro comodo-suggests a leisurely or moderate tempo, but the mood of the music is dark and insistent throughout. The second theme is a chorale for strings, and the development has a great deal of sweep, with the main theme returning in a grand unison for the strings. Curiously, the movement stays in C minor until the very end, when Brahms wrenches it into C major with the final two chords, as if unwilling to conclude with an ending as dark as all that has gone before. But after those final two chords have faded, it is the dark, troubled urgency of this music that stays to haunt the memory.