String Quartet in B-flat Major, Opus 67
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Born May 7, 1833, Hamburg
Died April 3, 1897, Vienna

Brahms' final string quartet is his most original-and perhaps most successful-essay in that form. He completed this quartet and several other works during the summer of 1875, which he spent happily at Ziegelhausen, near Heidelberg. Throughout that relaxed summer, though, Brahms continued to work on his First Symphony, a project that had occupied (some would say obsessed) him for over twenty years. He could at least escape into the other works he wrote that summer, and typically he deprecated them as "useless trifles, to avoid facing the serious countenance of a symphony." The Quartet in B-flat Major-hardly a useless trifle-had its first performance on October 30, 1876, five days before the long-awaited première of the First Symphony.

Brahms' first two string quartets had been tightly-argued affairs, but in the Third Quartet he seemed to relax, and this music flows and shimmers. Its bright surface, though, conceals many original touches, and the genial finale in particular is a compositional tour de force. Brahms gives the opening movement the unusual marking Vivace, more typical of a scherzo than a sonata-form first movement. It is built on two contrasted theme-groups, but in fact the real contrast in this movement is between two quite different meters. The opening-inevitably compared to hunting horn calls-is in 6/8, while the second theme is in 2/4: its slightly square rhythms have reminded some commentators of a polka. Brahms builds the movement around subtle contrasts between these different meters, jumping back and forth between them and at several points experimenting with some modest polyrhythmic overlapping. The movement concludes with a cadence derived from the "hunting-horn" opening.

The ternary-form second movement opens with a long violin melody reminiscent of the music of Brahms' close friend Robert Schumann. Brahms marks the violin part cantabile, but it must cut through a thick accompaniment, which is often double-stopped. The middle section, full of fierce declarations and rhythmic swirls, gradually gives way to the opening material and quiet close. The third movement is marked Agitato, but that is more an indication of mood than tempo, and Brahms puts the real tempo direction-Allegretto non troppo-in parentheses. Particularly remarkable here is the sound: Brahms mutes all instruments except the viola, which dominates this movement. Its husky, surging opening idea contrasts with the silky, rustling sound of the muted accompanying voices. The trio section likewise emphasizes the sound of the viola, followed by a da capo repeat and coda.

The finale-Poco Allegretto con Variazioni-is the most remarkable of the four movements, and Brahms' biographer Karl Geiringer called it "the nucleus of the whole work." As Brahms' marking suggests, it is a set of variations, based on a folk-like tune announced immediately. There follow six variations, all fairly closely derived from the opening tune, and then some remarkable things begin to happen.

Into the seventh variation suddenly pops the hunting-horn tune from the quartet's very beginning, the eighth variation is based on a transition passage from the first movement, and in the closing moments Brahms puts on a real show of compositional mastery: he combines the hunting-horn tune from the very beginning with the variation melody of the finale and presents them simultaneously.

Such a description makes this music sound terribly learned, and that might in fact be the case, were it not so much fun. We greet these themes as old friends when they appear to take up their place in the dance, and Brahms rounds off the quartet with this bright union of his opening and closing movements.