BSO | Brahms - Double Concerto

In the summer of 1887, when Johannes Brahms sat down at his vacation spot in the Swiss mountains to write the Double Concerto in A minor, he was a composer with little left to prove. Despite the inevitable resistance, he had enjoyed a career about as successful as a career can be, succeeding in every major genre of music except opera, even in light classical music from his ubiquitous “Cradle Song” to his Hungarian Dances and Liebeslieder Waltzes. He had already been declared one of the “three great B’s” of music, in the company of Beethoven and Bach. Unlike his predecessors, he had never accepted a commission for a work in his adult life, writing only what he wanted, when he wanted. He had capped his symphonic output in 1885 with the tragic and climactic Fourth Symphony, beyond which, some further sketches notwithstanding, he ultimately felt no compulsion to go.

What brought him to draft not one but two double concertos had to do with issues other than creative necessity. Brahms had always had powerful and talented allies, also a long history of friction with them. In most cases the friction came from his own oblivious and imperious nature. One of those longtime friends was Joseph Joachim, from his teens one of the leading violin virtuosos in Europe, and one of the first to recognize Brahms’s genius. The break that came between them after decades of friendship and collaboration, however, resulted for once from Brahms’s essential decency and common sense. Joseph had been a brutal husband to his wife and there had been a messy divorce. Brahms wrote a private letter of support to Amalie Joachim that ended up being read in court. As a result, Joseph broke totally from his old friend.

At the same time, remarkably, Joachim kept performing Brahms’s music. Meanwhile, despite Brahms’s habitual posture of live-and-let-live and I-don’t-need-anybody, he felt the loss of the friendship as well as the collaboration—Joachim had shepherded the creation of the Violin Concerto as well as premiering it. So as a gesture of reconciliation, Brahms composed a concerto featuring both his favorite violinist and his favorite cellist. The latter was Robert Hausmann of the Joachim Quartet, for whom Brahms had composed the Second Cello Sonata. Brahms wrote his old love Clara Schumann an uncharacteristically jaunty letter about the plan (but ending with entirely characteristic uncertainty):

I’ve had the amusing idea of writing a concerto for violin and cello. If it is at all successful it might give us some fun. You can well imagine the sort of pranks one can play in such a case…. I ought to have handed on the idea to someone who knows the violin better than I do…. It’s a very different matter writing for instruments whose nature and sound one only has a chance acquaintance with…from writing for an instrument that one knows as thoroughly as I know the piano.

That insecurity about writing for string instruments might seem shocking for a composer of Brahms’s experience and mastery, but he was perennially uncertain about instrumentation in general. In the past he had had Joachim on hand to advise him about writing for strings. Now he was on his own.

The work and the personal initiative came off as hoped. Soon Brahms, Joachim, and Hausmann were rehearsing the concerto at Clara’s home in the resort of Baden-Baden. Clara wrote in her journal, “This concerto is a work of reconciliation—Joachim and Brahms have spoken to each other again after many years.” Brahms knew Joachim would understand and appreciate that the second theme of the first movement referred to a Viotti concerto they both loved, and that the themes emphasize the notes F, A, and E (usually as F E A), the acronym of Joachim’s personal motto “frei aber einsam,” “free but lonely.” With Brahms at the podium, they premiered the Double Concerto in Cologne in 1887. Despite mixed-to-negative reviews (which led Brahms to suppress the second double concerto he had drafted), the trio gave several performances during that season. Joachim received the manuscript, which was inscribed “To him for whom it was written.”

The whole idea of a double concerto is a prime example of Brahms’s traditionalism and no less his particular kind of originality. It harkens back to the concertos of the Baroque, to Mozart’s multi-soloist works, to Beethoven’s Triple Concerto for violin, cello, and piano. At the same time such a piece was rare in the Romantic era, and one for violin and cello unprecedented.

The first movement is large, about as long as the next two movements combined. After a pealing orchestral motto on what will become the first theme proper, both soloists are presented in cadenza-like passages. The cello’s opening solo has a tone of virile, high-Romantic passion, echoing the motto theme. The violin’s answering passage is more flowing and lyrical, foreshadowing the “Viotti” second theme. If the beginning seems Romantically fateful, the overall tone of the first movement and the concerto will be as tender as passionate, often genial, finally playful.

As usual in Brahms concertos, the slow movement is warmly songful throughout, its broadly sweeping pentatonic opening sounding like an exalted folk song. The whole movement has a certain metric elusiveness: we often don’t know where the downbeat is, creating a dreamy rhythmic haze in which the lines wander. The movement is in a simple ABA format, the middle theme flowing and chorale-like, to which the soloists add garlands.

As in the other Brahms concertos, the finale has a Gypsy flavor, the A minor main theme darting and puckish, the lyrical second theme rather recalling the B theme of the second movement. The form is a sort of sonata-rondo with an extended central section. A long good-humored coda ends this, the last and the lightest-spirited of Brahms’s mature orchestral works.

Jan Swafford
Jan Swafford is a prizewinning composer and writer whose acclaimed books include Mozart: The Reign of Love, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph, Johannes Brahms: A Biography, The Vintage Guide to Classical Music, and Language of the Spirit: An Introduction to Classical Music. He is an alumnus of the Tanglewood Music Center, where he studied composition.