Johannes Brahms
Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, op. 25 (orchestrated by Arnold Schoenberg)

Johannes Brahms was an introverted and reserved person. He neither tended to provide his works with elaborate explanations, nor did he like to talk about his feelings. He preferred to work through whatever preoccupied him in his music, which served an almost therapeutic function for him. This is especially true of his three piano quartets, which Brahms began composing simultaneously in 1855. In conversation with his biographer Max Kalbeck, he confessed that these three works were a testament to his “Werther period”. With this, he was referring to Goethe’s epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, whose titular hero shoots himself because his beloved Lotte has promised herself to another. In the mid-1850s, Brahms may well have felt a kinship with this fictional character, for he himself was unhappily in love with Clara Schumann.

The G minor Piano Quartet, which opens the series, accordingly begins with deep seriousness, soon building to passionate intensity and erupting in painful outbursts. There is scarcely a glimmer of hope in the first movement – it is no wonder that it virtually collapses at the end. What remains is a wounded heart, still pounding fiercely in quavers during the subsequent Intermezzo. Melancholy suffuses the otherworldly third movement, Andante con moto, which seems to gaze down on the wretchedness of earthly life from a higher vantage point; in its march-like central section, however, it rises up in defiance. The frenetic finale, a Rondo alla zingarese, presents a wild dance that is not exuberant, but executed in a manner that is maniacal and almost grimly dogged.

Yet this piano quartet may also be interpreted in much more sober terms as absolute music. In that case, one is impressed by Brahms’s art of deriving a wealth of motivic forms from a single idea. Arnold Schoenberg, who was a great admirer of his older colleague, referred to this technique as “developing variation”. In 1933, on the centenary of his idol’s birth, he gave a famous lecture which he subsequently published under the title Brahms the Progressive. With this assessment, he went against the spirit of the times, which regarded Brahms as the epitome of conservatism. It was none other than Schoenberg, who had invented the twelve-tone technique (a new “grammar” for music) and was viewed as the spearhead of the avant-garde, who thus initiated a new way of thinking.

And he did not stop at words. In 1937, by then in exile in America, he turned his attention to Brahms’s G minor Piano Quartet and arranged it for orchestra. When Schoenberg was asked why he had chosen this particular work, he replied, “1. I like the piece. 2. It is seldom played. 3. It is always very badly played, because the better the pianist, the louder he plays, and you hear nothing from the strings. I wanted once to hear everything, and this I achieved.” Nonetheless, his respect for Brahms must have been immense: Schoenberg left Brahms’s original score virtually unchanged in his orchestration. The differences are still striking.

Schoenberg employs completely different instrumental effects and devices from those Brahms himself used in his four symphonies. The arrangement features abundant percussion, with glockenspiel, xylophone, cymbals, bass drum, snare drum, triangle, and tambourine; he scores for a shrill E flat clarinet and has the trombones perform glissandi, as if Brahms were a forerunner of Béla Bartók. At times, it brings to mind a funfair – or film music. Entertaining it undoubtedly is: Schoenberg’s Brahms project became his most successful orchestral work. Even if it occasionally led to misunderstandings: “I don’t know why everyone says Schoenberg has no melodies. That was very melodic,” commented the manager of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra after the premiere in May 1938…