Johannes Brahms
Symphony No. 1 in C minor, op. 68

It was a heavy burden that Robert Schumann placed on the shoulders of his young colleague Johannes Brahms. In one of his final essays, published in 1853, Schumann proclaimed that a new artist had finally arrived, “called to give ideal expression to the spirit of the age”. Brahms’s piano sonatas, he wrote, were already “veiled symphonies”, and “when he lowers his magic wand to where the powers of the masses in choir and orchestra lend him their strength, we shall be granted yet more wondrous glimpses into the secrets of the spirit world”. It is no wonder that Brahms took almost a quarter of a century before daring to present a full-fledged symphony to the public in 1876. His doubts were too great – particularly about measuring up to his predecessors in this supreme genre of instrumental music, above all Beethoven. Even in the early 1870s, when he had already composed the first movement of his symphony, he told his friend, the conductor Hermann Levi: “I shall never compose a symphony! You have no idea what it feels like to have such a giant Beethoven marching behind you all the time.” Yet in the end, he risked the comparison: although he avoided using voices, as Beethoven had in his Ninth, he paid homage to its universal choral theme by placing a similarly hymnic instrumental theme at the centre of his finale. Asked about the striking resemblance, Brahms retorted testily: “Yes indeed, and what’s more remarkable is that every jackass immediately hears it.”

Beyond this act of artistic self-conquest, the symphony also marks Brahms’s attempt to bring closure to perhaps the most important chapter of his personal life – his love for Clara Schumann. Since their first encounter, during her husband’s illness and after Robert’s death, their relationship had grown ever closer, and there is ample testimony to Brahms’s feelings. Nevertheless, they resolved not to allow their bond to go beyond friendship. That painful decision found its way into the First Symphony. A precursor of the alphorn theme, which the finale’s introduction leads towards, was sent by Brahms from the Bernese Alps to Clara in 1868, along with the words: “High on the mountain, deep in the valley, / I greet you a thousand times” – a fusion of a line from a Swiss folk song in which the singer speaks of his distant beloved, and Eichendorff’s poem Der Gärtner (The Gardener), a lament on unfulfilled love. The dreamlike oboe melody from the slow introduction of the first movement, in turn, quotes the funeral march from Beethoven’s Eroica – and thus also the final song from Schumann’s Dichterliebe cycle on poems by Heine, where almost the same melodic line appears in the bass. The song’s text later reads: “I also buried my love and my pain” – in an oversized coffin meant to find rest on the ocean floor.

Within this web of quotations, Schumann’s music for Byron’s Manfred plays a particularly significant role. The drama tells of the forbidden love between Manfred and Astarte – two people who should be bound more by kinship than romantic passion. After Astarte’s death, Manfred is consumed by guilt, which ultimately kills him. Brahms quotes the Astarte theme in the second subject of the first movement – a piece he sent to Clara in 1862. She immediately recognised its similarity to the Manfred Overture. Over a decade later, Brahms returned to the same motif in the finale’s second theme – which, perhaps unexpectedly, forms the core of the concluding section, rather than the memorable hymn of the opening. “In my music, I speak,” Brahms wrote to Clara when he sent her the alphorn theme. What exactly that music says remains open – but the wealth of references leaves little doubt as to its meaning.