Date of composition: 1883
Premiere: 2 December 1883 in the hall of the Vienna Musikverein with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conductor: Hans Richter
Duration: 42 minutes
Performances by the Berliner Philharmoniker:
first performed on 4 January 1884, conductor: Joseph Joachim
When Johannes Brahms set to work on his Third Symphony in 1883, just before his fiftieth birthday, he had already experienced all the highs and lows of an artist’s life. Thirty years earlier, Robert Schumann had proclaimed him Beethoven’s heir in a widely read article. Yet this well-intentioned eulogy (“a young blood at whose cradle the Graces and Heroes kept watch”) triggered a severe creative crisis. For more than two decades, Brahms struggled over his First Symphony before he gained the self-confidence to step into the public eye and out of Beethoven’s shadow. At the same time, he triumphed as a pianist and made a name for himself with piano, vocal and chamber music. Nevertheless, his native Hamburg passed him over twice in choosing a new chief conductor for its Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir; deeply offended, Brahms moved to Vienna. And as if to mark this new stage of maturity, the once shy young artist with gentle features grew a magnificent full beard within the span of a year.
The Third Symphony vividly conveys the sense of liberation with which Brahms could now compose. The opening movement in waltz time has a dance-like quality, with the string voices interlocking in syncopations that disrupt the regular pulse. In the second thematic block, Brahms inserts the woodwinds’ delicate melodies so loosely into the metre that the music constantly seems to shift. The cheerful mood was also grasped by his protégé Antonín Dvořák, who enthused: “This work surpasses his first two symphonies – perhaps not in size and grand design, but certainly in beauty! What marvellous melodies are to be found there! It is all love, and one’s heart opens wide.”
Unknowingly, he had hit the nail on the head: Brahms was in love. In the spring of 1883, he met the 26-year-old alto Hermine Spies at a concert in Krefeld and invited her to his summer retreat in Wiesbaden. She called him her “Johannes Passion”, while he sent her ardent letters and composed two song cycles for her. The romance ultimately came to nothing, but his good spirits were apparently undimmed. “Have I never told you about my fine principles?” he wrote to a friend: “No opera and no marriage ever again.”
Clara Schumann, therefore, heard in the second movement “a rapture and a whispering, so that one feels completely enwrapped in all the bliss of nature.” The woodwinds set the tone for this idyll, while the solo horn and strings shape the third movement in the style of an elegiac valse triste. At the same time, the symphony is a model of Brahms’s way of interlinking the individual movements through a network of motivic cross-references. Almost every melody can thus be traced back to a single basic idea: an ascending sequence of notes hidden already in the mighty opening chords. The interconnection becomes particularly evident in the finale, where many figures reappear. Most strikingly, the main theme of the first movement is quoted literally in the closing bars of the symphony. These subtle relationships ensure that the work is experienced, on a subliminal level, as a unified whole.
In the end, it was not the composition itself, but rather its premiere that posed a problem for Brahms. Not because no one wanted to hear it, but because all his conductor friends were clamouring for the honour of leading its first performance. Thus, Brahms had finally ascended to the symphonic Olympus.