To fresh woods, and pastures new
Brahms’s long road to the symphony

Every Romantic composer was faced with the question of how they could continue to write symphonies when Beethoven had already said all that there was to say on the subject. Their answers were many and varied. Several continued, undaunted, to write works based on traditional models, but most of these symphonies have now been forgotten. Brahms, for his part, chose a more laborious route: He reinvented the symphony.

No one writing an introduction to Brahms’s First Symphony can avoid mentioning the length of time that he spent wrestling with this work – a total of fifteen years – and how hard he found it to tackling such a piece at all (“I shall never write a symphony”, he once declared). He felt daunted by the shadow cast by the great Beethoven (“You have no idea what it feels like for us to hear such a giant marching along behind us,” he lamented).

But what was so laborious about this undertaking? After all, the symphony’s outer framework, with its four movements and vague characters and forms, had been firmly established since Beethoven’s time, and Brahms would abide by these norms in all four of his symphonies. A generation earlier, writers of symphonies seem to have found life much easier: apart from Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann, there were a number of lesser-known symphonists like Robert Volkmann, Joachim Raff, Anton Rubinstein, Carl Reinecke and Max Bruch. They were all heavyweights in their own day, but their works rarely feature in modern concert programmes. The durability of Brahms’s symphonies suggests that his works are cut from a different cloth. But what exactly is it that makes these symphonies so special?

Symphonies for all

Contemporary understanding of the symphony as a genre changed during the course of Viennese Classicism, a change that coincided with developments in the concert life of the period. Joseph Haydn’s early symphonies had been written for a small circle of listeners at a princely court, whereas his final contributions to the medium – his “London” Symphonies – were intended for a cosmopolitan, middle-class audience. Beethoven, finally, appealed to the “whole world” – to quote from the words of Schiller’s poem To Joy. This had consequences for the demands that were placed on the genre. With its cult of the genius, the Age of Romanticism expected greatness and, above all, novelty in a symphonic masterpiece, expectations which evolved with the passage of time. The symphony was initially praised as the purest artform, since it did not have to serve a purpose or illustrate a narrative, but soon there were demands for the symphony to serve as an instrumental drama. This was certainly true of E. T. A. Hoffmann, who spoke of an “opera for instruments”.

Composers reacted in very different and even contradictory ways to the more elevated demands now being placed on the symphony. Many were undeterred by these new developments, and continued to operate within the framework that they had inherited from Haydn and Beethoven, while adding ideas that were more or less original. But Mendelssohn and Schumann both wrestled with symphonic form on a much more basic level, adding extra movements, as in Schumann’s “Rhenish” Symphony, or introducing words and singing, as in Mendelssohn’s “Lobgesang”. Others tried merging different genres, like Liszt, whose symphonic poems describe literary actions, which they illustrate through the medium of musical sounds.

Wagner worked from the assumption that it was “impossible” for composers to achieve anything “new and noteworthy” in the field of the symphony by taking Beethoven as their model. He regarded Beethoven’s successors as “people who inform us in an often delightfully circumstantial way that they have nothing whatever to tell us”. Brahms’s thinking on this point was similar: “Anyone who risks writing symphonies after Beethoven must ensure that these works look completely different,” he informed a colleague in 1859/60. But he rejected Wagner’s view that in the wake of Beethoven’s Ninth the symphony could survive only in the guise of the music drama. Brahms believed that the genre had a future, but that its inner substance had to be recast.

While others were entirely satisfied with the conceptual status quo, Brahms’s symphonies demand attentive listening. Barely a single bar resembles another one, and note-for-note repeats are rare. Brahms even thought that in the wake of a series of performances of his First Symphony in a number of the most important towns and cities, the repeat of the first movement’s exposition could be omitted. Essentially the theme begins to change even in its first iteration: Arnold Schoenberg would later term this principle of constant transformation  “developing variation”. Everything is interwoven with everything else; nothing is mechanically juxtaposed.

The melody generates the accompaniment and vice versa. Even the most contradictory ideas are related on a subliminal level, and all the voices are treated as equal. On the few occasions that Brahms introduces a memorable theme such as the alphorn call or the hymnlike melody of the First Symphony’s final movement, the exception to the rule is so striking that, as Brahms himself once said, “any idiot can hear this at once”. For him, his symphonies had to emerge from their themes as if they were compelled to do so.

Carefully groping a way forward

This density and concentration required Brahms to grope his way forward extremely carefully. For several years he studied counterpoint, exchanging relevant exercises with his friend, the violinist and conductor Joseph Joachim, gaining experience in part-writing and with such elaborately playful devices as mirror canons and double fugues. He also studied the instruments of the orchestra in order to acquire a fuller understanding of their specific qualities. The fruits of these studies included his two serenades, each of which lasts almost three quarters of an hour, his expansive First Piano Concerto and his Haydn Variations. This is why it took him so long to complete his First Symphony.

Brahms has occasionally been accused of writing music that is not symphonic at all, but is rather chamber music scored for large-scale instrumental forces. This touches on an essential point. The notion that a monumental symphony could lay claim to an all-embracing universality was beginning to break down, and its ability to reach “humankind” with an audience of hundreds and possibly even thousands had already proved to be an illusion. It was invariably the individual on which the music left an impression. All the effort that Brahms lavished on his scores stemmed from his attempt to speak as a human being to other human beings, just as he did in his chamber music. As such, he spoke to his fellow humans honestly and implacably – the music may be encrypted, but every note is sincere. To bid farewell to the idea of a world-encompassing Utopia was painful, and would take time.