Johannes Brahms (1833 – 1897): Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel op 24
There was something innately cool about Johannes Brahms. Down to earth, unpretentious and blessed with a rich sense of humour, he was the Romantic who never got too carried away.
He had an uncanny knack for always appearing to know what he was doing and where he was going. As an artist, he was a model of discipline and self-restraint. As a man, he was laid-back, enjoyed the good things in life, and was not inclined to take himself too seriously. Willy von Becherath’s famous portrait of him sitting at a piano in middle age, contentedly puffing away at an expensive cigar while his fingers work the keys, defines much of his popular image today.
But Brahms also had his idiosyncrasies, and not least in the way he held back from emotional and physical intimacy throughout his life. Some of it may have been deep-seated shyness. A clean-cut Adonis in his youth, when fame later appeared on his doorstep, he took refuge behind a large, distinctive beard and became ever more inscrutable.
And although the mature Brahms could be gruff and prickly (his favourite tavern was aptly named The Red Hedgehog), he also retained a boyish love for pranking friends and colleagues. He particularly enjoyed sending his publishers on wild goose chases with misleading descriptions of his latest work. While writing his largely joyous Second Symphony, he solemnly informed the printers that the piece was so gloomy it would need to be engraved on black-edged paper.
His music itself was intensely emotional, reflecting an inner world he otherwise kept hidden from view. He was also a superb craftsman, having in his youth made a painstaking study of the old Austro-German masters such as Mozart, Beethoven and even JS Bach. Of all nineteenth century composers, Brahms was the most successful at harnessing a Romantic temperament to time honoured Classical principles, something that makes his best music immensely satisfying to listen to.
It’s all the more remarkable that Brahms could have achieved this as he was largely self-taught as a composer. His musical education, such as it was, was more about practice than theory. Born in the north German port city of Hamburg, his father, Johann Jakob Brahms, was a jobbing musician, a skilled double bass and French horn player who eventually earned a steady livelihood from playing in the city’s Philharmonic State Orchestra. In 1830, Jakob had married Johanna Henrika Christiane Nissen, a middle-class seamstress 17 years his senior. She was 44 years old when she gave birth to their second child, a boy whom they named Johannes.
From an early age the young Johannes showed such promise on the piano that he was soon being marked out for a future professional career. His tuition began in earnest from the age of seven when he firstly studied with Otto Friedrich Willibald Cossel, a local virtuoso, before later moving on to Cossel’s own teacher, the pianist and composer Eduard Marxsen.
By the age of ten, Johannes was taking part in chamber music performances and by fourteen giving his first solo recitals, programming Bach and Beethoven along with some of the more virtousic music of his day. He also earned a little pocket money from playing in the bars and taverns around Hamburg, although colourful tales about him sometimes taking his pianistic talents into the city brothels have been largely debunked by modern scholars.
He also started to write his own music at around this time, even in the face of some discouragement. Both his parents felt he should focus solely on the piano, while Cossel complained that his pupil “could be such a good player, but he will not stop his never-ending composing.” As it happens, most of what Brahms wrote during these years – mainly piano, chamber and choral music – was later burned by its overly self-critical creator. He would destroy innumerable compositions in this way throughout his lifetime.
But even as Brahms could be bashful about showing his artistry to the world, in most other ways he showed a natural aptitude for becoming a successful musician. His early career, in particular, would benefit from some smart networking. In 1850 he met and began giving regular recitals with the Hungarian violinist, Ede Reményi: the latter would inspire in Brahms a lifelong love of Hungarian gypsy music, while in turn connecting him with the up-and-coming violin virtuoso, Joseph Joachim. A fine musician and composer in his own right, Joachim would become one of Brahms’ most important friends and supporters.
It was also Joachim who provided Brahms with a life-changing letter of introduction to Robert Schumann. Brahms duly made an unannounced appearance on the Schumanns’ Düsseldorf doorstep in October 1853 and was welcomed in by Robert. Having asked him to play something, Brahms launched into a selection of his own music, including a recently composed piano sonata. After a minute or so, Schumann stopped him and said, “please excuse me, I must fetch my wife”. When Robert returned with her a minute or so later, both he and Clara could only look on in deepening admiration as their young guest continued to play.
“Sitting at the piano, he [Brahms] began to reveal wonderful regions”, Robert recalled:
We were drawn into ever more magical spheres. There came about an entirely brilliant performance, that made the piano into an orchestra of lamenting and jubilant voices. There were sonatas, more veiled symphonies, – songs, whose poetry one would understand without knowing the words, although a deep song melody runs through everything, – particular piano pieces, of a partly demonic nature from the most gracious form, – then sonatas for violin and piano – quartets for strings – and each so different from the other, that they seemed to stream from every possible source, and then they appeared, as he united them, as one roaring current, all as to a waterfall, bearing the peaceful rainbow over the downrushing torrent, where butterflies play about its banks to the accompaniment of nightingale voices.
Robert’s account would appear a few weeks later in his old music magazine, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, in an article he entitled “New Paths”. He hailed his young visitor not only as a genius in the making, but also as “the chosen one”. They remained some of the most glowing words of praise Brahms ever received and although he thanked Schumann for them, he also feared that they “will arouse such extraordinary expectations by the public that I don’t know how I can begin to fulfil them.”
But Schumann was also perceptive enough to see a young artist ready to take on the mantle of classical romanticism that had defined his own music as well as Felix Mendelssohn’s. Schumann would have been particularly impressed by Brahms’ first three piano sonatas (all completed by 1853), consummate works for one so young and in many ways exactly the “veiled symphonies” that Schumann suggests, with their dramatic breadth as well as their polyphonic intricacies and textural complexities.
Having been invited to stay on at the Schumanns as their house guest, Brahms would only have four short months in which to enjoy his new friendship with Robert, before the latter, increasingly unwell with (probable) neurosyphilis, tragically attempted suicide by throwing himself into the frozen Rhine. Having been dragged out by a fisherman, he was then committed to an asylum where he would see out the rest of his short life.
Still only twenty years old, Brahms suddenly had to grow up fast, stepping in to support Clara and her children for the next few years, while making regular visits to Robert at the asylum (with Clara cruelly forbidden by doctors from seeing him until two days before his death).
But with Clara still a youngish woman herself, Brahms found himself gradually falling in love with her – aside from her own profound musicality, she also represented to him an ideal of womanhood. Evidently there were feelings from both sides, and after Robert died in 1856, they considered becoming a couple before finally deciding against it. This would set a pattern for Brahms throughout his adult life, where he would fall in love several times, but on each occasion shrink back when the question of commitment loomed.
Over time, Brahms would come to believe that he worked best on his own, and perhaps he was right about that. At the same time he would forever complain of loneliness. At least he endeavoured to be supportive to his friends and loved ones in other ways. As his bank balance swelled, initially from concert tours in his youth, and then later from his compositions, he would prove himself consistently generous with helping others less well off than himself, from his own parents to the homeless people he encountered in the streets, to up and coming young composers.
And even as he chose to be alone, Brahms was always very clear-headed about his plans. For example, he had the good sense to recognise he was not yet the finished article, even after Schumann’s words of praise. He would devote much of his early twenties to a close study of the old classical masters from the past two hundred years and in doing so begin to build up the superlative technique of his maturity.
For five years he published almost nothing, only finally emerging from his cocoon in 1858 with a major orchestral work, his First Piano Concerto in D Minor. Having expended great labour pains on the piece, it was then not a success. Only one of its first five performances, with Brahms appearing as the soloist, was received well, while its second performance (in Leipzig) was particularly disastrous as the audience greeted the work with sustained hissing. On that occasion, Brahms almost walked off the stage after the first movement. “I am only experimenting and feeling my way,” he sadly told Joachim afterwards, “all the same, the hissing was rather too much.”
Although Brahms had needed some help with the orchestration from Joachim and some of the piano part was clumsily written, it was essentially the epic, symphonic shape of the Concerto (also lasting around fifty minutes) which had puzzled early audiences. The piano part, while difficult to play, was not virtuosic in the showy way audiences had come to expect from the likes of Franz Liszt, Anton Rubinstein or other piano virtuosi of the time. But the whole experience still wounded Brahms – always a more sensitive soul than he let on – and it would be another fifteen years before he attempted another major orchestral work.
The fate of the Concerto was just one of a series of personal setbacks for Brahms in his late twenties. He had become engaged to a soprano named Agathe Von Siebold, with whom he was genuinely in love. But then he dithered badly, exactly as he had with Clara, before finally breaking things off to the manifest distress of both parties. Brahms already suspected that he would ultimately end up sacrificing love for his career, and he would later spell out his agonising break with Agathe (whom he never saw again) with a poignant musical cypher in his String Sextet in G Major.
At around the same time, Brahms also endured some uncharacteristic wobbles in his professional life. Firstly, he was passed over for the directorship of the Hamburg Philharmonic, a position he had coveted for several years. Then in 1860 he became embroiled in a public row, as he and Joachim were instrumental in putting together a manifesto critical of Liszt, Richard Wagner and their various acolytes, objecting to their rejection of traditional musical forms and the “rank, miserable weeds growing from Liszt-like fantasias”. As both Liszt and Wagner were fond of propagandizing their artistic aims in print, while insisting that their path was the only true gospel, an increasingly irritated Brahms felt that some kind of response was in order.
Unfortunately, a draft of their protest pamphlet was leaked to the press (at a time when its co-authors had managed to muster up just four signatures of support) and the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (now edited by the Liszt-supporting Franz Brendel) responded smartly with a parody of the manifesto, ridiculing Brahms and his associates as out of touch and backwards-looking.
Thereafter Brahms saved any future proselytizing for his musical scores, even if the incident caused lasting friction between him and Wagner. The public furore (later becoming known as the War of the Romantics) also led to the ridiculous scenario of a generation of German music-lovers feeling they somehow had to choose between the music of Wagner and Brahms, as if one couldn’t just enjoy both.
At least Brahms was eventually able to shut out all these unpleasant distractions by doing what he did best – retreating to a quiet place and getting down to some new composition. And in this case, turning out one of his first masterpieces: the Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel for solo piano. In doing so, he would create, not for the first or last time, something new from an old and unfashionable form.
Once regarded as one of the ultimate tests of a composer’s technique, musical variations had been very popular during Baroque and Classical times. But by the mid-nineteenth century the form had fallen somewhat out of favour and was now regarded as a quaint relic from another era. In a time of ever-expanding expressionism, many composers found its rules too limiting.
The basic idea of variation form is to take a musical theme and then repeat it many times over, on each occasion making alterations to its melody, rhythm or harmony. It’s like a short story you keep telling and re-telling, but each time with a different emphasis – sometimes you change the setup, other times the delivery, but all the while you endeavour to keep it fresh and your audience guessing.
For Brahms, a man always fascinated by the nuts and bolts of musical construction, variation form was too much of a challenge to pass up. He had in fairness made several previous forays into the art-form, not least with his early Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann (also for piano) from 1854. But with the Handel Variations he would markedly widen his scope and ambition. Taking a simple, ceremonial, upbeat melody from George Frideric Handel’s Harpsichord Suite No. 1, Brahms writes no less than 25 variations around the theme, fully exploring its rhythmic and harmonic possibilities, while creating the most imaginative transformations.
He also captures the spirit of Handel’s early classicism, perfectly combining it with his own romantic imagination. While some of the variations are strident and confident, and some even carry deliberate echoes of eighteenth-century music, many more are reflective, dreamy and tinged with the delicious melancholy that would become a trademark of Brahms’ music. Perhaps most skilfully is the way each variation appears to grow organically and naturally from the previous, even as the mood of the music is in constant flux. It’s as if over the course of the piece we slowly hear the mature Brahms emerging, before finally reaching his full zenith with the dazzling fugue that ends the work.
Brahms would compose other sets of variations in the years ahead – not least the orchestral Saint Anthony Variations (1873) as well as the virtuosic, piano-only Paganini Variations (written well before Rachmaninov’s own celebrated effort on the same theme). But never again would he be quite as ambitious and comprehensive in his efforts as with the Handel. It remains one of his very finest works.
It was also an important landmark on the road to establishing his reputation more widely. The work was dedicated to, and premiered, by Clara Schumann, who had only the highest praise for the music. Brahms himself declared, “I am fond of it and value it particularly in relation to my other works”. And having heard a performance of the piece, even the composer’s arch-nemesis Richard Wagner conceded that “one sees what still may be done in the old forms when someone comes along who knows how to use them”.
So Brahms was on his way, artistically at least, even if in many other ways his career had still barely begun. Still dividing his time between Düsseldorf and Hamburg, he probably had no inkling that he would end up spending the last thirty-five years of his life living in Vienna and becoming the Austrian capital’s most celebrated composer. And nor, for that matter, that he would be well past his fortieth birthday before he began to write the bulk of the music for which he would be ultimately best remembered.