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Johannes Brahms (1835 - 1897) Allegro non troppo Adagio Allegro giocoso ma non troppo vivace Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg in 1833. His childhood was spent in relative poverty, and his early studies in music, for which he showed a natural aptitude, developed his talent to such an extent that there was talk of touring as a prodigy at the age of 11. It was Eduard Marxsen who gave him a grounding in the technical basis of composition, while the boy helped his family by playing the piano to entertain guests in summer inns outside the city. Brahms’s first concert tour in 1853, with the Hungarian emigre Violinist Ede Remenyi, took them, on the recommendation of the young Hungarian Violinist Joachim, to Weimar, where Franz Liszt held court and might have been expected to show particular favour to a fellow-countryman. Remenyi profited from the visit, but Brahms, with a lack of tact that was later accentuated, failed to impress the Master. Later in the year, however, he met the Schumanns, through Joachim’s agency. The meeting was a fruitful one. Schumann had moved in 1850 from Dresden to take up a position in Düsseldorf and now he detected in Brahms’s music a promise of greatness, Publishing his views in the journal he had once edited, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, and declaring Brahms the long-awaited successor to Beethoven. Düring Schumann’s final years, after his attempt at suicide and subsequent breakdown, Brahms rallied to the support of Schumann’s wife, Clara Schumann, and her young family, remaining a firm friend until her death in 1896, shortly before his own in the following year. Brahms completed his Violin Concerto in 1878 and dedicated it to his friend Joseph Joachim. The relationship with Joachim was later to suffer through Brahms’s lack of tact, when he tried to intervene in a dispute between Joachim and his wife, the singer Amalie Joachim, who submitted evidence of her husband’s faults of character in a letter written to her by Brahms. The breach was in part repaired by the later composition of the Double Concerto for violin and cello in 1887, a peace offering. Following his usual custom, Brahms worked on the Violin Concerto during his country summer holiday at Pörtschach, where in 1877 he had started his Sympbony No. 2. The first performance of the work was given in Leipzig on New Year’s Day, 1879, with Joachim as the soloist. The concerto combines two complementary aspects of the composer, that of the C Mirti/n Boon (CC 8Y-NC-NO) /1 f -W'O'ITFT artist concerned with the great and serious, as a Contemporary critic put it, and that of the lyrical composer of songs. As always Brahms was critical of his own work, and the concerto, long promised, had been the subject of his usual doubts and hesitations. Originally four movements had been planned, but in the end the two middle movements were replaced by the present Adagio, music that Brahms described as feeble but that pleased Joachim as much as it has always delighted audiences. The first movement opens with an orchestral exposition in which the first subject is incompletely presented in the initial bars. Its full appearance is entrusted to the soloist, after the orchestra has offered a second subject and other themes that will later seem eminently well suited to the solo violin. The actual entry of the soloist and the approach to it must remind us of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, with its rather longer exposition that had so taxed the patience of Viennese audiences 70 years earlier. The cadenza was left to Joachim. The slow movement is splendidly lyrical, based on a melody of great beauty, which is expanded and developed by the soloist and the orchestra, dying away before the vigorous opening of the Hungarian-style finale. This, in rondo form, is of great variety, intervening episodes providing a contrast with the energetic principal theme, leading to a conclusion of mounting excitement.
