Johannes Brahms: Cello Sonata No. 1 in E minor, Op. 38 (Copy) (Copy) (Copy) (Copy) (Copy) (Copy)
Program note written for the San Francisco Symphony.
In 1862, Johannes Brahms’s friend Adolf Schubring wrote these prophetic words in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik: “[Brahms] understands how to be Classic and Romantic, ideal and real—and after all, I believe he is appointed to blend both these eternal oppositions in art.”
Shortly after this career-defining article, Brahms began work on his E-minor cello sonata: his first published duo sonata. In June 1862, he rented a house with his composer friend Albert Dietrich just below the Ebernburg castle in a picturesque part of Germany. It was no coincidence they chose a location near the vacation spot of the virtuoso pianist and composer Clara Schumann, Brahms’s love and muse. Dietrich and Brahms spent the summer months composing, hiking in the nearby countryside, and visiting with Clara who regularly played for them in the evenings.
Brahms dedicated the sonata to his friend and colleague Josef Gänsbacher, a singing coach, administrator of the Singakademie in Vienna, and an amateur cellist. It was at Gänsbacher’s recommendation that Brahms received an invitation to direct the Singakademie, a position that became Brahms’s portal into the Viennese music world. The story goes that when Brahms and Gänsbacher played the sonata for a group of friends, Gänsbacher complained that he could not hear himself because of Brahms’s vigorous piano playing. Brahms responded: “lucky you.” It is likely an apocryphal anecdote, but not wholly unbelievable given Brahms’s cantankerous humor.
In this story, Brahms and Gänsbacher would have been performing the first version of the E-minor sonata, a three-movement piece with an Adagio as the central movement. Brahms submitted it twice to the publisher Simrock and was rejected. After three years, he revisited the piece while on another bucolic retreat near Clara Schumann. He did away with the Adagio middle movement, writing a fugal finale to replace it. The revision gave the piece a strange shape—a massive first movement in sonata form followed by a little dance marked Allegretto quasi Menuetto and finished off with the tumultuous Allegro. There is no slow movement in the entire piece. Finally in 1866, Simrock accepted this version and published it.
As if to answer Schubring’s critical essay, Brahms blends Romanticism and Classicism in novel ways in the E-minor sonata. Rich, singing melodies and moments of Sturm und Drang are couched in old musical structures. The first movement of the sonata is like an aural depiction of chiaroscuro. It opens with a decidedly scuro melody in the cello, dark and resonant, encouraged by offbeat chords in the piano. The scholar Karl Geiringer remarked on the resemblance of the first theme to the Contrapunctus III from Bach’s Art of Fugue. We pass through several keys with plenty of harmonic surprises until a new group of themes emerges, first a fiery one in B minor, furiously exchanged in tight counterpoint between the piano and the cello, then a theme in B major that floats peacefully in the wake of turmoil. The development reaches an energetic peak through unlikely means—the simple descending fifth that accompanied the peaceful B-major theme becomes a source of incredible power. After letting go into a quiet return of the B-major melody, the piece follows standard sonata form with a recap of the material from the exposition. The movement ends in the chiaro mood with a pastorale fantasy on the B-major theme.
The second movement, Allegretto quasi menuetto, is playful in a slightly sinister way, filled with the poised dance rhythms and graceful ornaments of the French Baroque. A sinuous waltz in the movement’s central trio section sees Brahms at his cleverest, expanding the first four notes of the minuet’s main theme until we return to the movement’s opening material. The third movement grabs us immediately. Though mostly in sonata form, it contains large fugal sections with a subject again inspired by Bach’s Art of Fugue. Brahms uses his command of classical forms to dramatic effect. The thundering piano part caused Brahms biographer Daniel Mason to write: “When you set a single cello to competing like this with the two hands of an able-bodied pianist, the odds are certainly on the pianist.” But the interweaving of the cello and the pianist’s two hands also makes for fascinating sonorities and thrilling virtuosity. A cascade of notes in both instruments brings the piece to a crashing close.