Overture Magazine - 2018-19 Season BSO_Overture_MAR_APR | Page 29

BRAHMS PIANO CONCERTO NO. 1
themselves into two camps: those
who admired the conservative, more
abstract style of Johannes Brahms and
those who were swept away by Richard
Wagner’s progressive, opera-based
“Music of the Future.” Schoenberg
was unusual in that he revered both
Brahms and Wagner equally. In Pelléas,
we hear these two musical camps
locked in a sometimes ravishing,
sometimes uneasy truce. Its highly
chromatic melodic and harmonic
language is certainly Wagnerian as
traditional tonality is stretched to
the limits. On the other hand, its
extensive developments of motives and
themes along with its dense layers of
contrapuntal voices is Brahmsian.
In the key of D minor , the work
unfolds as one very long movement,
lasting about 45 minutes. However,
Alban Berg, one of Schoenberg’s two
principal pupils and surely writing
with his teacher’s approval, has posited
a scheme that divides the tone poem
into four symphonic movements, which
makes the work much easier to follow.
The opening of the first movement
paints the darkness and mystery of the
forest where Golaud first encounters
Mélisande. Permeating the entire score
is a three-note motive, which is the
building block of most of the longer
themes. Introduced immediately in
the English horn, it rises by half steps.
Underneath in the violas, it evolves
into the wistful rising first theme
associated with Mélisande. The oboes
soon add a descending, pleading second
Mélisande theme. In the horns, Golaud
responds with his strong, virile theme,
which gradually grows passionate in
the strings. The savage, dissonant Fate
theme loudly predicts disaster. As this
subsides, a muted trumpet proclaims
Pelléas’ lighter, more carefree theme.
The second movement begins in a
dancing quick tempo with flutes and
other woodwinds depicting Mélisande
and Pelléas’ frolicking by the fountain,
as she tosses Golaud’s ring in the
air, then disastrously loses it in the
water. A slower episode, featuring solo
cello, woodwinds and the two harps,
conceived a concerto as sprawling in its
dimensions as this or one that assaults
the listener with such a dramatic and
defiant principal theme as Brahms hurls
out in the first measures. The timpani
thunder a mighty rolling D while
violins and cellos lash out with a savage
melody, apparently in a different key
and with repeated ferocious trills on the
discordant note A-flat, which forms a
tritone — the ominous “devil in music”
interval — over the sustained D pedal.
Such a mood of fierce tragedy was
not in tune with the fashion of the
day, and so its first audience was not
enthusiastic. “My Concerto has had
here a brilliant and decisive — failure,”
Brahms wrote to his friend Joseph
Joachim. “At the conclusion three pairs
of hands were brought together very
slowly, whereupon a perfectly distinct
hissing from all sides forbade any such
demonstration.” A critic called the first
movement a “monstrosity.”
Brahms began composing the
work in 1854 when he was 20 and in
the midst of a tumultuous domestic
tragedy. In February of that year,
Robert Schumann, Brahms’ beloved
mentor, attempted suicide and was
incarcerated in a mental asylum where
he died in 1856. Brahms raced to
the Schumann home in Düsseldorf
to comfort Clara Schumann and
spent the next several years at her
side, acting as go-between to her
husband and in the process falling
deeply in love with this beautiful
and accomplished musician, 14 years
his senior. It was a terrible situation
for a very young and sensitive
man. The month after Schumann’s
suicide attempt, he began composing
the concerto as a sonata for two
pianos; Joachim wrote that the first
movement’s mood was his response to
Schumann’s plight. Soon, the piano
format seemed inadequate for his big
thoughts, and he tried transforming it
into a symphony. But virtuoso piano
passages kept intruding, and by the
time of Schumann’s death, Brahms
had decided he wasn’t ready to tackle
a symphony.
describes the sensuous scene in which
Mélisande unravels her beautiful hair.
In a more violent episode, Golaud’s
jealousy is stirred. Here in one of the
work’s most stunningly orchestrated
passages, filled with eerie trombone
glissandi, he leads Pelléas to the fetid
vaults under the castle and threatens
him, to the screams of the Fate theme.
In the slow movement, a love
scene between Pelléas and Mélisande
revolves around the magnificent Love
theme, glorying in the warmth of
the low strings. Golaud, maddened
by jealousy, surprises the lovers and
strikes Pelléas dead.
The finale reprises much of the first
movement’s introductory material in a
lighter but more pathos-laden scoring
and emphasizing Mélisande’s themes
and Fate. Golaud’s grief and contrition
leads into Mélisande’s death, voiced by
poignant English horn solo and then a
solemn funeral march. A final epilogue,
led by the horns and emphasizing the
Love and Fate themes, sums up the
drama and its calamitous impact on its
one surviving participant, Golaud.
Instrumentation: Four flutes including
two piccolos, three oboes, English horn,
five clarinets including two bass clarinets and
E-flat clarinet, three bassoons, contrabassoon,
eight horns, four trumpets, five trombones,
tuba, timpani, percussion, two harps
and strings.
PIANO CONCERTO NO. 1
Johannes Brahms
Born in Hamburg, Germany, May 7, 1833;
died in Vienna, Austria, April 3, 1897
The First Piano Concerto was
Brahms’ calling card to the world: his
announcement that a powerful new
voice had arrived on the European
musical scene. When it was premiered
in Hanover, with the composer as
soloist, on January 22, 1859, no one
had heard a concerto so bold, weighty
and demanding of its listeners since
Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto of
1809. And even Beethoven had not

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