Brahms: Clarinet Quintet in B minor, Op. 115
Johannes Brahms had retired from composing by the time he heard the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld, but was so inspired by his playing that he came out of retirement expressly to write for the clarinet. The resulting chamber music includes the Clarinet Trio, two Clarinet Sonatas, and the poignant Quintet for Clarinet, Two Violins, Viola, and Cello in B minor, Op. 115, all some of his final, most mature works. Written as they were in the twilight of Brahms’ life, these works have a reflective quality, highly emotional, but experienced from the remove of memory.
The Clarinet Quintet seems to straddle two opposing sides of a coin. The conspicuous lack of tonic in the violins’ opening gesture creates a momentary ambiguity between B minor and D major, an early herald of the duality that will outline the work’s affective trajectory (and for Donald Tovey, a "tragic" elevation of the same tonal ambiguity that initiates Haydn's B minor Quartet, Op. 31, No. 1) . The three-note motive that the clarinet sings in the Adagio is the same that forms the pillars of the movement’s rhapsodic middle section. The third movement is similarly constructed on two contrasting sections — a melancholic scherzo in B minor between the pastoral spaciousness of the D major Andantino areas — both mosaicked with the same two motives. Even the fourth movement sources its opening material from the Andantino, but this time the turbulent B minor casts a shadow of malaise on the sunny repose that ended the third movement. The final variation’s collision with reprised music from the first movement signifies a sort of communion, a coming full circle that seems to acknowledge this material as the bookends of a unified story. The realization of this goal allows the piece to finally come to rest, but not before the final upset of the forte penultimate chord: Brahms’ harrowing last gasp right as the curtain falls.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest
Johannes Brahms had retired from composing by the time he heard the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld, but was so inspired by his playing that he came out of retirement expressly to write for the clarinet. The resulting chamber music includes the Clarinet Trio, two Clarinet Sonatas, and the poignant Quintet for Clarinet, Two Violins, Viola, and Cello in B minor, Op. 115, all some of his final, most mature works. Written as they were in the twilight of Brahms’ life, these works have a reflective quality, highly emotional, but experienced from the remove of memory.
The Clarinet Quintet seems to straddle two opposing sides of a coin. The conspicuous lack of tonic in the violins’ opening gesture creates a momentary ambiguity between B minor and D major, an early herald of the duality that will outline the work’s affective trajectory (and for Donald Tovey, a "tragic" elevation of the same tonal ambiguity that initiates Haydn's B minor Quartet, Op. 31, No. 1) . The three-note motive that the clarinet sings in the Adagio is the same that forms the pillars of the movement’s rhapsodic middle section. The third movement is similarly constructed on two contrasting sections — a melancholic scherzo in B minor between the pastoral spaciousness of the D major Andantino areas — both mosaicked with the same two motives. Even the fourth movement sources its opening material from the Andantino, but this time the turbulent B minor casts a shadow of malaise on the sunny repose that ended the third movement. The final variation’s collision with reprised music from the first movement signifies a sort of communion, a coming full circle that seems to acknowledge this material as the bookends of a unified story. The realization of this goal allows the piece to finally come to rest, but not before the final upset of the forte penultimate chord: Brahms’ harrowing last gasp right as the curtain falls.
© Graeme Steele Johnson for Chamber Music Northwest