Brahms: Clarinet Sonatas, Op. 120
Like Mozart and Schubert before him and Saint-Saëns, Debussy, Nielsen and Poulenc after, Brahms came to the clarinet late in life, having intended to put down his pen after the triumph of the great G major Viola Quintet, Op. 111. It was only upon hearing the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld in Meiningen in 1891 that Brahms was inspired to come out of retirement expressly to write for the clarinet. It is therefore to Mühlfeld that we owe those crowning masterpieces from Brahms’ twilight years: not just the four sublime clarinet works (the Trio for clarinet, cello and piano, Op. 114, the Quintet for clarinet and strings, Op. 115, and the present Sonatas, Op. 120), but the treasured piano music, Chorale Preludes and Four Serious Songs written in those years as well.
An unknown, unpublished, 20-year-old Brahms planted the seeds of lifelong relationships with Robert and Clara Schumann when he met them at their home in 1853 on invitation from the violinist Joseph Joachim to play some of his piano pieces. The Schumanns were profoundly impressed; Clara journaled that Brahms “seemed as if sent straight from God,” while Robert unabashedly hailed him as Beethoven’s long-awaited musical heir (he also recounted Brahms’ genius to the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in an article that reads something like a description of the Second Coming).
The Beethoven prophesy — which others would echo later in Brahms’ career — is interesting for the way it invokes at once tradition and innovation. A lifelong student of music of the past, Brahms obsessively collected, performed and transcribed the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (on one occasion, he jokingly sent his piano transcription for the left hand alone of Bach’s D minor Chaconne to Clara Schumann, who had cut a finger on her right hand); he kept a journal in which he catalogued past composers’ violations of voice leading rules (the brash parallel fifths from Schubert’s “Die böse Farbe” appear here, along with Brahms’ revision of the passage and his annotation, “Schlecht!” [“bad!”]); and his first encounter with Richard Mühlfeld was in a performance of works by Mozart and Weber, which found lasting resonances in Brahms’ music for clarinet (for one, the keys of Brahms’ two Clarinet Sonatas mirror in order those of Weber’s pair of Clarinet Concertos). Indeed, the opening five pitches of Brahms’ F minor Clarinet Sonata reproduce a third lower the beginning of the final chorale from Bach’s immortal St. Matthew Passion. But the way Brahms laces the movement with infinite combinations and permutations of that opening motive creates the kind of motivic latticework that modernist-in-chief Arnold Schoenberg would laud in his essay, “Brahms the Progressive”. In this sense, the F minor Sonata’s Allegro appassionato movement encapsulates Brahms’ straddling of past and future: an undeniably romantic tapestry of sorts mosaicked by a seminal seed of ancient origins, all packaged in the time-honored sonata form.
Of course, the issue of intention on Brahms’ part eludes resolution when it comes to the ostensible Bach quote; we know that Brahms was intimately familiar with Bach’s music and that he owned a copy of the St. Matthew Passion score, but cannot say for sure whether he consciously referenced the final chorale in the F minor Sonata. It is nevertheless tempting to read the text of that chorale in the sentimental context of the waning light of Brahms’ own life: “When I must depart one day, do not part from me then.”
Written as they were in the twilight of his life, Brahms’ clarinet works have a reflective quality — highly emotional, but experienced from the remove of memory. Following the tumult of the pained Allegro appassionato, the pathos of the F minor Sonata’s heartbreakingly understated second movement seems to lie in what is left unsaid, rather than what is present. The clarinet croons what is hardly a melody at all — basically a decorated, falling scale — accompanied by the naked, heartbeat metronome of the piano, and the movement circles itself in poetic simplicity. The tender E-flat Sonata, one of Brahms’ very last pieces of chamber music, also takes up this kind of summative quality. Like fading embers, it glows with an introspective, generous — if melancholic — spirit, which is perhaps best captured in the weeping coda that ends the Allegro amabile. That the clarinet provides the bass note that supports the movement’s final chord seems a poignant metaphor for the weight of a long life.
© Graeme Steele Johnson
Like Mozart and Schubert before him and Saint-Saëns, Debussy, Nielsen and Poulenc after, Brahms came to the clarinet late in life, having intended to put down his pen after the triumph of the great G major Viola Quintet, Op. 111. It was only upon hearing the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld in Meiningen in 1891 that Brahms was inspired to come out of retirement expressly to write for the clarinet. It is therefore to Mühlfeld that we owe those crowning masterpieces from Brahms’ twilight years: not just the four sublime clarinet works (the Trio for clarinet, cello and piano, Op. 114, the Quintet for clarinet and strings, Op. 115, and the present Sonatas, Op. 120), but the treasured piano music, Chorale Preludes and Four Serious Songs written in those years as well.
An unknown, unpublished, 20-year-old Brahms planted the seeds of lifelong relationships with Robert and Clara Schumann when he met them at their home in 1853 on invitation from the violinist Joseph Joachim to play some of his piano pieces. The Schumanns were profoundly impressed; Clara journaled that Brahms “seemed as if sent straight from God,” while Robert unabashedly hailed him as Beethoven’s long-awaited musical heir (he also recounted Brahms’ genius to the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in an article that reads something like a description of the Second Coming).
The Beethoven prophesy — which others would echo later in Brahms’ career — is interesting for the way it invokes at once tradition and innovation. A lifelong student of music of the past, Brahms obsessively collected, performed and transcribed the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (on one occasion, he jokingly sent his piano transcription for the left hand alone of Bach’s D minor Chaconne to Clara Schumann, who had cut a finger on her right hand); he kept a journal in which he catalogued past composers’ violations of voice leading rules (the brash parallel fifths from Schubert’s “Die böse Farbe” appear here, along with Brahms’ revision of the passage and his annotation, “Schlecht!” [“bad!”]); and his first encounter with Richard Mühlfeld was in a performance of works by Mozart and Weber, which found lasting resonances in Brahms’ music for clarinet (for one, the keys of Brahms’ two Clarinet Sonatas mirror in order those of Weber’s pair of Clarinet Concertos). Indeed, the opening five pitches of Brahms’ F minor Clarinet Sonata reproduce a third lower the beginning of the final chorale from Bach’s immortal St. Matthew Passion. But the way Brahms laces the movement with infinite combinations and permutations of that opening motive creates the kind of motivic latticework that modernist-in-chief Arnold Schoenberg would laud in his essay, “Brahms the Progressive”. In this sense, the F minor Sonata’s Allegro appassionato movement encapsulates Brahms’ straddling of past and future: an undeniably romantic tapestry of sorts mosaicked by a seminal seed of ancient origins, all packaged in the time-honored sonata form.
Of course, the issue of intention on Brahms’ part eludes resolution when it comes to the ostensible Bach quote; we know that Brahms was intimately familiar with Bach’s music and that he owned a copy of the St. Matthew Passion score, but cannot say for sure whether he consciously referenced the final chorale in the F minor Sonata. It is nevertheless tempting to read the text of that chorale in the sentimental context of the waning light of Brahms’ own life: “When I must depart one day, do not part from me then.”
Written as they were in the twilight of his life, Brahms’ clarinet works have a reflective quality — highly emotional, but experienced from the remove of memory. Following the tumult of the pained Allegro appassionato, the pathos of the F minor Sonata’s heartbreakingly understated second movement seems to lie in what is left unsaid, rather than what is present. The clarinet croons what is hardly a melody at all — basically a decorated, falling scale — accompanied by the naked, heartbeat metronome of the piano, and the movement circles itself in poetic simplicity. The tender E-flat Sonata, one of Brahms’ very last pieces of chamber music, also takes up this kind of summative quality. Like fading embers, it glows with an introspective, generous — if melancholic — spirit, which is perhaps best captured in the weeping coda that ends the Allegro amabile. That the clarinet provides the bass note that supports the movement’s final chord seems a poignant metaphor for the weight of a long life.
© Graeme Steele Johnson