Terry Williams finds the best recordings of Brahms’s Third, one of the composer’s greatest triumphs yet one of his most paradoxical pieces
The work
Johannes Brahms fought shy of writing a symphony. What was there left to say after Beethoven? When he eventually got around to it, the First Symphony of 1876 proved so successful that he wasted no time in producing a Second. A six year symphonic silence then followed before his Third Symphony was heard. Begun in 1882 during a vacation in Wiesbaden and finished the next summer, its premiere, given by Hans Richter and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, was one of Brahms’s greatest triumphs – all the more surprising as the Third Symphony is anything but a gallery pleaser.
By the time of that premiere, the once debonair composer and very model of a 19th-century Romantic poet had long since morphed into the luxuriantly bearded and portly Johannes Brahms. Although modest by nature, he perhaps felt a certain gravitas was required if he were to look the part of the celebrated composer who had not only written a wealth of songs, choral, chamber and solo piano music, but also two acclaimed symphonies, two epic piano concertos, a violin concerto of Beethovenian stature and a much admired Ein deutsches Requiem.
The conductor and pianist Hans von Bülow, his benefactor and friend and founder of the Meiningen Court Orchestra which programmed many of his works, hailed him as ‘after Bach and Beethoven, the greatest, the most sublime of all composers’, a sentiment not shared by Brahms’s Russian contemporary Tchaikovsky, who infamously dubbed him ‘a talentless bastard’. The composer and music critic Hugo Wolf dismissed the symphonies as ‘disgustingly stale and prosy, fundamentally false and perverse’. Even today, Brahms remains one of the most divisive of composers.
It was Brahms’s Vienna, a city permanently at war with itself, which had originally drawn up the battle lines. The composer found himself in the cross-fire between two opposing claques. His detractors condemned him as regressive, a spent force compared to his fashionable contemporaries Wagner and Liszt. However, in a 1933 lecture, no less a visionary than Schoenberg, main protagonist in the avant-garde Second Viennese School, would laud Brahms as not only a leading torch-bearer for the tradition of German music from Bach onwards but also as a vital link in the development of Western music. Whatever one’s viewpoint, history ha
