THE LISTENING SERVICE
It’s Christmas. And Johannes Brahms has the best beard in the business, so what gifts does he bear this festive season? Cherries! But cherries that don’t ripen – in fact, cherries whose musical putrefaction heralds the end of an era of hope. Merry humbugging Brahmsmas with his Fourth Symphony!
The irony is that the Fourth Symphony – composed in 1884-5 in Mürzzuschlag, where Brahms said the cherries never ripen, and he worried his symphony might not either – is also a piece that makes the most superficially festive sounds that Brahms ever created in a symphony. The scherzo even includes a tinkling, twangling triangle, so surely it’s a cavalcade of joy?
But this scherzo isn’t a joke: it’s a manically concentrated movement in which Brahms’s sonic whims – including the triangle – are held in a vice-like grip of compositional cunning, in music that distils the harmonic and motivic essence of the previous two movements, and whose climax is a scream across the whole gamut of the orchestra, prefiguring the final movement’s main theme.
The finale makes a symphonic terminus on the rubble of the musical history that Brahms knew uniquely well. His theme is a version of a bass line that Bach had used in the final movement of his Cantata BWV 150. Here, Bach’s ‘days of sorrow’ becomes the basis of a symphonic chaconne: 30 variations and a coda, all based on the same chromatically churning theme.
There is no relief in this movement from its ouroboros-like ascent and descent. Brahms’s compositional feat in this music is to disguise that repetitive regularity, but the trajectory of the piece is never in doubt: a tragic, exhausted oblivion in E minor, as the theme is warped and wracked by a fractal, self-referential storm of energy in its final bars, a black hole that consum
