Beethoven wrote his first eight symphonies (and was stuck into the ninth) in less time. But it’s how long it took Brahms to complete his First Symphony. He initially sketched it in the mid-1850s, in his 20s, and he was 43 by the time it was premiered, exactly 150 years ago on 4 November 1876 in Karlsruhe.
Earlier that summer had seen the premiere of Wagner’s Ring cycle in Bayreuth – another project that had taken more than 20 years to bring to fruition. But in contrast to the 15 hours and four operas of the Ring, all Brahms had to do was compose four movements, lasting about 45 minutes in performance. Why did it take him so long?
Mostly because of Beethoven. Where Wagner took the inspiration of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as an excuse to reject the concept of the purely instrumental symphony – the voices of the choral symphony in the Ode To Joy were the start of Wagner’s development of a new kind of music-drama – Brahms grappled with the question of how to write a symphony with “that giant”, as he’s said to have called Beethoven, on his back. As if that self-administered pressure weren’t enough, he risked even greater comparisons with Beethoven: his First Symphony is brought to its conclusion by a tune that virtually quotes Ode to Joy.
In short, the essence of his work is profoundly personal. This symphony’s subject is his battle with and transcendence of all those centuries of influence, the history of his anxieties in coming to terms with them. The music’s journey from C minor to C major – the same as Beethoven’s Fifth – is staged not as a search for a humanity-encompassing utopia, as it is with Beethoven, but as something more intimate.
It is a struggle to find an individual voice, a quest for a territory that’s new and yet connected to all of that weighty history. With this work, Brahms wasn’t trying to change the world – he was trying to keep it going, and to find his place within it. The conductor and pianist Hans von Bülow called the symphony “Beethoven’s Tenth”, which might seem like the greatest of compliments, but to me was really a misunderstanding of the unique intensity and intimacy of expression that Brahms finds in his First Symphony – a symphony that Beethoven could not, and would not, have written.
Over, now, to Berlin, with a story that seems incomprehensibly trivial to anyone not involved in the finer points of orchestral disposition, but bear with. Conductor Iván Fischer cancelled this week’s planned concerts of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic (Andrés Orozco-Estrada has replaced him) because the double-basses would not be moved from their usual placement in the Philharmonie, their concert hall home. They usually sit to the conductor’s right, with one of the angled walls of the hall behind them.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
