Johannes Brahms
b. 7 May 1833 in Hamburg, Germany; d. 3 April 1897 in Vienna, Austria.
Three Hungarian Dances (nos. 1, 3, and 10). Published 1874, age 41.
As a young man still living in his native Hamburg, Brahms encountered a violinist named Eduard Reményi. He had been born Eduard Hoffmann three years before Brahms, but he was Hungarian and changed his name in part as an expression of patriotism. He habitually would perform some “national dances” on his programs that drew on both Magyar and Gypsy styles. Biographer Jan Swafford notes that there was a substantial Hungarian community in Hamburg following the political revolutions happening all over Europe, including Hungary, in 1848. This Hungarian style, exciting and passionate, was exotic and alien to the north Germans, including Brahms. Brahms and Reményi met in August 1850 when Reményi asked Brahms to accompany him in a recital in a private home. Things progressed well enough that they began touring together in 1853.
Magyar and Gypsy are as thoroughly mixed as musical styles as they are as ethnicities. The elements can be identified, but not in one short sentence. Furthermore, these elements represent a kind of “urban” Hungarian music. Decades later, Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály would discover and document the true Hungarian folk music tucked away in tiny villages in the country. As for Reményi, his folk music was authentic as far as it went, none of it notated. So Brahms started working out piano parts to fit the violin lines, with Reményi functioning as a stylistic coach. It was also in 1853 that Brahms met an already widely known violinist named Joseph Joachim, aged 22, also Hungarian and a friend of Reményi. When in time Reményi and Brahms parted ways, Joachim perpetuated the Hungarian influence upon Brahms.
Fast-forward to Brahms in the early middle of his career, now living in Vienna. He published one set of Hungarian Dances for piano four-hands in 1869 and a second in 1880. There were charges of plagiarism from others who claimed that they had composed tunes that Brahms was issuing under his own name. But Brahms had taken care with the initial publication not to put opus numbers on the pieces, and the title pages credited him only as an arranger. The music journal Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1874 published a list identifying the sources of the first set of ten dances, and in 1933 musicologist Endre Major made a scholarly investigation of all of Brahms’s Hungarian Dances.
The publications were a big success, especially for the publisher Simrock (as Dvorák’s Slavonic Dances would be not too many years in the future), with arrangements of them issued for solo piano by Brahms and for violin and piano by Joachim. Brahms himself orchestrated the three on the present program, though why these three and not more is unknown. The first dance is known as the “Divine Csárdás,” published in Pesth (later renamed Budapest) and probably originally composed by Miska Borzó. The second and third dances use melodies from a popular set of dances published as “Tolna Wedding Dances.” The melody that Brahms sets in D major in the middle of no. 2 was also used by Liszt in his Hungarian Rhapsody no. 8. A version of one of the themes in the final dance was collected by Bartók and used in his 15 Hungarian Peasant Songs.
Miklós Rózsa
b. 18 April 1907 in Budapest, Hungary; d. 27 July 1995 in Hollywood, California.
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 24. Premiered 15 January 1956 in Dallas, age 48.
Rózsa’s is a name that to many readers “sounds familiar,” and well it should. Rózsa was one of the great composers of film scores in the middle 20th century; he won three Oscars for his scores for “Spellbound” (1945), “A Double Life” (1947), and “Ben-Hur” (1959). He received another ten nominations for Academy Awards. Among the many familiar films that he scored are “The Thief of Bagdad” (1940), “The Jungle Book” (1942), “Double Indemnity” (1944), “The Lost Weekend” (1945), “The Naked City” (1948), “Command Decision” (1948), “Adam’s Rib” (1949), “Quo Vadis” (1951), “Lust for Life” (1956), “The Green Berets” (1968), and his last film score, “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” (1982).
But he started as a composer of classical, or “serious,” music. After completing his general education in Budapest, he went to Leipzig, passing music examinations in 1929 and relocating to Paris in May 1932. He achieved his first international success in Paris, but, like so many other composers, he had trouble making ends meet. On the recommendation of his friend, fellow composer Arthur Honegger, Rózsa tried composing music for films to pay his bills. Rózsa did very well for about a year in Paris, scoring mostly newsreels, but chose to move to London in 1935.
In London Rózsa met Alexander Korda, a film director and producer and fellow Hungarian expatriate. Starting with “Knight Without Armour” (1937), Rózsa composed music for a string of Korda’s films, culminating in “The Thief of Bagdad.” Shooting on the film began in London in 1939 but was thrown off-schedule by the Blitz. Korda moved the entire company to Hollywood to complete the film, bringing about Rózsa’s last major relocation. One more highlight of Rózsa’s film career to note is his exclusive contract with MGM running from 1949 to 1968 that, among other things, gave him the right of first refusal to score every and any film produced; and the contract guaranteed that no one would tamper with his scores, nor would Rózsa ever be obligated to tamper with anyone else’s score.
In 1953, Rózsa approached Jascha Heifetz with the idea of writing a violin concerto for him. Heifetz suggested that Rózsa prepare only a first movement and bring it to him for evaluation. After completing his score for Julius Caesar, Rózsa began serious work on the concerto while on his summer vacation in Rapallo, Italy, and had a complete score in six weeks. Heifetz liked what he heard, and over the next year as his schedule allowed fine-tuned the solo part. Heifetz gave the first performance in Dallas conducted by Walter Hendl. The entire work is dominated by the scales common in Hungarian folk music, but there are numerous traditional harmonies in the orchestra and solo part that sweeten the music. Of course, having been composed for Heifetz, the solo part is a colossal technical and artistic test.
Johannes Brahms
Symphony no. 4 in E minor, Op. 98. Premiered 25 October 1885 in Meiningen, Germany, age 52.
Brahms’ Third Symphony had been successful from its first performance in Vienna on 2 December 1883. As the list of his works admired and loved by the public and musical colleagues lengthened Brahms, far from resting on his laurels, was concerned that people were constantly waiting to see whether he would equal or surpass his latest success. Thus, when Brahms began working on his Fourth Symphony, he took his time, completing the first two movements during the summer of 1884 and the last two in summer 1885.
The premiere in Meiningen was in a friendly environment, with applause after each movement and an ovation at the conclusion. Friends expressed far more enthusiasm having heard the orchestration, and a string of successful performances around Germany and Austria accumulated. But frequently the praise was muted. Reviewing the first performance in Vienna, on 17 January 1886, Hanslick described it as “the composer’s severest test,” and a “dark well.”
On one hand, this symphony is completely typical of Brahms; on the other, he is amazingly inventive. The falling chain of thirds in the beginning will recur, transformed, throughout the symphony. The second movement, while it ends with an E major triad, for much of its length uses an altered, modal version of the scale that makes the mood ambivalent. The third movement is in C, the only movement not in E, and is the only one of his symphonic scherzos to be in sonata form. By itself, its mood is irresistibly jovial; in the context of the other movements, it is quick flash of sunlight between storm clouds.
Writers describe the fourth movement as a passacaglia or a chaconne, but it’s nearly impossible to make a distinction between those terms. The most accurate description would be a set of 30 variations on an 8-measure theme. Brahms’s gift for variation is brilliantly apparent here, taking the music and the mood through amazing transformations yet never losing sight of the original musical shape. Most analysts see the variations grouped in three sections, the center being slower, softer, and making more use of the major mode. The last third, while still being a series of variations, sounds like a recapitulation of the first section.
They say that musical masterpieces lend themselves to varied interpretations. That is certainly the case here. While it is possible to sense autobiographical elements in Brahms’s music, by the time of the Fourth Symphony the emotional character of his music is so refined as to be nearly abstract. The color of E minor in this symphony is certainly dark. For the conclusion of the entire work to be in the minor mode is unusual, and the headlong plunge into the last cadence has long felt to this listener like a massive, ancient tree crashing to earth. But Brahms supplied no program for this piece, nor did he drop any hints in correspondence or conversation that the symphony was “about” anything. Brahms would surely have said, as Ralph Vaughan Williams would say about his Symphony in E minor, “It’s about the key of E minor.”
©2008, David Mead
