SIX Allusive Irony in Brahms's Fourth Symphony.

Brahms's last symphony was written during the summer months of 1884 and 1885 in Murzzuschlag. The composer announced the work independently to two of his closest correspondents, characterizing it in both cases by means of the same metaphor. To Elisabeth von Herzogenberg he wrote on 29 August 1885: "May I perhaps send you a piece of a piece of mine, and would you have time to take a look at it, and say a word about it? In general my pieces are unfortunately more agreeable than I am, and one finds less in them to correct?! But in these parts the cherries do not become sweet and edible -- so if the thing doesn't taste good to you, don't bother yourself about it. I am not eager to write a bad No.4."(1) In a letter to Hans yon Billow, Brahms expressed doubts about whether the symphony would find a public. "I fear namely," Brahms wrote, "that it tastes of the climate here, cherries here don't become sweet, you would not eat them!"(2)

The Fourth Symphony challenged symphonic norms in a number of ways: by the complex working out of its themes, the novel structure of its passacaglia-like finale, and its overarching tragic character. Indeed, Brahms's Fourth -- his "neue traurige Symphonie," as he once described it -- stands as a direct challenge to the long-standing convention, established by Beethoven in his Fifth and Ninth Symphonies and virtually inviolable thereafter, that minor-key symphonies should end triumphantly in the major mode.(3) The composer's concern about the reception of his new piece might well have been sparked by his awareness that this work would challenge audience expectations and therefore need to establish for itself a novel if not indeed unique position in relation to the symphonic canon.(4)

This essay considers at some length a number of extracompositional references that figure prominently in the "traurige" expressive language of the symphony as a whole. The second movement and finale, in particular, contain significant allusions -- to works by Beethoven, Bach, and Schumann -- that have the force of an ironic utterance, and through these ironic allusions Brahms comments in an increasingly personal way on the symphony's essentially tragic character. But before turning to these later movements, we must first consider the opening measures of the work, from which its tragic character begins to grow.

I

Nearly from the start, the main theme of Brahms's opening Allegro -- with its characteristic chain of descending thirds and ascending sixths -- has sparked discussion of possible extracompositional references. In 1898 Hugo Riemann linked the theme to the aria "Schau hin und sieh" ("Behold and see") from Handel's Messiah, and ten years later Alfred Heuss observed a similarity to a passage from the slow movement of Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata. Max Kalbeck, writing in 1913, responded skeptically to both suggestions, noting that the scherzo of Brahms's own C-Major Piano Sonata, op.1, contains a similar passage of falling thirds using identical pitches (mm.48-50), and that it was therefore unnecessary to resort to other models to account for the theme of Brahms's symphony. At the same time, however, he proposed that the opening measures of Mozart's G-Minor Symphony might have served as a model instead (ex. 6.1), even drawing a parallel between the preparatory gesture in the lower strings in the earlier work and the introductory measures that Brahms had suppressed from the later one.(5)

Yet chains of falling thirds are a recurring stylistic feature of Brahms's music, and to the extent that the passages from Handel, Beethoven, and Mozart resemble the opening of the symphony simply in respect of this particular feature, adducing them as models is redundant, as Kalbeck observes. Moreover, in texted works composed after 1879 falling third-chains like the one that characterizes Brahms's symphony seem to have been consistently associated in the composer's mind with the idea of death, as Max Harrison and Peter Latham have variously remarked in regard to the songs "Feldeinsamkeit" (op.86, no.2), "Mit vierzig Jahren" (op.94, no.1), "Der Tod, das ist die kuhle Nacht" (op.96, no. 1), and "O Tod" (the third of the Vier ernste Gesange, op.121).(6) This particular use of the falling third-chain as a musical symbol for death obviously raises the possibility that the same symbolic association is operating in the Fourth Symphony. And this suggestion gains force when we note that the opening measures of the symphony even recall the "staggering" accompanimental device that characterizes a number of the songs in question.

"O Tod," op.121, no.3, seems especially relevant here. This late song contains the most prominent use in Brahms's Lieder of the falling third-chain, both in its purely structural and motivic role, as well as in the strength and nature of its association with the idea of death. In this song, Death is personified by being addressed directly no fewer than four times, each time supported by the falling third-chain. The relationship between word and motive is stark and direct. Significantly, the motive appears in both descending and inverted form, reflecting the contrasting aspects of the biblical writer's subjective response to the reality of death. In the verse that characterizes death as bitter, the motive appears in its usual descending form, but when the text speaks of death as welcome, the inverted form takes hold (ex. 6.2).