BRAHMS AND BRUCKNER
Notes on the composers and the pieces
Johannes Brahms
Schicksalslied (Song of Destiny)
Anton Bruckner
Symphony No. 7
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Johannes Brahms: Schicksalslied (Song of Destiny), Op. 54
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) was one of the leading composers in late German Romanticism. Brahms’s early career, when he worked mostly around his native Hamburg, was helped by several important friends. One was violinist Joseph Joachim, whom Brahms met in 1853 while touring with violinist Eduard Reményi. Joachim wrote a note introducing Brahms to Franz Liszt and later cleared the way for the composer to visit the home of Robert and Clara Schumann in Düsseldorf. Robert Schumann helped bring him to the public’s attention by advising him to write something like a Beethoven symphony and by declaring him “the Chosen One.” Schumann’s mental illness worsened soon after and he died in an asylum in 1856, but Clara, a famous pianist, remained a strong supporter and friend of Brahms.
In 1859 Brahms established a woman’s choir, the Hamburg Frauenchor. After he applied several times without success for the music directorship of the Hamburg Philharmonic, he moved to Vienna in 1862 to improve his reputation with the Philharmonic’s management. Though he never attained this music directorship, he remained in Vienna where he composed, performed, and led concerts of the Vienna Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Viennese Society for the Friends of Music).
After resigning from that society, he worked solely as a composer. In that role, he was comfortable with most musical forms save for the tone poem, opera, ballet, and the mass. (Some people, including the composer himself, might add the string quartet, but he produced three fine ones.) His musically conservative reputation put him at the center of the conflict with the New German School of Wagner and Liszt, but Brahms was more progressive than was supposed, particularly with harmony. Arnold Schoenberg praised him, and Anton Webern went so far as to credit him with anticipating the atonal Second Viennese School.
Brahms wrote most of his major orchestral works relatively late in his career. At age 35 he had yet to write a symphony because he considered the symphony the highest form of orchestral writing and beyond his abilities. Beethoven had set an intimidating standard for composing symphonies, but Schumann’s endorsement encouraged Brahms to get started on one. Still, he faltered. His initial effort turned into his First Piano Concerto (1858), which many people considered almost a symphony. His next attempt appeared on a sketch he gave Clara Schumann in 1862, but he destroyed most if not all the evidence of whatever progress he made. Meanwhile, he produced major chamber works, songs, piano pieces, and Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem, 1868), the work that established him as a major composer.
Soon after the premiere of the Requiem, while visiting a friend on Germany’s North Sea coast, Brahms came across Friedrich Hölderlin’s short novel, Hyperion; or, The Hermit in Greece. He was particularly impressed by a poem in the novel entitled “Hyperions Schicksalslied,” mainly for its contrasting the divine existence of the Spirits in Heaven with the struggle of humans on Earth. Later, he began work on his own Schicksalslied (Song of Destiny or Song of Fate), also known as the Little Requiem, perhaps because the work came so soon after the German Requiem.
The work opens with a calm, serene, even prayerful Adagio depicting celestial spirits. An aggressive Allegro portrays the violence and conflicts endured on Earth. In terms of text and plot, Brahms knew how he wanted the piece to end, but he was unsure how to get there musically. He was so unsure that he set the score aside and wrote Alto Rhapsody in 1869. He did not return to Schicksalslied until 1871 when he took Hermann Levi’s advice to use the opening orchestral passage for the ending though in a different key and orchestration. The result was a serene ending that exchanges struggle for peace.
About Schicksalslied, German musicologist Josef Sittard wrote,“Had Brahms never written anything but...[Schicksalslied] it would have sufficed to rank him with the best masters.”
—Roger Hecht
Roger Hecht plays trombone in the Mercury Orchestra. He is a former member of Bay Colony Brass (where he was also the Operations/Personnel Manager), the Syracuse Symphony, Lake George Opera, New Bedford Symphony, and Cape Ann Symphony, as well as trombonist and orchestra manager of Lowell House Opera, Commonwealth Opera, and MetroWest Opera. He is a regular reviewer for American Record Guide, contributed to Classical Music: Listener’s Companion, and has written articles on music for the Elgar Society Journal and Positive Feedback magazine. His fiction collection, The Audition and Other Stories, includes a novella about a trombonist preparing for and taking a major orchestra audition (English Hill Press, 2013).
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