A Rare Gift: Brahms Symphony No. 3 Piano Reduction

In September, 2014, Peter Poltun, Archivist and Music Librarian of the Vienna Opera, presented Music Director Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra with a gift: a rare edition of the piano reduction of Johannes Brahms’s Third Symphony. Brahms wrote his Symphony No. 3 in F Major during the summer of 1883 while spending time at Wiesbaden, a town on the Rhine River. The two-part piano version of the work was premiered by Brahms and his friend Ignaz Brüll in November of that year in Vienna, and the first orchestral performance of the symphony was given a month later by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra under Hans Richter. Brahms was heavily involved in arranging the two-part piano reduction of the symphony for publication; this version was printed in 1884 prior to the release of the full score. Publishers in the nineteenth century often printed arrangements of symphonies for four hands on two pianos before their full-score counterparts, which built excitement for forthcoming published symphonic versions of the pieces and gave audiences the chance to play through the works at home. We thank Peter for his gift of this first printing of Brahms’s two-part piano arrangement of the symphony, which he warmly presented to the Orchestra in Vienna during the fall 2014 tour, 91 years after the Orchestra first performed the symphonic version of the work in Cleveland.

— Kate Rogers was the 2014–15 season archives research fellow. The fellowship is an opportunity for graduate music students from Case Western Reserve University to work with The Cleveland Orchestra Archives.