Brahms’s Second Symphony

Franz Liszt was a man of exceptional energy. He was active throughout his life as pianist, composer, conductor, and teacher, with constant commitments in France, Germany, Italy, and Hungary. He was also a lifelong reviser of his own music. As such, it is not clear to us over a century past his death which piece he was working on at any given moment. Liszt sketched, drafted, completed, revised, and revised again before many of his works were ever published or performed — and even then, they were often subject to further tinkering. His output of original compositions and transcriptions (of his own and others’ works) was so vast, it is likely that his mind, if not his desk, was always a traffic-jam of pieces in various stages of completion.

The symphonic poem Orpheus is exceptional, then, because it enjoyed a relatively simple birth and was never revised. While Liszt was known for his virtuosity on the piano and for the great brilliance of his compositions, this work presents a total contrast in tone and sensibility. In this work is the contemplative Liszt, absorbed not by his lifelong religious devotions, but by the legacy of Greek culture.

In the printed score, this beautiful work is prefaced by a short essay in which Liszt explains how, as conductor of Weimar’s opera house in the 1850s, he was preparing a performance of Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice. The “sublime simplicity” of Gluck’s music led him to think of Orpheus as a symbol for the essence of art. Calling to mind an Etruscan vase he had seen at the Louvre in Paris, Liszt pictured “the first poet-musician, draped in a star-studded robe, his brow crowned with a mystically royal bandeau, his lips open to utter divine words and music, and his long, slender fingers energetically plucking the strings of his lyre.” Around the figure of Orpheus on the vase lie the wild beasts he has tamed with the beauty of his singing; all nature is subdued by the power of art. The essay insists that the modern world has much to learn from this artistic vision. In his symphonic poem, Liszt made his point by composing music not in an imagined style from ancient Greece, but in a modern, 19th-century orchestral language.

Liszt’s orchestral music has sometimes been dismissed as being derived from Berlioz or ghosted by his disciple Joachim Raff, but in works such as Orpheus, his mastery of orchestration is both personal and obvious; it is a short step from here to the new soundworld of Wagner’s music dramas.

For this work, the two harps play a crucial role in representing Orpheus’s lyre. The opening sections are scored with the character of chamber music, giving expressive solo entries to the woodwinds. Solo violin and cello also contribute, and the mood remains serene and abstracted until a certain quickening of the pace generates a modest climax for the full orchestra. Calm returns, and the final page has a visionary quality with string and wind chords alternating in celestial harmony.

The work was first performed in February 1854 as the overture to a performance of Gluck’s opera. While Orfeo has its own overture, it is, by common consent, a somewhat bland piece that has little in common with the marvelous music of the opera itself. Liszt would have had no hesitation in substituting his own much more appropriate piece; such shifting and substitution was quite normal in the 19th century.

Later that same year, Liszt’s Orpheus was performed in Weimar as a concert work, and in due course it took its place as “No. 4” in the series of 12 published symphonic poems — composed by Liszt throughout the 1850s as part of his enduring legacy after he had given up concertizing as one of the century’s greatest virtuoso pianists.

— Hugh Macdonald

Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.

Bohuslav Martinů began composing when he was still a child, but he was a late bloomer when it came to the symphony: he embarked on his First Symphony in 1942, at age 51. Once he embraced the form, however, he did so with remarkable intensity, completing all six of his symphonies over the next dozen years.

Born in 1890 in the quiet Bohemian border town of Polička — the name means “Little Fields” — Martinů was trained as a violinist but remained mostly self-taught as a composer. After early years playing in the Czech Philharmonic, he relocated in 1923 to Paris, where he absorbed an immense range of influences — Stravinsky, jazz, Neoclassicism, Renaissance polyphony — without becoming anyone’s disciple. Childhood memories of Czech folk music also entered the mix. By the time Martinů reached America, he was fusing these elements into a language unmistakably his own: rhythmically vital, pungent, closely layered in harmony, clear in design, and animated by an acute ear for orchestral color.

Martinů’s late symphonic flowering was inseparable from exile and nurtured by American institutions and émigré communities. Having fled Nazi-occupied France in 1940, he reached the United States the following year with little more than a handful of scores. The Boston Symphony Orchestra under Serge Koussevitzky commissioned the First Symphony in 1942 (and would later premiere the Third and Sixth symphonies).

A year later, the American Friends of Czechoslovakia in Cleveland, working with The Cleveland Orchestra, assembled the funds to commission what became Martinů’s Second Symphony. By 1910, Cleveland had the world’s fourth-largest Czech population, and Czech musical organizations had long been integral to the city’s cultural life.

The new symphony was intended to mark the 25th anniversary of Czechoslovak independence; the score is dedicated “To My Fellow Countrymen in Cleveland.” Written in Darien, Connecticut between May and July 1943, The Cleveland Orchestra premiered the symphony with Music Director Erich Leinsdorf on October 28, 1943 — the anniversary itself — on a program that included a Czech classic, Smetana’s Moldau from Má vlast.

The Second Symphony carried several burdens at once. It was a new work in a genre only recently taken up by the exiled Czech composer, written to pay homage to a republic established in the aftermath of the First World War but since dismembered by Nazi Germany. Everything about the occasion might have encouraged grandeur, pathos, or at least an element of bombastic patriotism.

In a statement he wrote for the Cleveland premiere, Martinů remarked on the inflation of expectations around the symphony from Beethoven onward: even in contemporary hands, it was still treated as the expression of something “grandiose, tragic, or pathetic,” often dependent on a “program.” But he distrusted attempts to express tragedy through “mechanical means and dynamic design,” which could end “simply in noise.” Such effects, he argued, act “upon the nerves alone,” rather than serving “the purpose of music and beauty.”

His own description of the Second Symphony’s essential character as “calm and lyric” is disarmingly simple and deliberately uninflated. That Martinů had, in fact, applied the very same epithet to the First Symphony — a work markedly different in character and ambition — suggests that he had in mind an aesthetic principle rather than a particular mood.

The Second is the most compact of Martinů’s symphonies, closer at times to chamber music. It begins in a kaleidoscopically swirling cloud of D minor, with shapes gradually gathering definition from the surrounding motion. In lieu of the drama of Brahmsian motivic development, Martinů foregrounds his French inheritance by spinning out threads of changing texture and instrumental exchange across the large ensemble. The first movement builds to a striking, tam-tam-reinforced climax before the music subsides gently, leaving a sense of ideas still awaiting transformation.

The second movement narrows the palette, leaving aside the heavier brass and percussion and expressively blending winds, horns, strings, and piano (with a momentary triangle glint). The piano’s role in the symphony is not soloistic but coloristic, adding a percussive edge and a brightening attack within the orchestral fabric. Two contrasting ideas shape the movement: a stepwise, folk-inflected wind melody and a broader string theme. Their interaction gives the movement its enigmatic drama.

The full ensemble is enlisted to underscore the bracing energies of the third movement, cast as a march rather than a scherzo. Its syncopated dance impulses bring Martinů’s Bohemian roots to the surface. Near the end, a trumpet alludes obliquely to “La Marseillaise,” though the flashing reference is hardly enough to turn the Second into a programmatic “war symphony.”

The finale sets contrasting ideas in a kind of perpetual motion, its prismatic timbres propelled by infectious rhythms. The orchestra eventually rallies all its forces in a rousing D-major coda — not superficially affirmative, but bright and triumphant. More than 80 years after The Cleveland Orchestra introduced the Second Symphony to the world, Martinů’s belief still resonates: “simple events and simple things” can become in music “quite as spectacular and just as inspiring” as any grandiose program.

— Thomas May

Thomas May is a writer, critic, educator, and translator. A regular contributor to The New York Times, The Seattle Times, Gramophone, and Strings magazine, he is the English-language editor for the Lucerne Festival.

It is usually said of Johannes Brahms that he delayed composing a symphony until after he was 40 out of respect for Beethoven’s great set of nine — and from a fear of being found wanting in comparison with his mighty predecessor. There is much truth in this. Indeed, Brahms acknowledged it himself.

Brahms’s rapid rise, at age 20, into an elite circle of leading composers was set in motion by Robert Schumann, who declared publicly that Brahms was destined for a great future in the pedigree of German music. In the company of Schumann and his wife, Clara, Brahms had almost exclusively played chamber music — which for them represented Beethoven’s legacy.  Meanwhile, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (and its “Ode to Joy”) was being elevated by Liszt, Wagner, and their followers as a pointer to the future of symphonic music.

Brahms always regarded symphonic writing as a tough proposition. Self-critical to the point of destroying an unknown number of works that did not satisfy his exacting standards, we should be thankful that Brahms gave us as many as four symphonies.

Brahms’s long-awaited First Symphony premiered in the city of Karlsruhe in November 1876. The composer was anxious to test it in one of the less prominent German cities before allowing performances in Vienna, Leipzig, or Berlin. Such was its success, however, that performances quickly followed in all major cities, at home and abroad. Once he had given one symphony to the world, the rest followed more rapidly — within nine years. In fact, the success of the First and the choice of a perfect spot for his summer vacation worked miracles and produced the Second Symphony the very next year.

Since 1864, there had been a railroad connection from Vienna to Lake Wörth in the southernmost part of Austria, enticing the capital’s well-to-do to spend their summers there. Brahms liked to compose during his holidays, and in the village of Pörtschach on the lake’s northern shore he found a haven: “It is delightful here,” he wrote, “I will never again spend the summer far from the Prater [Vienna’s main street].” Many a great work was to emerge from those summer retreats amid Alpine lakes and mountains, including the Violin Concerto the following year. (Mahler, who built a villa at Maiernigg just across the lake from Pörtschach, would also find inspiration in those surroundings.)

Upon completing the Second Symphony in the summer of 1877, Brahms had no hesitation in offering it first to a Viennese audience. They heard it on December 30 that year and, like its predecessor, it was soon taken up by the great orchestras of the world. There are dark passages and no lack of tension, but on the whole, this is a sunny work, full of light and vivacity, that leaves listeners in a state of elation.

This impression is most strongly conveyed by the charming third movement, which can make the intricacies and tensions of the first two movements fade into memory, and even compel audiences to overlook the technical skill of the brilliant finale, which sweeps away everything before it. The third movement is a kind of intermezzo, in which a gentle folksy melody is treated as a recurring rondo theme, alternating with two equally charming episodes. The first is a fairylike transformation of the initial theme, sped up; the second is a scherzo-like dance full of cross-accents and chattering exchanges between winds and strings. Brahms’s debt is here more to Mendelssohn and Schumann than to Beethoven.

Is there a darker spirit elsewhere at work? Within a few bars of the opening of the first movement, the trombones are heard lurking in the shadows and, in the development, those hints turn into real threats when the trombones show their teeth in overlapping, grinding entries. As if in remorse, the trombones play a soothing role in the slow movement, where Brahms explores intricate counterpoint, with at least two themes intertwining at any given moment. If the trombones are a sinister force in the first two movements, they step proudly forward in the last movement to close the symphony with the most thrilling D-major triad in all symphonic music.

The cellos similarly have a leading role, with an especially ravishing melody (supported by the violas) as the second subject of the first movement, and an important expressive line in the slow movement. Meanwhile, the first horn takes the spotlight with its superbly shaped solo in the coda of the first movement, which is followed by the first violins indulging their taste for broad melody on their lower strings — as if this is the point towards which the entire edifice of the first movement had been leading.

In Brahms, there are always great moments like this. If we get too excited by one, however, we risk overlooking the next. Eagerness mixed with quiet patience rewards the alert and focused listener.

— Hugh Macdonald

Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.