Brahms’s Third Symphony

During the very hot summer of 1853, when Johannes Brahms was 20 years old, he fulfilled a childhood dream by walking down the Rhine River from Mainz to Bonn. This is a spectacular hike of about 100 miles, filled with reminders of German history and legend. One of the first places he stopped was Wiesbaden and the little town of Rüdesheim nearby, famous for the Rheingau wines made there.

Memories of those days were behind Brahms’s decision, 30 years later, to spend the summer of 1883 in Wiesbaden. A further enticement was the presence of a young singer, Hermine Spies, whom Brahms had heard for the first time that January. Her lovely contralto voice and bright personality enchanted him to the point where Brahms’s sister assumed an engagement was in the air. Even though he remained a committed bachelor, the company of this “pretty Rhineland girl,” as he described her, undoubtedly brightened those summer months and even perhaps pervaded the great work that took shape on his desk — the Third Symphony.

It had been six years since he had written the Second Symphony, and in the interval Brahms had composed two concertos — the Violin Concerto and Second Piano Concerto — as well as two overtures. He was no longer nervous about engaging the most challenging of forms.

The Third Symphony differs from Brahms’s other three in being shorter and milder in tone, without the heroic passages that the others display. It is the only one in which material from one movement reappears in another, and the only one to end quietly in a soft pianissimo — a radical departure from symphonic tradition. For these reasons, it is less often played. But many connoisseurs prize it above Brahms’s other symphonies for the delicacy of its scoring and its ravishing melodic richness.

The first movement’s opening gesture is an upward motive (F–A-flat–F) similar to the F–A–F motto associated with the violinist Joseph Joachim, one of Brahms’s dearest friends. By substituting an A-flat, Brahms introduces the ambiguity of major-minor tonality that appears throughout this symphony. This ambiguity is not fully resolved until we reach the luminous, soft chords at the end of the last movement, which are solidly in the major key.

The two central movements are exceptionally touching. The second movement feels like a set of meandering variations on the clarinet’s elegant theme and some strange and solemn chords in the lower strings provide an enigmatic interlude. The restrained writing for trombones is masterful.

The melody of the third movement, heard at the start in the cellos, is one to cherish long after the performance is over. For expressive elegance, it has no rival, and this effect intensifies when it passes first to the woodwinds, then to the horn. Neither of these two middle movements ever rises in volume to forte for more than a passing moment.

Energetic music is plentiful in both the opening and final movements, along with musical argument (reshaping themes and moving through keys) in Brahms’s sure-handed manner. But they both come to rest with the same dreamlike reminiscence of the rising motto and its balanced descending theme. Brahms seems to be perfectly at peace with the world.

The symphony’s first performance took place in Vienna in December 1883, in a concert which featured Dvořák’s Violin Concerto, also new to the Viennese. Although Vienna was his home, where he had many friends and supporters, there was usually a portion of the press determined to cut Brahms down to size. Yet, in this instance, those sour voices were silent, and the symphony was acclaimed by all, going on to be successfully welcomed in performances across Germany and beyond.

— 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 was one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century, writing over 400 works in multiple genres — a seemingly unlikely accomplishment for someone who, as a young student, was twice dismissed from the Czech National Conservatory for his “incorrigible negligence.” Despite those early setbacks, Martinů spent three years as a violinist in the Czech Philharmonic, where his exposure to the music of Debussy piqued his interest in composition.  In 1923, he moved to Paris, where he encountered the neoclassicism of Stravinsky and Les Six, blending this new music with Czech traditions and techniques derived from Renaissance polyphony and Baroque counterpoint to forge a uniquely personal style.

With the Nazi invasion of France in 1940, Martinů fled with his wife to America, where he worked to resume his career. Although he had previously written a number of works for orchestra, he had studiously avoided the symphony, disdaining what he called the “climax cliché” that he felt was inherent in the genre. But American audiences loved symphonies so, in 1942, he wrote the first of what would turn out to be five symphonies in five years. (A sixth was written in 1953.) These proved quite popular and, during the 1940s, he was among the most frequently performed contemporary composers in the US.

Contrary to what one might expect of works written in such close proximity, Martinů’s symphonies all differ in character while sharing certain characteristics: an energetic rhythmic style, fluid phrasing, shimmering textures, a rich harmonic language (with frequent conflicts between major and minor keys), and featured roles for harp and piano.     

Martinů’s first two symphonies are colorful and exuberant works, but the Third — written in 1944 and dedicated to Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra — comes from a different, darker world. Unlike his earlier symphonies, this one is in three movements instead of four, omitting the typically lighthearted scherzo movement, which would have seemed out of place in this more somber composition. The Third is also the most overtly programmatic of Martinů’s symphonies, with an unmistakable musical and emotional journey from darkness to light, personified by the opening movement’s E-flat minor key later giving way to a radiant E major in the finale.

The first movement is built around a series of short motives that soon expand into a swirling contrapuntal web that obscures any sense of meter. Against this, the timpani and harp play a steady and ominous rhythmic ostinato. A long, plaintive flute solo introduces a moment of repose toward the end of the exposition. After a frenzied development section, the recapitulation repeats the opening material almost exactly, but with the English horn replacing the solo flute.  Minor-key harmonies dominate throughout, contributing to the overall sense of dread.

The darkness of the first movement gives way to a more contemplative mood in the second. The opening section features another flute solo and a remarkable shimmering passage that ends in B-flat major, offering, for the first time in the work, a brief glimmer of light. The middle section begins with a desolate contrapuntal passage in the strings that grows in intensity as the strings and timpani pound out a steady, insistent rhythm. After an agonized climax, the reflective mood of the opening returns. Once again, Martinů replaces the solo flute with English horn, and the movement ends quietly in C major.

The structure of the finale is unique, with an Allegro opening that gives way to a longer Andante section. With two startling brass fanfares, the opening music returns in the minor mode, suggesting restless, bitter conflict, interrupted by a few moments of quiet, hopeful repose. The intensity finally dissipates, and we hear the first of three distinct passages, each suggesting another stage in the move away from the violence of the Allegro. The first is built around a quiet, mournful melody in the violas. The second features four solo strings and the same shimmering, almost hallucinatory textures we heard in the second movement. With the addition of the percussion, triumphant figures in the brass, and the final establishment of E major, the music at last emerges fully into the light. But even in the symphony’s final moments, we hear reminders that the hard-won peace is tenuous, with the intrusion of quiet minor chords and, at the very end, three dissonant exclamations in the piano.

Many see this symphony as Martinů’s response to World War II, then in its fifth long year. Others have suggested that its character was shaped by his personal despair and longing for his distant homeland. However one interprets the meaning of his Third Symphony, there can be no denying the power with which Martinů conveys his message.

— Michael Strasser

Michael Strasser is professor emeritus of musicology at Baldwin Wallace University. He has published numerous articles and reviews and presented papers at international conferences on fin-de-siècle France, Arnold Schoenberg, and colonial music in British North America and Mexico.

When Vítězslava Kaprálová completed her Military Sinfonietta in 1937, Europe was on the precipice of its second global conflict in less than 40 years. In her native Czechoslovakia, Hitler’s increasing insistence on acquiring the Sudetenland to “protect” its German-speaking population was destabilizing a new and fragile independence following the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. The composer’s own description of her work stated that the sinfonietta “does not represent a battle cry, but it depicts the psychological need to defend that which is most sacred to the nation.” 

Kaprálová was born in Brno in 1915 to composer Václav Kaprál and voice teacher Vítězslava Uhlířová. She received her musical education first at the Brno Conservatory and later in Prague, where she studied with Vítězslav Novák. A year after completing her second degree, she continued her education at the École Normale de Musique in Paris, where she studied with another Czech composer, Bohuslav Martinů (the two were also briefly lovers). Although it remains unconfirmed, Kaprálová’s biographers agree that, while in Paris in 1940, she likely also took at least one lesson with the great pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. Following the outbreak of World War II, Kaprálová made plans to apply to The Juilliard School in New York City, though it is unknown whether her application was ever submitted or reviewed. Despite her premature death at age 25, composer produced more than three dozen pieces, including piano works, chamber music, art songs, melodramas, and several symphonic works. She also crossed borders, both geographical and social, by becoming the first woman to conduct both the Czech Philharmonic and the BBC Orchestra. 

Kaprálová dedicated the Military Sinfonietta, her graduation piece for the Prague Conservatory, to the Czechoslovak president Edvard Beneš. The work received its premiere under the composer’s baton in the Czech capital in 1937 and was paired with the overture to Dvořák’s Šelma sedlák and Josef Suk’s Aesrael Symphony. This program suggests the perceived promise her music held for the Czech canon and, according to her own program notes, her intention was to use “the language of music to express her emotional relationship towards the questions of national existence, a subject permeating the consciousness of the nation at the time.”

The sinfonietta also brought her recognition beyond her homeland. It was selected for performance by the BBC Orchestra at the opening of the 1938 International Society of Contemporary Music Festival in London, where Kaprálová once again conducted.  

Despite its title, Kaprálová’s single-movement Military Sinfonietta is less militaristic than it is striving. Indeed, the work initially opened with a funeral march, a possible homage to fellow Moravian-born composer Gustav Mahler, whose own symphonies battle for interior victory rather than external confrontation. On Novák’s advice, however, Kaprálová changed the opening, and it begins instead with a more conventional drumroll and an ascendant brass fanfare. The full orchestra enters shortly thereafter with what the composer called “the aggressive main theme” placed in the violins. Yet the theme’s intensity is not threatening but evocative, particularly of the aspirational sonic worlds of early jazz and old Hollywood. The “tender singing” second theme is led by the oboe, once again mediating any sense of conflict. The exposition closes with a punctuated return of the strings. Accented motives amplified by percussion and piano offer the closest we have come so far to any sense of musical showdown. 

Introduced by “the deep singing voices of the basses and cellos,” the work’s middle section initially takes on the expressive character of a separate slow movement. However, according to the conventions of sonata form, the development also teems with variety and experimentation. A contrasting, major-mode melody ripples through the strings and winds before pulsating repetitions throughout the orchestra suspend the work’s momentum. The entry of a solo violin offers a new direction, its smooth, meandering melody leading the orchestra to ever higher registers. But this progress, too, is cut short. The entry of dancing rhythms in the piccolo and bassoon, accented by the snare drum, ultimately destabilizes the ensemble, and the return of the reflective melody in the trumpet only temporarily clears the path to the recapitulation.

Like sides of a battle, several further contrasting characters alternate, including a battery of ominous percussion and sharp dotted rhythms that finally express the work’s martial dimension, before the exposition returns in full. The fragility of this arrival at a resolution is underscored by one more menacing interjection. Rescued by a final fanfare, the sinfonietta’s primary theme drives the work to a triumphant close. 

— Leah Batstone 

Leah Batstone is a musicologist and visiting scholar at the Jordan Center at New York University. She is also the founder and creative director of the Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival, which takes place each spring in New York City.