Symphony No. 3

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.