The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Johannes Brahms · a symphony in E minor, Op. 98 · four movements for orchestra, the last a passacaglia on an eight-bar ground · published by Simrock in Berlin in 1886 · about 38 to 43 minutes in performance
Mode
Symphony as argument from the smallest material; sonata form, a slow movement in a church mode, a scherzo without trio, and a Baroque ground
Mythos
The wheel: fate as a ground that turns and cannot be left, and voices that speak over it and are carried on
Phase
Four movements, E minor, E major, C major, E minor; the middle movements a major third apart, the interval the first movement is built from
Presentation
Concert music; four movements for an orchestra of pairs of woodwinds with contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani, triangle and strings, the trombones held back for the finale
Register
From a sigh in each falling pair to a stamping close; a horn call from an older world, a dance with triangle, a flute’s lament, a chorale; no word anywhere
Scale
One mind, the old church, the dance and the past held inside the present; about forty minutes
Governing Proposition
A first movement grown from a chain of falling thirds, a slow movement that opens in a church mode, a dance in C major, and a finale in which an eight-bar ground is heard thirty-one times and lands on E minor every time. The wager of the work is that inheritance does not console: that the oldest order a symphony can reach will hold every kind of feeling, and still end where it began, in the minor, at full force.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The symphony begins in the middle of a thought. There is no introduction and no fanfare: the violins enter with a theme in E minor, alla breve, that is hardly a tune at all. It is a chain of falling thirds, two notes at a time, a sigh in each pair, the line dropping and dropping, third after third. The material of the movement is not a melody but an interval, and everything that follows is made from it.
The movement is in sonata form, and it does not repeat its exposition. Brahms’s first three symphonies had kept the repeat; this one is the first to drop it, and nothing is said twice that the argument does not need. The development carries the chain of thirds further, turning and extending it, and the counterpoint is invertible: what was above can go below, and the music remains itself. The orchestra is thick in places, the strings doubled in the tuttis, and the development is where the texture weighs most.
The coda drives the theme into canon, one voice taking it up as another is still sounding it, and the movement ends with a stamping close in E minor. There is no turn to the major and no release. The first movement has shown that a whole span of music can grow from one interval, and the key plan of the symphony is drawn from the same interval: the two middle movements, in E major and C major, stand a major third apart.
Movement II
The slow movement opens with the horns alone, on E, without harmony. The call is in the Phrygian colour, the old church mode on E, and for a moment the symphony seems to come from another century. The sound is a C major sound heard on E: the third that governed the first movement governs the opening of the second. Then the call is harmonised and turned into E major, the church mode taken into the key of the movement.
The movement is in 6/8 and moves gently. Its themes return in new orchestration, the material passed between winds and strings so that what comes back is heard differently. Its long second theme is given to the cellos, and it is the warmest page of the work; it is also longer and lovelier than the movement’s argument requires. The movement’s middle stretches are grace rather than height.
What the horn call brings is an allusion, not a structure. The old church is summoned as a colour, at the threshold of the movement, and the music proceeds as a Romantic slow movement in E major. It is the first time the symphony reaches for the past, and it does so lightly. The finale will reach for it again, and there the past will be the law.
Movement III
The third movement is in C major and 2/4, fast and high-spirited. It is a scherzo in all but its form: there is no trio, and the movement is built more like a sonata than a dance with a contrasting middle. The second flute takes up the piccolo, and the triangle sounds.
It is the one movement of high spirits in a tragic work, and the question of its place has been asked since the first season: whether a different middle movement would serve. The answer the work gives is in the key plan. C major stands a major third below the E of the movements around it, the interval of the first movement’s theme, and the dance is held to the whole by that third more than by its temper.
The movement is the place where the subtractive test finds give, and where the inner law of the work holds by key more than by feeling. Its wit and energy rise; they do not elevate. And it prepares the finale by contrast: after the festival in C major, the last movement returns to E minor, and to the oldest form the symphony will reach.
Movement IV
Allegro energico e passionato, E minor, 3/4. The finale begins with the theme as a progression of chords in the winds, and with them, for the first time in the symphony, the trombones. They have been silent for three movements, and their first sound is the ground on which the finale will be built. The theme is eight bars long, and its top line rises by step. It is a ground in the Baroque manner, the form called passacaglia or chaconne.
Thirty variations follow, each eight bars long, over the ground or around it: thirty-one statements and 248 bars before the coda. The ground is passed between the bass, the treble and the inner voices, and the variations build on it by accumulation, each a step. The marking is energico e passionato, and the ground is the law against which the passion is measured. However the variations rise, the ground brings each of them home.
At the centre the time changes to 3/2, so that the eight bars move at half the pace. A flute plays alone over sustained strings, a lament breathing slowly over the ground. Then the music turns to E major, and the last two variations of the central group are a chorale for the trombones. It is a slow movement folded into the variation chain, a reprieve within the law; and the law does not change. The ground still turns, at half the pace, beneath the chorale.
Movement V
After the chorale the ground returns in its first form, at full force, and listeners have long heard the return as a recapitulation within the chain of variations. That double reading, variations and sonata form at once, is how the Baroque law of the finale and the sonata law of the first movement meet. The coda drives faster to the last chords, and the symphony ends in E minor, fortissimo. There is no turn to the major. The ground has climbed by step thirty-one times and come home each time, and the end is where it began.
Brahms wrote the symphony over the summers of 1884 and 1885 at Mürzzuschlag in Styria. It was first performed at Meiningen on 25 October 1885 by the Meiningen Court Orchestra, Hans von Bülow’s orchestra, with Brahms conducting, and the orchestra took it on tour. Simrock in Berlin published it in 1886. In that year the symphony after Beethoven was a field contested between Wagner’s party and Bruckner, and the symphonic finale had become the place of victory. Brahms ended his last symphony with a passacaglia, in the minor.
The work has been in the repertoire of every orchestra since, recorded from the early electrical era to the present, its tempo argued between the flexible tradition of Furtwängler and the steadier one of Toscanini and Weingartner. Tovey wrote its classic essay; Schoenberg, in “Brahms the Progressive”, made its opening the demonstration of developing variation, and the Second Viennese School learned from it. Webern’s Passacaglia, Op. 1, of 1908, and the passacaglias of Reger, Shostakovich and Britten stand in a line that runs through Bach and this finale together. The ground holds, and holding is not redemption.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test meets resistance almost everywhere. The first movement drops the exposition repeat, the first of Brahms’s symphonies to do so, and nothing is said twice that the argument does not need; its chain of falling thirds is the source of every paragraph, the canonic close of the coda included. The finale cannot lose a variation without the arithmetic of the ground showing: thirty-one statements of eight bars, each a step in an accumulation, and the central E major group is the one place the pace changes. The give is in the third movement, whose high spirits stand outside the tragic frame and are answered by the key plan more than by the hearing.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Disclosure through sound is credited in full, and something can be stated: inheritance is not consolation. The work turns to the oldest forms it can reach, the church mode of the Andante and the Baroque ground of the finale, and the forms do not save. The ground climbs by step thirty-one times and lands on E minor every time; the E major group is a reprieve inside the law, not an escape from it, and the work ends in the minor at full force. Order holds, and holding is not redemption. Held below the gate by the line between mood and meaning: with no words, the proposition is the listener’s to assemble, and it is often heard as an autumnal mood.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Height is reached, and it recurs. The first movement’s coda drives its theme into canon and a stamping close, grandeur of force. The Andante’s horn call, on E without harmony, is beauty from an older world, and its long theme in the cellos is the warmest page in the work. The finale reaches height again and again: the trombones’ first entry, with the chords of the ground, after three movements of silence; the flute alone at half the pace, a lament over the ground; the trombone chorale in E major; the return of the ground at full force; the coda’s drive to the last chords. Held below the top on frequency: the Allegro giocoso rises by energy and wit, not elevation.
Score: 9.0 / 10
An archetype can be named, and it bears some weight: the wheel, fate as a ground that turns and cannot be left, and the voices of the variations, a flute and the trombones, speaking over it and carried on. The finale builds this rather than citing it: the ground is the law of the movement, and nothing in the movement escapes it. The church mode of the horn call and the old ground are allusions to the sacred and the past, atmosphere more than structure. What holds the axis lowest of the eleven is the particular, thin as in all wordless music: no person, place or act is in the work, and the fate is the listener’s figure for a formal fact.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance is the four-movement symphony after Beethoven, whose finales had become the place of victory, in a field contested in 1885 by Wagner’s party and by Bruckner. The departures are several: a finale cast as a passacaglia, a Baroque form no symphony had carried; a symphony ending in the minor at full force, with no major apotheosis; a slow movement opening in a church mode; a first movement without its exposition repeat, whose theme is an interval chain and not a melody. The stake was real but bounded. Brahms was the most secure symphonist in German music, risking no post and no livelihood, and the swerve runs backward into the past, a departure by recovery.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the work stops knowing what it knows. The finale’s knowledge, that a fixed law can hold every kind of feeling and still end where it began, is the passacaglia’s own; recast as a sonata rondo it would become a victory or a defeat, not a fate. The first movement’s knowledge, that a whole movement can grow from one interval, is the chain of thirds made form, the development extending the chain. The central group of the finale, written at half the pace, is a slow movement folded into the variation chain, and the return of the ground after it is a recapitulation folded into variation. Held below the top by the third movement, a container for good spirits more than an instrument.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Evidence, not promise. Schoenberg’s essay “Brahms the Progressive” made developing variation, the growth of everything from small cells, the key to Brahms, and this symphony’s opening is the standard demonstration. Tovey’s essay in the Essays in Musical Analysis is a classic. The analytic literature has not exhausted the finale’s double reading, as variations and as sonata form, or settled the third movement’s place. Performance stays open: the flexible tempo of Furtwängler’s tradition against the steadier one of Toscanini and Weingartner. Held below Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 131 and Ninth Symphony because the openness is mostly formal: what this work means is less contested than what they mean.
Score: 9.1 / 10
The work showed that the most rigorous Baroque variation form could carry a Romantic symphony’s tragic weight, and that a symphonic movement could be made from an interval rather than a melody. It reorganised what the past could be in a symphony: not quotation, but law. Delayed influence is credited and discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is real and documented, but not the field’s main line, for the symphony after 1885 went through Mahler and Bruckner. It ran through the Second Viennese School, by Schoenberg’s own account of developing variation, and through the twentieth-century passacaglia, Webern’s Passacaglia, Op. 1 (1908), Reger, Shostakovich and Britten, a line shared with Bach.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Survival is weighed in form, presence and fabric. The form survives whole: published by Simrock in 1886 and played as published, with nothing lost or in doubt. Presence has been continuous since 1885, from Meiningen and the tour that followed into the core repertoire of every orchestra, recorded from the early electrical era to the present, among the most performed symphonies of its century. That earns a tenth above the usual mark for its span. It is not given the widest presence: Beethoven’s and Tchaikovsky’s late symphonies are heard more, and the work has no life outside the concert hall. The surface fixed to its moment is almost nil: no text, no programme, no obsolete instrument.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Command of the medium, bearing weight throughout: the first movement built from one interval chain, in invertible counterpoint and canon to the coda; the Andante’s horn call in a church mode turned into E major, its themes returning in new orchestration; thirty variations over an eight-bar ground with a sonata outline drawn through them, the pace halved for the E major group, the ground passed between bass, treble and inner voices; the trombones held back three movements for the finale’s first chords and its chorale; orchestration of unusual clarity for Brahms, the flute solo and the horn writing especially. No passage falls short of its intention. Held a tenth below the top by tutti doublings that can thicken, in the first movement’s development above all.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements, the Allegro giocoso’s triangle and the finale’s trombone chorale. One law governs them, and its unit is the third. The first movement’s theme is a chain of thirds; the middle movements stand a major third apart, E and C; the Andante’s church-mode opening is a C major sound on E. The Baroque law of the finale and the sonata law of the first movement meet in the finale’s double reading, so the work’s oldest form and its newest procedure are one argument. The range is wide, church mode, dance, march and chaconne, and the coherence is not narrow. The strain is the third movement, which obeys the key plan more than the work’s tragic temper.
Score: 9.4 / 10
A wordless symphony holds more than its medium suggests, through its forms: the inner life of a single consciousness, in the first movement’s argument and the flute’s lament; the old church, in the church mode and the trombone chorale; history itself as material, the Baroque ground made the law of a Romantic movement and the past held inside the present; the festival and the dance, in the Allegro giocoso; fate or the natural order, in the ground that turns. They are held in one structure, not listed. What holds the axis here is absence: the family, labour, the state and any community are not in it, and the sacred is present as a sound, not as more.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.6, then The Inner Law at 9.4 and The Living Form at 9.3. A first movement built from one interval chain in invertible counterpoint and canon, thirty variations over an eight-bar ground with a sonata outline drawn through them, and the trombones held back three movements for the finale; one law, the third, from the triangle of the scherzo to the trombone chorale; and a form in which the passacaglia is what the finale knows.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: consciousness, the old church, history as material, the dance and fate are held in one structure, but the family, labour, the state and any community are absent, and the sacred is a sound. Next above it, The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 and The Unconcealment at 8.4, which share a cause: with no words, the fate the finale builds and the claim it makes must be named by the listener.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.9 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.6, The Inner Law at 9.4, The Living Form at 9.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Swerve at 8.6 clears it by a tenth, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls a tenth short and The Archetypal Deep at 8.3 two tenths short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.3, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met, and with the Epochal Gate unmet and an aggregate of 8.8 the work stands in Tier IV.
Basis · the score of the Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98, in its standard performing version, four movements as published by Simrock in Berlin in 1886, and its performance tradition, read from knowledge under the desk’s convention for concert music; no score, edition or recording was in hand, and the running time is a range across the recorded tradition, not a measurement. The four movements are scored as one work; no single performance or recording is the object, and the performance tradition is evidence only. There are no words. Brahms’s headings and markings are given as he wrote them, and the one essay title is given as published; no other words are quoted. The plan of the finale, thirty-one statements of eight bars, was counted by script. Details that could not be verified, among them the pitches of the first movement’s theme and of the ground, the source of the ground in an earlier work, the numbering of the finale’s variations, the form of the slow movement and the keys of its themes, the scoring of the recapitulation and of the finale’s coda, the instruments heard only in the third movement, sketches set aside before the opening, the dates of Schoenberg’s essay, particular recordings and the early reception among Brahms’s friends, are not given. The sound of the work as heard is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.