Sam Hollister
Sam Hollister is the founder and artistic director of Aurora Collaborative. Read his program notes ahead of the Brahms series on April 26th.
Although Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) is indeed a ubiquitous name and has always been a universally respected composer, joining the ranks of figures such as Bach and Beethoven—his story is somewhat more obscure. Several legends of his life do make their way into music lore, such as his rise to popularity at the young age of 20 after having been discovered by Robert Schumann; or his subsequent life-long obsession and relationship with the latter’s wife, composer Clara Schumann; or his uncompromising self-enforced standards on composition that led him to destroy or leave unpublished many of his works. But what we hear less about is the end of his life.
In 1890, having completed four already-immortal symphonies, two overtures, four concerti, a few dozen pieces for chamber ensembles, dozens more works for piano and organ, and hundreds for voices or choir, Brahms told a friend that he “had achieved enough.” In that year, he declared his String Quintet in G Major to be his final work. But this inclination to retire from composition seems to have been disturbed by one singular event: a March 1891 performance of the Meiningen Court Orchestra featuring Weber’s Clarinet Concerto No. 1 in F Minor. Richard Mühlfeld was the clarinetist, and in his instrument and virtuosity was Brahms’s defunct compositional muse instantly reincarnated. That summer, Brahms travelled to his summer cottage in Bad Ischl and began to frantically compose music featuring the rich sound of his new friend Mühlfeld’s instrument.
This period of writing produced, first, the Clarinet Trio, for clarinet, cello, and piano, which ends our program. Then followed his Clarinet Quintet, a work for string quartet and clarinet. Feeling as though he had exhausted his ability to blend clarinet with strings, he followed this with his Clarinet Sonata No. 1 in F Minor, for clarinet and piano, which opens our program, and then a second sonata in Eb Major.
If the notion of reneging on such a determined retirement is surprising, then the unparalleled richness and depth of these late pieces serves as a clear justification. Brahms had discovered a sound through his Mühlfeld-muse that he had theretofore explored only cursorily. In the words of Brahms’s friend Eusebius Mandyczewski regarding Brahms’s treatment of the clarinet, “it is as though the instruments were in love with each other.” •