Concerto in A minor for Violin, Cello, and Orchestra, Opus 102
First performance: October 18, 1887, Cologne, Brahms conducting, Joseph Joachim, violin, Robert Hausmann, cello. First BSO performance: November 18, 1893, Emil Paur conducting, Franz Kneisel, violin, Alwin Schroeder, cello. First Tanglewood performance: August 4, 1946, Serge Koussevitzky conducting, Erica Morini, violin, Gregor Piatigorsky, cello.
Robert Hausmann, the cellist of the Joachim Quartet, liked to recount how Brahms, hearing him play Dvořák’s Cello Concerto shortly before his death, had said with some chagrin that had he known it was possible to write such a good cello concerto, he himself would have done it long ago. In 1884 Hausmann had in fact urged Brahms to do just that, “or at least [to come up with] a companion piece” to the composer’s E minor cello sonata. Brahms did not write a concerto for Hausmann, but in 1886 he offered some consolation in the form of the F major sonata. The Double Concerto for him and Joachim came along a year later.
To be sure, for both musical and personal reasons Joachim was the more urgent cause behind this project. Brahms and Joachim had become friends in 1853; as a young man, Brahms had relied heavily on Joachim’s advice in compositional questions. Even the middle-aged composer of the greatest of violin concertos submitted happily to his friend’s violinistic expertise: more than just a few notes in the solo part of that work are Joachim’s. And, albeit to a smaller extent, Joachim would also contribute some of the violinistic detail in the Double Concerto. Not least, over the years Joachim had given the first performances of the Violin Concerto and about half of Brahms’s chamber works.
But the long friendship was clouded in 1884 by the divorce proceedings between Joachim and his wife, the contralto Amalie Weiss. Joachim had always been madly jealous, even though his wife’s behavior gave him no reason to be, and now he suspected her of having an affair with Brahms’s publisher, Fritz Simrock. Brahms, sure of Amalie’s innocence, sympathized with her and wrote her a long letter to say so. Amalie produced this letter in court, and it proved crucial in convincing the judge of her innocence. Joachim, hurt and enraged by what he regarded as Brahms’s treachery, broke off relations.
Brahms worked hard at repairing the friendship, and the most significant of his efforts was to tender this Double Concerto as a peace offering. It is of course odd that a composer should write a double concerto as an irenicon for a violinist while making the cello part the more prominent and rewarding. In any event, he wrote Joachim that he had been unable to resist composing the work, that nothing about it really mattered to him except Joachim’s attitude toward it, and he urged him simply to write the two words “I decline” on a postcard if that was what he felt like doing. “If not,” Brahms went on, “my questions begin. Would you like to see a sample? I am now copying the solo parts. Do you feel like getting together with Hausmann to check them for playability? Could you think about trying the piece with Hausmann and with me at the piano, and eventually with the three of us with orchestra in some town or other? I won’t say out loud and specifically what I quietly hope and wish....” Joachim accepted the musical apology; the friendship was at least functionally restored, but the old closeness was gone for good. As for the concerto itself, it met with only a succès d’estime at its early performances, and even many members of Brahms’s circle were markedly reserved in their response to what turned out to be the composer’s last orchestral work. Musicians love it, and audiences can be persuaded by the right performance.
With its muscular, sometimes stern first movement, tender and subtly lyric Andante, and flavorful finale, the Double Concerto offers rich rewards. The orchestra begins forcefully but on an odd harmonic slant, and it stops very quickly, as though choked off in mid-phrase. The four bars with which the orchestra begins the concerto pose a conflict between the basic duple meter (the first two measures) and rhythmically dissonant triplets (the next two), a tension that runs throughout the work. In the double cadenza, triplets gradually give way to multiples of two, and this emergence from rhythmic dissonance into clarity is a crucial part of what gives this page its energy. Urged in by a series of thrusting chords in multiple stops, the orchestra returns, playing the same phrase with which it had begun but now firmly placed in A minor. This is our first sense of an unmistakable downbeat. Introductory gestures are over.
The development is active indeed, virtuosic, with wide-ranging arpeggiated passages and a sequence of the maddest trills since Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata. The recapitulation, too, is heralded by a series of hugely sonorous seven- and eight-note chords for the two soloists, and is full of new inventions and perspectives.
After the storms of the Allegro, the slow movement—in D major—is gentle. A romantic horn call and its woodwind echo cue a glorious, subtly limned melody, first played by the two soloists in octaves and, much of the way, with the orchestra joining in as well. The refinement with which Brahms maneuvers the orchestra in and out of that melody is one of this movement’s loveliest features.
The finale is one of many in Brahms’s gypsy vein. It is also full of humor—for instance, in the violin’s inclination to disrupt the cello’s attempt to bring back the opening tune. Toward the end, with the tempo momentarily slowed, the music becomes surprisingly delicate and lyrical, with closely worked filigree passages for the soloists, but the final page is all strength and energy.
Michael Steinberg
Michael Steinberg was program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1976 to 1979, and after that of the San Francisco Symphony and New York Philharmonic. Oxford University Press has published three compilations of his program notes, devoted to symphonies, concertos, and works for chorus and orchestra.