Storm and Sunrise: Brahms’s First Concerto and Also sprach Zarathustra

About the Work

Few concertos have had so painful a birth. Brahms’s First Piano Concerto did not begin life as a concerto at all. In the spring of 1854 the twenty-one-year-old composer started a sonata for two pianos; within months he was trying to turn it into a symphony; and only after that attempt stalled did the material find its final shape as a concerto for piano and orchestra, completed in 1858. The backdrop to those years was the great crisis of Brahms’s early life. In February 1854 Robert Schumann, the older composer who had hailed Brahms in print only months before as the coming genius of German music, threw himself into the Rhine. He was rescued and committed to an asylum at Endenich, where he died in July 1856. Brahms moved to Düsseldorf to support Clara Schumann and her children, and the turbulent first movement has long been heard as a response to that catastrophe, though Brahms himself never said so.

What he did say concerned the slow movement. In a letter to Clara he wrote that he was “painting a gentle portrait” of her, and that it was to be the Adagio. In the manuscript that movement is headed with the words of the Mass, Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini (“Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord”), which many have taken as a private reference to Robert Schumann.

The premiere, on 22 January 1859 in Hanover, with Brahms as soloist and his friend Joseph Joachim conducting, was respectable. Five days later in Leipzig, the citadel of German musical taste, it was hissed. Audiences expected a concerto to be a vehicle for pianistic display; Brahms had written something closer to a symphony with piano obbligato, in which the soloist does not even enter until the orchestra has spent several minutes on its own. Brahms reported to Joachim, with rueful wit, that the concerto had been “a brilliant and decisive failure”. It took decades for the work to be recognised for what it is: one of the grandest and most searching piano concertos of the nineteenth century, in which the symphonic ambition that Brahms would not realise on its own terms until his First Symphony in 1876 is already fully present.

The three movements are laid out on a huge scale. The opening Maestoso, in D minor, is about as long as the other two combined. The Adagio is a hymn-like meditation in D major. The finale is a Rondo whose Allegro non troppo drive owes something to the finale of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, but whose fugal episode and exultant close in D major are pure Brahms. It makes a formidable opening for this programme, and the work that Petrenko and the orchestra have chosen to carry to Carnegie Hall and South America in the weeks that follow.

What to Listen For

First movement (Maestoso). Listen to the very opening: a long trill rumbles in the timpani and double basses on a low D while the violins and cellos hurl out a jagged theme full of wide leaps and wrenching trills. The harmony is deliberately unstable; the music seems to start in the wrong key. After this storm, a gentle, almost consoling second idea emerges in the strings. The piano, when it finally enters, does not compete with the orchestra; it slips in quietly with a tender, reflective phrase, as though it had been listening. Notice how often the soloist plays in heavy double octaves and thick chords, doubling or opposing the full orchestra rather than decorating it: this is the symphony-concerto that confused its first audiences. Listen, too, for the radiant F major theme that the piano introduces alone, a moment of calm at the heart of the storm, before the trills and leaps return for a coda of real ferocity.

Second movement (Adagio). The “gentle portrait” of Clara. Muted strings and bassoons open a slow, chorale-like melody; the piano answers with a meditative line that seems to think aloud. Listen for the long passages where the soloist plays almost alone, very softly, and for the moment near the end when the piano spins out a quiet cadenza-like reflection before the orchestra returns. It is music of hushed devotion, and Brahms asks the pianist for restraint rather than display.

Third movement (Rondo: Allegro non troppo). The piano launches the finale alone with a vigorous, stamping theme in D minor, which the orchestra takes up. Listen for the contrasting episodes (one lyrical and warm, one a busy, closely argued fugato in the strings) and for the short cadenza in which the soloist seems to test the main theme from new angles. In the closing pages the music turns from D minor to D major, and the horns lead a triumphant, pastoral coda: the struggle of the first movement is finally resolved.

About the Work

Richard Strauss was thirty-two when he wrote Also sprach Zarathustra, and already the most talked-about composer in Germany. His earlier tone poems, Don Juan, Death and Transfiguration and Till Eulenspiegel, had made his name as a master of the modern orchestra. With Zarathustra, completed in 1896 and first performed in Frankfurt on 27 November of that year under the composer’s own direction, he took on something far more ambitious: Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical prose-poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85), in which the ancient Persian prophet comes down from his mountain to preach the coming of the Übermensch, the “superman” who will go beyond the old morality.

Strauss was careful to say that he had not set out to write philosophy in music. The title page reads “tone poem, freely after Friedrich Nietzsche”, and he later explained that he had meant “to convey in music an idea of the evolution of the human race from its origin, through the various phases of development, religious as well as scientific, up to Nietzsche’s idea of the Superman”. The score is divided into nine sections, most of them headed with chapter titles from Nietzsche’s book: “Of the Backworldsmen”, “Of the Great Longing”, “Of Joys and Passions”, “The Song of the Grave”, “Of Science”, “The Convalescent”, “The Dance Song” and “The Night Wanderer’s Song”.

The work is built on a basic conflict between two keys. C major, the key of the famous opening sunrise, represents nature, the elemental world; B major and B minor, a semitone away and about as remote as keys can be from C, represent humanity and its striving. The whole piece plays out the tension between them, and Strauss refuses to resolve it: the last bars famously leave the two keys hanging side by side.

The orchestra is enormous, with quadruple woodwind, six horns, four trumpets, organ, two harps and bells, and Strauss uses it with extraordinary imagination, from the thunderous unisons of the sunrise to the thin, eerie fugue of “Of Science”, to the Viennese waltz that erupts in “The Dance Song”, led by a solo violin. That opening, of course, became one of the most recognisable pieces of music in the world after Stanley Kubrick used it in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). The remaining half hour is less well known and much stranger, and hearing it after the Brahms, a work that also wrestles with the heaviest questions, is the best way to understand why Zarathustra is far more than its first ninety seconds.

What to Listen For

Introduction (Sunrise). It begins almost below hearing: a low C held by the organ pedal, contrabassoon and double basses, with a faint rumble on the bass drum. Then four trumpets rise through C–G–C, the “nature” motif, answered by a major and then a minor chord from the full orchestra and pounding timpani. Listen for the third statement, which reaches a blazing C major, crowned by the organ.

Of the Backworldsmen / Of the Great Longing. The mood changes completely. Muted cellos and basses murmur in B minor, and horns intone a fragment of plainchant (Credo in unum Deum): these are the “backworldsmen”, people who seek consolation in another world. The divided strings then spread out into a warm, lush hymn in A-flat. In “The Great Longing” listen for the orchestra pulling against that religious calm: the organ sounds a Magnificat, but the strings surge away from it.

Of Joys and Passions / The Song of the Grave. Passionate, restless music with a vehement trombone figure (sometimes called the “disgust” motif), which then dissolves into the funereal “Song of the Grave”, led by oboe and a solo violin.

Of Science. One of the most remarkable passages Strauss ever wrote: a slow fugue begun by the low strings, whose subject uses all twelve notes of the chromatic scale. It is dry, grey, deliberately learned music, science as cold reason. Listen for how it gradually breaks down.

The Convalescent. The fugue gathers into a furious climax and a shattering return of the nature motif, followed by a long general pause. Zarathustra recovers slowly; listen for the chattering woodwinds, trumpets and a kind of laughter in the orchestra as he regains strength.

The Dance Song. A solo violin leads off a lilting, slightly tipsy Viennese waltz, Strauss’s image of the liberated “dancing” spirit that Nietzsche celebrates. It grows into a whirling orgy of sound.

The Night Wanderer’s Song. At the height of the dance a single bell starts to strike midnight: twelve strokes, as the music collapses. What follows is a quiet, glowing epilogue in B major, with high violins and woodwinds floating ever upward. But listen to the very end: while the high instruments hold a soft B major chord, the cellos and basses pluck a low C, three times. Nature and humanity are left unreconciled. It is one of the most famous question marks in music.