Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68

Program notes

About the Work

Few symphonies were born of so long a labour, or so heavy a burden of expectation, as Brahms’s First. Its earliest sketches date from the mid-1850s, but he did not complete the work until 1876, when he was forty-three; Brahms himself reckoned that it had taken him twenty-one years. The reason was not idleness but awe. Brahms had been hailed in print as early as 1853, when he was barely twenty, by Robert Schumann, who in a famous article anointed the young man as the heir who would carry German music forward. The anointing was a gift and a curse. To write a symphony in the German tradition meant, inescapably, to follow Beethoven, and the weight of that inheritance very nearly paralysed Brahms. ‘You can’t have any idea,’ he told the conductor Hermann Levi, ‘what it’s like to hear such a giant marching behind you.’

The Beethoven shadow falls across the finished work in ways both general and specific. The symphony’s overall trajectory, a struggle in the dark key of C minor that fights its way through to a blazing C major triumph, is the very arc of Beethoven’s Fifth, and indeed of the whole heroic symphonic idea. More pointedly, the broad, hymn-like main theme of the last movement bears an unmistakable family resemblance to the ‘Ode to Joy’ melody from Beethoven’s Ninth. Brahms knew perfectly well that listeners would notice. When the resemblance was pointed out to him, he is said to have growled, ‘Any ass can see that’, a remark that manages to be both a defiance and an admission. The conductor Hans von Bülow, an early champion, went further and dubbed the work ‘Beethoven’s Tenth,’ a nickname that has stuck to it ever since.

For all its debts, the First Symphony is wholly Brahms’s own in substance and craft. Where Beethoven tends to build from terse, hammered motifs, Brahms thinks in long, intertwining lines and in dense, richly woven textures, the inner voices of the orchestra always alive with counterpoint. The mood, too, is distinctly autumnal and Northern: grave, searching, often tinged with melancholy even at its most affirmative. The premiere took place in Karlsruhe on 4 November 1876, conducted by Felix Otto Dessoff, and the work was quickly taken up across Germany and Austria. It established Brahms at a stroke as the leading symphonist of his generation and silenced any lingering doubt about whether the long-promised heir would deliver. Three more symphonies followed within a decade, but the First retains a special intensity: it is the sound of a great composer wrestling, in public and at last, with the giant at his back, and winning.

Brahms scores the symphony for a Classical orchestra modestly expanded (pairs of woodwinds with added contrabassoon, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones reserved for the finale, timpani, and strings), and the orchestration is notably grave and dark-hued, favouring the lower and middle registers. The whole work is bound together by a few germinal ideas, above all a rising chromatic figure and a falling one that grind against each other from the very first bars, so that the eventual arrival of the great C major chorale feels less like a contrast than a hard-won resolution of everything that came before.

What to Listen For

The first movement opens with one of the most arresting introductions in the repertoire: over a relentless, pounding timpani pulse, the strings strain upward while the winds press downward, two lines pulling in opposite directions in a knot of tension. Listen to that slow introduction closely, because its rising and falling chromatic shapes are the seeds of the entire symphony. When the main Allegro arrives it inherits this agitation directly, restless, contrapuntal and churning, and the movement stays gripped by C minor struggle almost throughout, its energy more anxious than heroic.

The second movement (Andante sostenuto) is a balm after the storm: a warm, songful slow movement in E major, with long-spun melodies passed among oboe, clarinet, and strings. Listen near the close for a tender, soaring solo violin, rising above the orchestra in one of Brahms’s most intimate touches, a moment of pure lyric repose.

The third movement takes the place of the expected scherzo, but Brahms refuses the boisterous Beethovenian model. Instead he writes a gentle, graceful intermezzo (Un poco allegretto e grazioso), led off by a flowing clarinet melody, with a faster, more buoyant central section. It is relaxed and conversational, a deliberate easing of pressure before the great final reckoning.

The finale is the heart of the work and its goal. It begins in shadow, a slow and ominous introduction in C minor full of foreboding, until suddenly the clouds break and a horn rings out with a broad, glowing call. Brahms had jotted this melody on a card to Clara Schumann in 1868 (‘Thus blew the shepherd’s horn today!’), fitting it to the words ‘High on the mountain, deep in the valley, I greet you a thousand times’; here it sounds like a summons to dawn. A solemn trombone chorale answers, and then, out of this radiant threshold, the strings launch the great main theme, the broad, hymn-like tune so often likened to Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy.’ From there the movement drives forward with mounting jubilation, and at the very end the trombone chorale returns in blazing C major brass, sealing the symphony’s long journey from darkness to triumphant light.