Piano Sonata No. 1 (Brahms)
The piano sonata in C major op. 1 by Johannes Brahms is at the beginning of the opus count of his works. He dedicated it to the violinist Joseph Joachim and gave the world premiere on December 17, 1853 in the Leipzig Gewandhaus . In the spirited work composed between 1852 and 1853 and consisting of four movements , the influence of Ludwig van Beethoven can be clearly heard.
Brahms composed only three piano sonatas that fall into his early creative period and demonstrate how intensively he had already dealt with thematic and harmonic questions. In his lively works, he combined traditional sonata form concepts with developments in Romanticism and, with his tendency towards variation and folksong, already showed an individual signature.
To the music
The extended first movement ( Allegro ) is sometimes reminiscent of a ballad and has a symphonic-orchestral character with its powerful upswings, the full-bodied piano movement, the counterpoint and variety. The powerful beginning of the first theme rhythmically points to the main motif of Beethoven's hammer piano sonata; Comparable with the Waldstein Sonata, Brahms leads the theme in its repetition in B flat major . He takes up the chordal first theme in the following movements as well, creating relationships that span the entire sonata.
A figured transition leads to the intimate second theme in A minor ( con espresione ) in bar 39, which is followed by a further secondary theme in bar 59, which is derived from the motivic core of the main theme.
In the with the clock 88 in C minor incipient carrying it works mainly with the split side set themes and combines these with the main subject, which is about leads in clock 104 to a sound layering in which the first subject the page topic right with the left hand and simultaneously with the Hand is played.
The second, slow movement ( Andante, 2/4 ) in C minor was overwritten by Brahms with the words “After an old German Minnelong”, while he underlined the bars with a lyric text. Contrary to what the title suggests, neither the melody nor the words are based on a Minnelied song , but rather on the folk song "Stealthy Moon Rising", which he took from the collection of German folk songs with their original songs by Anton Wilhelm von Zuccalmaglio . This relationship connects the Andante with the slow movement of his third piano sonata op. 5 , which he prefixed with a stanza by C. O Sternau : "The evening is dawning, the moonlight is shining ..." He divides the two-part theme into cantors (bars 1– 2) and choir (bars 3–4), thus juxtaposing unison and chord formation. The theme is followed by three variations and an epilogical repetition, in which the melody itself is not significantly changed and which do not yet meet the concept with which he later continued the genre. At the end he transposes the theme over the repeated organ point C to C major.
The third movement that follows attacca is a wild Scherzo in E minor ( Allegro molto e con fuoco, 6/8 ). After a sequenced interlude, he repeats the Scherzo theme, varied contrapuntally, and from bar 101 leads into a three-part C major trio (più mosso, 3/4) in which an ascending, intimate melody unfolds over a continuous eighth note movement is provided with painful chromaticism . The Scherzo is extremely demanding in terms of fingering and, like the finale, already presents some of the typical technical challenges of Brahms' piano music, which include runs of thirds, octaves , full-bodied chords and tricky jumps. Instructions such as feroce (wild) and strepitoso (noisy) as well as rhythmic refinements and accent shifts through hemioli characterize the youthful swing of the structure.
The finale ( Allegro con fuoco , 9/8) is a rondo-like ride, whose ascending theme, based on Beethoven, is again derived from the beginning of the first movement. The Ritornell consists of three four-bar sections that blend of D major , via E minor to E major move. The exuberance of the action is temporarily slowed down by two calm and intimate couplets in G major and A minor. In the first, cantabulous, longing sevenths shape the character, while the second couplet, which follows the almost unchanged refrain, is folksong-like and can be viewed as a song without words . As Brahms later explained to his friend Albert Dietrich , when composing the secondary theme he thought of the line My heart is in the highlands by the Scottish poet Robert Burns . After further dynamic and agogic increases, a stormy coda follows from bar 228 in 6/8 bar ( Presto non troppo, ed agitato ).
Emergence
His C major sonata was written in two steps. He had already composed the Andante in April 1852, but did not write the other three movements until the spring of 1853 before a concert tour with the violinist Ede Reményi . Despite the number of opus, the C major sonata was created after the F sharp minor sonata op. 2 composed in Hamburg in 1852 , although it was premiered earlier. Brahms himself played it in 1853 in the Leipzig Gewandhaus, while op. 2 was only played by Hans von Bülow in 1882 as part of a Brahms evening in Vienna . He had already written the Scherzo in E flat minor op. 4 in 1851. The fact that Brahms preferred it to the F sharp minor sonata in the late autumn of 1853 and placed it at the beginning of his oeuvre with opus number 1 can be attributed to its classicist tendencies. Apparently he thought the sonata was his best composition to date. He told Luise Japha: "When you first show yourself, people should see the forehead and not the - foot."
background
Piano works are at the beginning and at the end of Johannes Brahms' oeuvre. While he took a long time before he published anything in the field of symphonic and string quartet (two quartets in C and A minor op. 51, one quartet in B flat major op. 67), he turned to his three As a young musician, piano sonatas characterized by youthful vigor belonged to a tradition-bound genre that was strongly influenced by Beethoven. This legacy made it difficult to access a form that had been taken up by some composers such as Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Robert Schumann , but which no longer seemed very relevant around 1850.
Since his early training was based on the piano, he was very familiar with the instrument, which is why it is not surprising that his first compositions were about this instrument. There were solo works, but also chamber music and vocal music with piano accompaniment. As an extremely accomplished pianist, he was able to play his own works and perform them with other musicians without great difficulty. Many years later, in connection with the double concerto in A minor for violin, violoncello and orchestra op. 102 by the revered Clara Schumann , he wrote that it was “something else to write for instruments whose type and sound are only so casually in your head that you only hear in your mind - or write for an instrument that you know through and through, like I know the piano, where I definitely know what I'm writing and why I write this way and that. "
literature
- Constantin Floros : Studies on Brahms` Piano Music - Poetic with Brahms . In: Brahms Studies, Volume 5, Johannes Brahms Society, Hamburg 1983, pp. 47–48
- Katrin Eich: The piano works , in: Brahms-Handbuch, Ed. Wolfgang Sandberger, Metzler, Weimar 2009, ISBN 978-3-476-02233-2 , pp. 332–336
- Otto Schuman : The Sonatas , in manual of piano music, Heinrichshofen´s Verlag, Wilhelmshaven 1979, ISBN 3-7959-0006-9 , pp. 474-477
Individual evidence
- ↑ Katrin Eich: Piano Sonatas , in: Brahms-Handbuch, Ed. Wolfgang Sandberger, Metzler, Stuttgart 2009, p. 335
- ↑ Günther Batel: Johannes Brahms, Sonata in C major , in: Masterpieces of Piano Music, Fourier Verlag, Wiesbaden, 1997, 361
- ↑ Katrin Eich: Piano Sonatas , in: Brahms-Handbuch, Ed. Wolfgang Sandberger, Metzler, Stuttgart 2009, p. 335
- ↑ Harenberg piano music guide, 600 works from the baroque to the present, Johannes Brahms, Sonata in C major op. 1, Meyers, Mannheim 2004, p. 197
- ↑ Constantin Floros : Studies on Brahms` Piano Music - Poetic with Brahms . In: Brahms Studies, Volume 5, Johannes Brahms Society, Hamburg 1983, p. 47
- ↑ Quoted from Katrin Eich: Die Klavierwerke , in: Brahms-Handbuch, Ed. Wolfgang Sandberger, Metzler, Stuttgart 2009, p. 334
- ↑ Katrin Eich: Piano Sonatas , in: Brahms-Handbuch, Ed. Wolfgang Sandberger, Metzler, Stuttgart 2009, p. 334
- ^ Katrin Eich: Die Klavierwerke , in: Brahms-Handbuch, Ed. Wolfgang Sandberger, Metzler, Stuttgart 2009, p. 332
- ↑ Quoted from: Katrin Eich: Die Klavierwerke , in: Brahms-Handbuch, Ed. Wolfgang Sandberger, Metzler, Stuttgart 2009, p. 332