Piano Quartet in C minor Op.60 (1875)

Brahms began his Pian Quartet in C minor in 1856, at the time of his passionate but hopeless attachment to Clara Schumann. It was originally in C sharp minor with a slow movement in the closely related key of E major. There were nly three movements. But the work was not published until 1875, by which times Brahms had recovered from his frustrated passion. He changed the key of the first movement C minor and supplied a scherzo and a new finale in the same key. Strangely, however, the slow movement remained in E major.

But as, as Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto had shown, E major is a not unattainable ideal in a C minor context. Even in the midst of the dar sighns at the beginning of the first movement, the pizzicatos on E natural are a hint of light to come. The piano’s E flat major second subject, though a consolation, is now what the movement is looking for. But the conversion of the opening sighs into bright B major is more like it. Later, in the recapitulatio, the pizzicato Es introduce a little episode in E miinor and, when the second subject reappears in G major, the ideal is very much nearer.

But before that is achieved the turbulent C minor Scherzo intervnes. Then, at last, there is the lovely E major Andante, which reaches even more remote areas of serenity in its second subject. Thus freed from his frustration, in musical as well as persoal terms, Brahms supplied for hew new Finale a very different sort of C minor movezment. The scoring is light and the mood wavers constantly between major and minor before a last-minute but no unpredictable decision in favour of the former.

The last of Brahms’s three Piano Quartets was also, in a sense, his first. At the height of his passionate attachment fo Clara Schumann, after the death of her husband in a mental hospital in Endenich in 1856, he had written a tragically orientated three-movement Piano Quartet in C sharp minor with a slow movement in the closely related key of E major. It was neither published nor publicly performed – perhaps because it said too much about a relationship which was never openly acknowledged – but it was not forgotten: “Imagine a man who is just going to shoot himself since there is nothing else to do,” said Brahms in reference to the work in 1868.

The suicidal aspect of the score was still in his mind when, preparing for the publication of this thoroughly revised and far less tragic version in C minor, he suggested to Simrock that the cover should be illustrated with an image of a man with Brahms’s face holding a pistol to his head – and dressed, moreover, in the blue coat, yellow breeches and top-boots associated with Goethe’s self-destructive hero Werther. This was no doubt an ironic comment by a composer in his forties on the romantic young man who had written the Piano Quartet in C sharp minor nearly 20 years earlier.

For the mature version of the work Brahms changed the key of the first movement to C minor and supplied a scherzo and a finale in the same key. Strangely, the slow movement remained in E major. As Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto had shown, however, E major is a not unattainable ideal in a C minor context. Even in the midst of the dark sighs at the beginning of the first movement, the pizzicato E naturals on viola and violin are a hint of light to come. The piano’s E flat major second subject, though a consolation, is not what the movement is looking for. But the conversion of the opening sighs into a bright B major fortissimo is more like it. Later, in the recapitulation, the pizzicato Es introduce a little episode in E minor and, when the second subject reappears on viola in G major, the ideal is very much nearer.

But before that is achieved the turbulent C minor Scherzo intervenes. If this Allegro is a reworking of the C sharp minor finale, as it is plausibly thought to be – it lacks the trio section expected in a scherzo – did it end like the present version in the major? It would be interesting to know. Anway, now is the time for the expression of the distant ideal in the lovely E major Andante, which reaches even more remote areas of serenity in its beautifully scored second subject. The new Finale begins in C minor but the scoring is comparatively light and the mood wavers constantly between major and minor before a last-minute but not unpredictable decision in favour of the former.