Scherzo in C minor (FAE) (1853)

Brahms’s earliest surviving piece for violin and piano owes its existence to the happy coincidence that the young composer was staying with the Schumanns when Joseph Joachim visited Düsseldorf in 1853. It was in anticipation of that event that Brahms, Schumann and the latter’s pupil Albert Dietrich got together to write a sonata that would not only be dedicated to Joachim but would also be specifically identified with him by making a feature of the three notes F, A and E standing for his personal motto “Frei aber einsam” (free but alone). When he first played through the “FAE” Sonata with Clara Schumann the violinist was not told who had written which movement. But if he knew anything of Brahms at the time he would have been quite certain that the Scherzo, surging forward on the urgent triplet rhythms which are introduced by the violin in the opening bars, could have been written by no one else.

Brahms’s earliest surviving piece for violin and piano - written long before the first of the three great Sonatas - was his part in a collaborative salute to Joseph Joachim on his visit to Düsseldorf in 1853. Although Joachim was still in his early twenties, he was so widely admired as a violinist and musician even then that his arrival in a place like Düsseldorf was an event to be celebrated. He was already on friendly terms with both Schumann and Brahms, who happened to be staying with Robert and Clara Schumann at the time, and it must have seemed to them a great idea that they and Schumann’s pupil Albert Dietrich should pool their resources in a Violin Sonata for him. It would not only be dedicated to him but would also be specifically identified with Joachim by making a feature of the three notes F, A and E standing for his personal motto “Frei aber einsam” (free but lonely).

When Joachim played the “FAE” Sonata, with Clara Schumman at the piano, he was asked to guess which composer was responsible for which movement. Dietrich wrote the first movement, Schumann the Intermezzo and Finale and Brahms the Scherzo, as Joachim would immediately have recognised. No one but Brahms could have written a hard-driven piece like this, surging forward as it does on the urgent triplet rhythms which are introduced by the violin in the opening bars and which can still be sensed even when they cannot be heard. Just in case they might be forgotten in the lyrical middle section, Brahms offers a rumbling reminder of them low in the left hand of the piano part. At the end, after the triplets have resounded for the last time, the melody from the middle section reappears in a firmly conclusive grandioso augmentation.