Six Piano Pieces, Op.118

Brahms wrote his last piano sonata in 1853 at the age of 20, his last set of piano variations in 1863 and no solo piano music at all for as long as fifteen years after that. When he returned to the piano it was with the four capriccios and four intermezzos of Op.76 and, as far as the piano was concerned, he restricted himself to similarly small-scale pieces for the rest of his composing career. He had by no means abandoned large-scale forms - his last two symphonies, his last two concertos and a dozen major chamber works all date from this period - but in the last years of his life his most intimate statements and most daring technical experiments were confided to the piano. The last four sets of short pieces, Op.116 to Op.119, were written during summer holidays at Ischl in 1892 and 1893 and dispatched from there by post to Clara Schumann who, he knew, would understand them as no one else could. “Even one listener,” Brahms said of these pieces, “is one too many.”

In the Six Piano Pieces, Op.118, the composer seems at first sight to have abandoned his characteristic concern for long-term continuity. Although there are obvious harmonic links between the Intermezzo in A minor and the Intermezzo in A major and between the Intermezzo in F minor and the Romance in F major, there is no apparent logic in the order in which the six pieces are presented - except that the tonality gradually sinks from A minor to E flat minor, leaving the sequence eloquently incomplete on the most poignant of all Brahms’s piano pieces.

The opening theme of that last Intermezzo in E flat minor is based on the traditional melody of the Dies Iræ. Although Brahms makes no dramatic point of it, elaborating it for its poetic potential rather than stressing its characteristically stark outline, he nevertheless anticipates it at several earlier points in the work, beginning with the main theme of the rhapsodic first Intermezzo in A minor. A more youthful Brahms is recalled in the cradle-song Intermezzo in A major and the famously heroic Ballade in G minor, while the Intermezzo in F minor is too preoccupied with its ingeniously concealed canonic textures to be concerned with anything but its own reflections.

The theme presented in the left hand in the opening bars of the Romance in F major, on the other hand, is clearly based on the Dies Iræ plainsong, although its grim implications are far from explicit here and have not the least effect on the luminous baroque-style pastorale of the D major middle section. As for the Intermezzo in E flat minor itself, there is nothing quite like the estrangement of harmony and melodic line anywhere else in Brahms and, in spite of some characteristic defiance in G flat major in the middle section, nothing quite like the quiet resignation at the end.

Four Piano Pieces, Op.119

Intermezzzo in B minor: adagio

Intermezzo in E minor: andantino un poco agitato

Intermezzo in C major: grazioso e giocoso

Rhapsody in E flat major: allegro risoluto

The Four Pieces, Op.119, were Brahms’s last work for the piano. Written at much the same time as the Six Pieces, Op.118, at Ischl in the summer of 1893, they present a directly contrary emotional progression. In this case the greatest poignancy is expressed at the beginning - in the exquisitely equivocal harmonies of the opening section of the Intermezzo in B minor and, in spite of its relatively hopeful second theme in the D major, in its modestly understated but chilling ending in the minor. The Intermezzo in E minor has a similarly wistful quality to start with but, after its delightfully waltz-like middle section, it is difficult to take it quite so seriously; and, indeed, it ends with a quietly happy memory of the waltz in E major. The Intermezzo in C is nothing other than a cheerfully lilting scherzo which, while it has a more lyrical side to it, never loses its playful sense of humour. As for the final Rhapsody in E flat, it is a characteristically heroic example of its kind and yet it too has its caprices, not least in allowing a charmingly melodious diversion in A flat major and then in delaying the reprise of the main theme. The firmly E flat minor ending seems to be an expression more of defiance than of despair.

Gerald Larner©