String Quartet in A minor Op.51 No.2 (1873)

String Quartet in A minor Op.51 No.2 (1868-73)

Allegro non troppo

Andante moderato

Quasi Minuetto: moderato - allegro vivace

Finale: allegro non assai - più vivace

Less austere than its companion in C minor, Brahms’s A minor Quartet seems destined to end differently. Serious-minded though the opening theme of the Allegro non troppo certainly is, the prominence given to the gently lilting second subject is encouraging. So are the thoughtful Andante and the Quasi Minuetto, which so ingeniously includes both minuet and scherzo material in the same movement. But there is no happy ending: although there is an extended relatively peaceful section in A major just before the end of the last movement, a quick coda concludes the work abruptly in A minor.

Brahms also wrote a String Quartet in C minor, Op.51 No.1, which ends most decisively and uncompromisingly in the same key as it began. Its less austere companion in A minor, which was completed at much the same time in 1873, seems destined to end differently. The opening theme of the Allegro non troppo is certainly serious-minded but Brahms gives such affectionate prominence to the gently lilting second subject, both on its introduction in C major and its eventual recapitulation in A major, that he is clearly in a more relaxed mood here. Unlike Beethoven in the Quartet in C minor, he finds room for a slow movement - a thoughtful Andante moderato in A major - as well as both a minuet and a scherzo, which economy he achieves by the ingenious device of alternating a graceful A minor minuet (Moderato) with lightly articulated scherzo material in A major (Allegro vivace) within the same movement. So with the general consensus apparently in favour of a happy ending, there must surely be a Finale that confirms the situation. In fact, although there is an extended relatively peaceful section in A major just before the end, where even the fiery main theme loses its aggressive demeanour, a quick coda ends the work abruptly in A minor.

If Beethoven was cautious about risking comparison between his own first quartets and the mature examples of his predecessors, Brahms was far more nervous about it – and with reason, since his predecessors included not only Haydn and Mozart but also Beethoven and Schubert (whose Quartet in A minor seems to have had some influence on the present work). One of the things that worried him, deterring him from publishing a string quartet until he was 40, must have been the problem of sustaining an argument in such a way that, as in some of the greatest works of the kind, it would be resolved only at the end of the last movement. From that point of view at least, the Quartet in A minor is a masterpiece.

The first movement sets out the argument in clear terms. On the one hand, there is the uneasy first subject introduced in A minor in the opening bars; on the other hand, there is the serenely lilting second subject presented in C major by the two violins in thirds. If the exclusion of the second subject from both the development and the coda seems to suggest that it is not worthy of serious consideration, the issue is not as simple as that. In the Andante moderato it is the thoughtful A major main theme that predominates. Although it is threatened by an intrusion of agitated tremolandos and agressive melodic gesture in F sharp minor, it prevails even though it is driven into the wrong key before it recovers its A major equilibrium.

The third movement, which alternates a Moderato minuet in A minor with Allegro vace scherzo material in A major, presents the basic argument in different terms. So it is still to be resolved in the Finale. Beginning with a fiery Hungarian dance in A minor, it seems too carried away by its cross-rhythms to yield more than momentarily to anything more lyrical. In fact, it does yield in an A major episode that offers appealingly expressive variants of the dance tune on cello and violin. It is only when activity is so attenuated as, apparently, to be dying away that a one-page Più vivace coda decides definitively and unmistakably in favour of uncomprosing, if exhilarating, A minor.