Six Piano Pieces

Brighton

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Six Piano Pieces

Capriccio in B minor, Op.76, No.2

Intermezzo in B flat major, Op.76, No.4

Capriccio in C major, Op.76, No.8

Intermezzo in E flat major, Op.117, No.1

Intermezzo in A minor, Op.118, No.1

Intermezzo in E flat minor, Op.118, No.6

Brahms wrote his last piano sonata in 1853 at the age of 20, his last set of piano variations ten years later 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 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.

Written for the most part at Pörtschach in 1878, at about the same time as the Violin Concerto, the Eight Piano Pieces, Op.76, are not in general as thoughtful or as individual as the later capriccios and intermezzos. The Capriccio in B minor, for example, is purely capricious with little more ambition than to amuse itself with Hungarian gypsy mannerisms over a chromatic bass line in the outer sections and to indulge in a little sentiment in the middle. If that piece calls to mind the Schubert of the Moments Musicaux, the Intermezzo in B flat major - an exquisitely modelled sonata movement in miniature - recalls the Mendelssohn of the Songs without Words. The Capriccio in C major, the last and harmonically the most adventurous piece in the Op.76 set, has something of a Chopin Prelude or Study about it.

The older Brahms got, the more he preferred the intermezzo to the capriccio. The Three Intermezzos, Op.117, written in 1892, are perfect examples of the poetic intimacy he achieved in that more reflective manner. The tender lullaby of the first in B flat major - its melody protectively enclosed in an inner part in the right hand - was inspired by the words of the Scottish folk song on the first page: “Sleep softly, my child, sleep softly and sweetly. It makes me so sad to see you weep.”

The Six Piano Pieces, Op.118, written a year later, end with an Intermezzo in E flat minor, the most poignant of all Brahms’s piano pieces, which is discreetly based on the traditional melody of the Dies Iræ. Although Brahms makes no histrionic point of that motif, elaborating it for its poetic potential rather than stressing its characteristically stark outline, he nevertheless takes it seriously enough to anticipate it at several earlier points in the Op.118 set, beginning with the main theme of the rhapsodic first Intermezzo in A minor. 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 sense of resignation at the end.

Gerald Larner©