VIIJOHANNES BRAHMS
Of all the figures of modern music, brilliant and varied as they are, impressing one with the many-sidedness and wide scope of the art, there is perhaps only one, that of Johannes Brahms, which conveys the sense of satisfying poise, self-control and sanity. Others excel him in particular qualities. Grieg is more delicate and intimate, Dvořák warmer and clearer in color; Saint-Saëns is more meteoric, Franck more recondite and subtle, and Tschaïkowsky more impassioned; but Brahms alone has Homeric simplicity, the primeval health of the well-balanced man. He excels all his contemporaries in soundness and universality. In an age when many people are uncertain of themselves and the world, victims of a pervasive unrest and disappointment,it is solacing to find so heroic and simple a soul, who finds life acceptable, meets it genially, and utters his joy and his sorrow with the old classic sincerity. He is not blighted by any of the myriad forms of egotism,—by sentimentality, by the itch to be effective at all costs, or to be «original,» or to be Byronic or romantic or unfathomable. He has no «message» for an errant world; no anathema, either profoundly gloomy or insolently clever, to hurl at God. He has rather a deep and broad impersonal love of life; universal joy is the sum and substance of his expression.
It is hard to say whether the unique greatness of Brahms depends more on this emotional wholesomeness and simplicity or on the intellectual breadth and synthetic power with which it is combined. Probably the truth is that true greatness requires the interaction of the two. At any rate, Brahms is equally remarkable, whether considered as a man or as a musician, for both. In his personal character frankness, modesty, simple and homely virtue were combined with the widest sympathy, the most far-ranging intelligence, extreme catholicity and tolerance. In music he prized equallythe simplest elements, like the old German folk-songs and the Hungarian dances, and the most complex artistic forms that are evolved from them by creative genius. Like Bach and Beethoven, he spanned the whole range of human interests; deep feeling fills his music with primitive expressiveness, and at the same time great intellectual power gives it the utmost scope and complexity. Lacking either trait he would not have been himself, he could not have performed his service to music.
There are many anecdotes illustrating the simple, large traits of the man. His pleasures were homely, his ambitions inward and vital. He cared little for fame, and was annoyed by the foolish adulation of the crowd. To a long and flowery speech addressed to him on the presentation of some sort of tribute he answered, with admirable brevity and utter prose, «Thank you very much.» Once when a party of his friends were gathered together to sample a rare old wine, somebody pompously announced, «What Brahms is among the composers, this Rauenthaler is among the wines.» «Ah,» snapped out Brahms, «then let's have a bottle of Bach now.» He often remarked that onecould never hope to get upon the level of such giants as Bach and Beethoven; one could only work conscientiously in one's own field. He had the disgust of shams that one expects in so sincere a lover of the genuine, and the armor of roughness and sarcasm with which he protected himself against the pretentious was formidable. When the University of Cambridge offered him a degree, suggesting that he write a new work for the occasion, he replied that if any of his old works seemed good enough to them he should be happy to receive the honor, but that he was too busy to write a new one. There was about him something shaggy, bear-like, and one can imagine the foxes and weasels scattering at his growl.
But for everything fresh and genuine Brahms had the heartiest love. He is one of the innumerable army of great men of whom biography loves to relate that they always carried candy in their pockets for the children, and a lady described in a letter how she had seen him on the hotel piazza, on all-fours, clambered over by young playmates. He was on cordial terms with waiters and servants, and told Mr. Henschel with emotion the story of a serving-maidwho lost her position in order to shield a careless postman, who, being married, could not afford to lose his. Another pretty story, showing at once his modesty and his catholicity of taste, recounts how all the musical friends of the wife of Johann Strauss, the great waltz composer, were writing their names, with phrases from their works, on her fan. When it was his turn, the composer of the German Requiem wrote the opening phrase of the «Blue Danube» waltz, and underneath it the words, «Not, I regret to say, by your devoted friend, Johannes Brahms.» Thus wholesome and unaffected was the character of this great man.
Outwardly, Brahms's life was uneventful. His father was a contrabass-player in the theatre orchestra of Hamburg. In him his son's positiveness of character seems to have been foreshadowed, for we learn that when the conductor once directed him not to play so loud, he replied with dignity: «Herr Capellmeister, this is my contrabass, I want you to understand, and I shall play on it as loud as I please.» Brahms was born at Hamburg in 1833, and from his earliest years was trained for music as a matter of course. His early acquaintance with thebest works was of incalculable value to him. Mr. Hadow points out that the eclecticism and solidity of his style was doubtless largely due to the study of Bach and Beethoven that he made in youth under Marxsen. He had the advantage, too, of early practical experience. When he was only twenty he made a concert tour with Reményi, the Hungarian violinist, during which he gained much training and confidence. A feat he performed during this trip showed even more virtuosity than that of «le petit Saint-Saëns» already recorded. Having to play the Kreutzer Sonata on a piano too low in pitch to suit Reményi, who disliked to tune down his violin, he transposed it up a semi-tone, and though playing without notes, performed it accurately and with spirit. To this feat, which aroused the admiration of Joachim, Brahms owed his acquaintance with the great violinist, and through him with Liszt and Schumann. His experience with the former, then in the height of his fame, was unfortunate, but characteristic. Brahms, who was worn out with travel, fell asleep during one of the most moving parts of Liszt's Sonata, which the great virtuoso was so condescending as to play. Though Brahmswas only a boy at the time, he was evidently, even then, undazzled by worldly glory.
His meeting with Schumann was much more happy; indeed, it was one of the important events of his life. Probably no young composer ever received such a hearty welcome into the musical world as Schumann extended to Brahms in his famous article, «New Paths.» «In sure and unfaltering accents,» writes Mr. Hadow, «he proclaimed the advent of a genius in whom the spirit of the age should find its consummation and its fulfilment; a master by whose teaching the broken phrases should grow articulate, and the vague aspirations gather into form and substance. The five-and-twenty years of wandering were over; at last a leader had arisen who should direct the art into 'new paths,' and carry it a stage nearer to its appointed place.» It is not surprising that Schumann, whose generous enthusiasm often led him to praise worthless work, should have received the early compositions of Brahms so cordially. Their qualities were such as to affect profoundly the great romanticist. Although the essential character of his mature works is their classical balance and restraint, these first compositionsshow an exuberance, a wayward fertility of invention, thoroughly romantic. His first ten opuses, or at any rate the three sonatas and the four ballades for piano, are frequently turgid in emotion, and ill-considered in form. The massive vigor of his later work here appears in the guise of a cyclopean violence. It is small wonder that Schumann, dazzled, delighted, overwhelmed, gave his ardent support to the young man. Brahms now found himself suddenly famous. He was discussed everywhere, his pieces were readily accepted by publishers, and his new compositions were awaited with interest.
But fortunate as all this was for Brahms, it might easily, but for his own good sense and self-control, have turned out the most unfortunate thing that could happen to him. For consider his position. He was a brilliant young composer who had been publicly proclaimed by one of the highest musical authorities. He was expected to go on producing works; he was almost under obligation to justify his impressive introduction. Not to do so would be much worse than to remain a nonentity; it would be to become one. And he had meanwhile every internal reason for meeting people's demands.He was full of ideas, conscious of power, under inward as well as outward compulsion to express himself. Yet for all that, he was in reality immature, unformed, and callow. His work, for all its brilliancy, was whimsical and subjective. If he had followed out the path he was on, as any contemporary observer would have expected, he would have become one of the most radical of romanticists. At thirty he would have been a bright star in the musical firmament, at forty he would have been one of several bright stars, at fifty he would have been clever and disappointed. It required rare insight in so young a man, suddenly successful, to realize the danger, rare courage to avert it. When we consider the temptation it must have been to him to continue these easy triumphs, when we imagine the inward enthusiasm of creation with which he must have been on fire, we are ready to appreciate the next event of the drama.
That event was withdrawal from the musical world and the initiation of a long course of the severest study. When he was a little over twenty-one, Brahms imposed upon himself this arduous training, and commanded himself to forego for a while the eloquent but ill-controlledexpression hitherto his, in order to acquire a broader, firmer, purer, and stronger style. For four or five years, to borrow Stevenson's expression, he «played the sedulous ape» to Bach and Beethoven, and in a minor degree to Haydn and Mozart. The complex harmonies of his first period gave place to simple, strong successions of triads; for an emotional and often vague type of melody he substituted clearly crystallized, fluent, and gracious phrases, frequently devoid of any particular expression; the whimsical rhythms of the piano sonatas were followed by the square-cut sections of the Serenade, opus 11. Of course the immediate effect of all this was a great sacrifice of what is called originality; had Brahms not had complete faith in the vitality of his genius he could not have surrendered so much of immediate attainment for the sake of an ultimately greater mastery. It is a profound lesson in the ethics of art that a man who could write the fourth of the Ballades, opus 10, should have been willing to follow it up with this Serenade, opus 11. Yet Brahms knew what he was about, and his first large work, the Piano Concerto, opus 15, shows his individuality of expression entirely regained,and now with immensely increased power and resource.
Nothing could exhibit better than this dissatisfaction with his early work and withdrawal from the world for study, that intellectual breadth which we have noted as characteristic of Brahms. He was not a man who could be content with a narrow personal expression. No subjective heaven could satisfy him. His wide human sympathy and his passion for artistic perfection alike, compelled him to study unremittingly, to widen his ideals as his powers increased. No fate could seem to him so horrible as that «setting» of the mind which is the æsthetic analogue of selfishness. Originality, which so often degenerates into idiosyncrasy, was much less an object to him than universality, which is after all the best means of being serviceably original. Dr. Deiters, in his reminiscences, after describing this period of study, continues: «Henceforth we find him striving after moderation, endeavoring to place himself more in touch with the public, and to conquer all subjectiveness. To arrive at perspicuity and precision of invention, clear design and form, careful elaboration and accurate balancingof effect, now became with him essential and established principles.»
From this time until the end of his life, in fact, a period of only a little less than forty years—he died in 1897—Brahms never departed from the modes of work and the ideals of attainment he had now set himself. He labored indefatigably, but with no haste or impatience. He was too painstaking and conscientious a workman to botch his products by hurrying them. He thus described to his friend, Mr. Henschel, his method of composing: «There is no realcreatingwithout hard work. That which you would call invention, that is to say, a thought, is simply an inspiration from above, for which I am not responsible, which is no merit of mine. Yes, it is a present, a gift, which I ought even to despise until I have made it my own by right of hard work. And there need be no hurry about that either. It is as with the seed corn: it germinates unconsciously and in spite of ourselves. When I, for instance, have found the first phrase of a song, I might shut the book there and then, go for a walk, do some other work, and perhaps not think of it again for months. Nothing, however, is lost.If afterward I approach the subject again, it is sure to have taken shape; I can now really begin to work at it.» Another inkling of the severity of his standard we have in a remark he made after pointing out certain imperfections in a song of Mr. Henschel's. «Whether it is beautiful also,» he said, «is an entirely different matter; but perfect it must be.» With such a standard, we need not be surprised that he imposed so severe a training upon himself at twenty-one, or that he continued all his life the practice of writing each day a contrapuntal exercise, or that he wrought for ten years over his first symphony, that Titanic work. Thus laboring always with the same calm persistence, returning upon his ideas until he could present them with perfect clarity, caring little for the indifference or the applause of the public, but much for the approval of his own fastidious taste, he produced year by year an astonishing series of masterpieces. No one has better described the kind of work that made Brahms great than Matthew Arnold in those lines about labor
«which in lasting fruit outgrowsFar noisier schemes; accomplished in repose;Too great for haste, too high for rivalry.»
«which in lasting fruit outgrowsFar noisier schemes; accomplished in repose;Too great for haste, too high for rivalry.»
«which in lasting fruit outgrows
Far noisier schemes; accomplished in repose;
Too great for haste, too high for rivalry.»
A just conception of this broad scheme of Brahms's ideal and of his thoroughness in working it out is necessary, we must insist, not only to appreciation of the man himself, but to any true understanding of his relation and service to music. Brahms was enabled, by the tireless training to which he subjected his fertile and many-sided genius, to couch romantic feeling in classic form. In order to grasp the full significance of such a work, it is necessary to bear in mind those fundamental principles of musical effect and facts of musical history which have been presented in the Introduction. Music has resulted from the gradual formal definition, by time and pitch relations, of those vague gestures and utterances by which men expressed their primitive feelings. It has been, in a word, the product of two human instincts, neither of which alone would have sufficed to produce it—the instinct for expression and the instinct for beauty. But these instincts have not worked with precisely equal efficacy at all times. In fact, so limited is human attention, so few things can men attend to at once, every great development of expression has generally disturbed the equilibrium requisite to beauty, andevery great advance in beauty has generally, for the time being, restrained the eloquence of expression. Musical history is a series of reactions between man's primal emotional impulse and his desire for intelligibility. First, urgency of feeling drives him to a formless cry; then the wish to be understood and the love of beauty induce him to formulate this cry; finally, as soon as the formula is felt to be inadequate to further expression, it is discarded in favor of one more elastic and complex. The conventions that are helpful at one stage prove hindrances in the next. The same forms that subserve growth up to a certain point, beyond that point hamper it. Accordingly, in the history of music, formulation has always been followed by relaxation of the formulæ to admit of new expression; and when new expression has been thus evolved, a new and more complex form has had to be worked out to regulate and fix it.
Such a period of relaxation was that which intervened between Beethoven and Brahms. The romanticists, headed by Schumann, seized upon the possibilities of poignant expression that they were quick to recognize in theirheritage from Beethoven, and developed an extraordinarily mobile and eloquent instrument for voicing personal emotion. At the same time they inevitably lost the perfect control of form, the transparent lucidity of structure, that had characterized Beethoven. In some respects more moving, they were on the whole less intelligible. They were enriching their art, and must leave the perfect subordination of the new material to their successors. It is most interesting to trace the analogy between this development of musical expression and the growth of emotional life in the individual, and to observe how in both the period of experience, in which emotion is felt in all its immediate stress, inhibiting all else and being therefore conceived in no relations, but merely as a single and ultimate fact, is followed by the period of meditation and self-inspection, when the whole emotional life is grouped into order, and the man learns to see the significance and the spiritual value of his feelings. With the romanticists music necessarily became more and more the medium of personal passion, less and less the revealer of universal order.
Browning, himself a romanticist through andthrough, has summed up the spirit of romanticism in a single stanza of his «Old Pictures in Florence»:
«On which I conclude, that the early painters,To cries of 'Greek art and what more wish you?'Replied, 'To become now self-acquainters,And paint man, man, whatever the issue!Make new hopes shine through the flesh they fray,New fears aggrandize the rags and tatters:To bring the invisible full into play!Let the visible go to the dogs—what matters?'»
«On which I conclude, that the early painters,To cries of 'Greek art and what more wish you?'Replied, 'To become now self-acquainters,And paint man, man, whatever the issue!Make new hopes shine through the flesh they fray,New fears aggrandize the rags and tatters:To bring the invisible full into play!Let the visible go to the dogs—what matters?'»
«On which I conclude, that the early painters,
To cries of 'Greek art and what more wish you?'
Replied, 'To become now self-acquainters,
And paint man, man, whatever the issue!
Make new hopes shine through the flesh they fray,
New fears aggrandize the rags and tatters:
To bring the invisible full into play!
Let the visible go to the dogs—what matters?'»
The individualism, the subjectivity, the mystical distrust of definite forms, so stirringly championed in these lines, are vital principles in the work of all the composers of the generation after Beethoven. Thus in Schumann's music, for example, the generality of the emotional burden of classical music is changed to something far more individual and introspective. Expression is more tinged by temperament; the work of art exhales a personal fragrance. Schumann tells us not merely of love, longing, and passion, but of Robert Schumann's love, longing, and passion. His work, for all its beauty, is much less inclusive and complete than the classical masterpieces. In the same way Chopin filled his nocturnesand preludes with the lovely but often unhealthy poetry of the isolated dreamer, and Wagner, separating the passion of love from the other interests of the heart, and thus throwing out of balance the spiritual economy, sacrificed as much in health as he gained in potency. And of the men we have been studying, Grieg, Franck, and Tschaïkowsky also illustrate in various ways the tendency to «paint man, man, whatever the issue,» to let the «flesh be frayed» and the «visible go to the dogs.» It is hardly necessary to say that all these men have their legitimate place. Their message of passion and unrest, already audible in Beethoven, was the inevitable and indispensable expression of one of those self-conscious phases in man's growth when he freshly realizes his finitude. Their utterances make a deeply pathetic appeal to us, because they reveal all the terrible sadness of personal life which as yet finds no resting-place in the universal. Aspiration and disappointment, bitter grief and blind pain, speak in their fragmentary loveliness. The romanticists will never want for our love, since they interpret to us a part of our own experience.
But, as we have said, after man suffers emotionhe reflects upon it; after he feels the parts he learns the whole; after musicians have developed new capabilities of expression they proceed to subordinate them to plastic beauty. Adjustment follows discovery, and the romantic takes on classical perfection. The chaos of one age is thus the order of the next; and after Schumann and his fellows had enriched the world with their beautiful but fragmentary and wayward feelings, it remained for Brahms to essay a further conquest; to commence at least (and perhaps he has not done more) the task of making these new feelings more intelligible, of clarifying their turgidity, of subordinating their conflicts in a more complex harmony. Or, to state his function in more specifically musical terms, he had to discover how rugged melodic outlines, bold harmonic progressions, and the large-spanned phrases of modern musical thought could be organized and brought into that unity in variety which is beauty.
We are now in a position to grasp the full significance of that severe training to which Brahms subjected himself in his youth. Without it he would have gone on doing brilliant work of the romantic order, like his first compositions,but he would never have attained the grasp and self-control that raised him above all his contemporaries and that made possible his peculiar service to music. That period of training was the artistic counterpart of what many men undergo when they discover how many sacrifices and how long a labor are necessary to him who would find a spiritual dwelling-place on earth. Many pleasures must be renounced before happiness will abide; evil and suffering are opaque save to the steadfast eye. So, in music, effects and eloquences and crises must be the handmaids of orderly beauty, and tones are stubborn material until one has learned by hard work to make them transmit thoughts. Technic is in the musician what character is in the man. It is the power to stamp matter with spirit. Brahms's long apprenticeship was therefore needed in the first place to make him master of his materials; in the second place to teach him the deeper lesson that the part must be subordinated to the whole, or, in musical language, expression to beauty.
He achieved this subordination, however, not by the negative process of suppression, but by conquest and co-ordination. In his musicemotion is not excluded, it is regulated; his work is not a reversion to an earlier and simpler type, it is the gathering and fusing together of fragmentary new elements, resulting in a more complex organism. Thus it is a very superficial view to say that he «went back» to Beethoven. He drew guidance from the same natural laws that had guided Beethoven, but he applied these laws to a material of novel thought and emotion that had come into being after Beethoven. Had he repudiated the new material, even for the reason that he considered it incapable of organization, he would have been a pedant, which is to say a musical Pharisee. One masters by recognizing and using, not by repudiating. And just as a wise man will not become ascetical merely because his passions give him trouble, but will study to find out their true relation tohimand then keep them in it, so Brahms recognized the wayward beauties of romanticism, and studied how to make them ancillary to that order and fair proportion which is the soul of music.
To this great artistic service he was fitted by both the qualities which have been pointed out above as co-operating to form his unique nature.His deep and simple human feeling, which put him in sympathy with the aims of the romanticists and enabled him to grasp their meaning, would not have sufficed alone; but fortunately it was associated with an almost unprecedented scope of intellect and power of synthesis. Brahms's assimilative faculty was enormous. Like a fine tree that draws the materials of its beauty through a thousand roots that reach into distant pockets of earth, he gathered the materials of his perfectly unified and transparent style from all sorts of forgotten nooks and crannies of mediæval music. Spitta remarks his use of the old Dorian and Phrygian modes; of complex rhythms that had long fallen into disuse; of those means of thematic development, such as augmentation and diminution, which flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; of «thebasso ostinatowith the styles pertaining to it—the Passacaglia and the Ciaconna;» and of the old style of variations, in which the bass rather than the melody is the feature retained. «No musician,» Spitta concludes, «was more well read in his art or more constantly disposed to appropriate all that was new, especially all newly discovered treasures ofthe past. His passion for learning wandered, indeed, into every field, and resulted in a rich and most original culture of mind, for his knowledge was not mere acquirement, but became a living and fruitful thing.»
The vitality of his relation with the past is nowhere more strikingly shown than in his indebtedness to the two greatest masters of pure music, Bach and Beethoven. He has gathered up the threads of their dissimilar styles, and knitted them into one solid fabric. The great glory of Bach, as is well-known, was his wonderful polyphony. In his work every voice is a melody, everything sings, there is no dead wood, no flaccid filling. Beethoven, on the other hand, turning to new problems, to problems of structure which demanded a new sort of control of key-relationship and the thematic development of single «subjects» or tunes, necessarily paid less attention to the subordinate voices. His style is homophonic or one-voiced rather than polyphonic. The interest centres in one melody and its evolutions, while the others fall into the subordinate position of accompaniment. But Brahms, retaining and extending the complexity of structure, the architecturalvariety and solidity, that was Beethoven's great achievement, has succeeded in giving new melodic life also to the inner parts, so that the significance and interest of the whole web remind one of Bach. His skill as a contrapuntist is as notable as his command of structure. Thanks to his wonderful power of assimilating methods, of adapting them to the needs of his own expression, so that he remains personal and genuine while becoming universal in scope, he is the true heir and comrade of Bach and Beethoven.
It was, perhaps, inevitable that in his great work of synthesis and formulation he should sometimes be led into dry formalism. One who concerns himself so indefatigably with the technic of construction naturally comes to take a keen joy in the exercise of his skill; and this may easily result, when thought halts, in the fabrication of ingenuities and Chinese puzzles. Some pages of Brahms consist of infinitely dexterous manipulations of meaningless phrases. And though one must guard against assuming that he is dry whenever one does not readily follow him, it certainly must be confessed that sometimes he seems to write merely for the sakeof writing. This occasional over-intellectualism, moreover, is unfortunately aggravated by a lack of feeling for the purely sensuous side of music, for clear, rich tone-combination, to which Brahms must plead guilty. His orchestra is often muddy and hoarse, his piano style often shows neglect of the necessities of sonority and clearness. Dr. William Mason testifies that his touch was hard and unsympathetic, and it is rather significant of insensibility or indifference to tone color that his Piano Quintet was at first written for strings alone, and that the Variations on a Theme of Haydn exist in two forms, one for orchestra and the other for two pianos, neither of which is announced as the original version. There is danger of exaggerating the importance of such facts, however. Austere and somber as Brahms's scoring generally is, it may be held that so it should be to be in keeping with the musical conception. And if his piano style is novel it is not really unidiomatic or without its own peculiar effects.
However extreme we may consider the weakness of sensuous perception, which on the whole cannot be denied in Brahms, it is the only serious flaw in a man equally great on the emotionaland the intellectual sides. Very remarkable is the richness and at the same time the balance of Brahms's nature. He recognized early in life that feelings were valuable, not for their mere poignancy, but by their effect on the central spirit; and he labored incessantly to express them with eloquence and yet with control. It is only little men who estimate an emotion by its intensity, and who try to express everything, the hysterical as well as the deliberate, the trivial and mischievous as well as the weighty and the inspiring. They imagine that success in art depends on the number of things they say, that to voice a temperament is to build a character. But great men, though they reject no sincere human feeling, care more to give the right impression than to be exhaustive; and the greatest feel instinctively that the last word of their art must be constructive, positive, upbuilding. Thoreau remarks that the singer can easily move us to tears or laughter, but asks, «Where is he who can communicate a pure morning joy?» It is Brahms's unique greatness among modern composers that he was able to infuse his music, in which all personal passion is made accessory to beauty, with this «puremorning joy.» His aim in writing is something more than to chronicle subjective feelings, however various or intense. And that is why we have to consider him the greatest composer of his time, even though in particular departments he must take a place second to others. Steadily avoiding all fragmentary, wayward, and distortive expression, using always his consummate mastery of his medium and his synthetic power of thought to subserve a large and universal utterance, he points the way for a healthy and fruitful development of music in the future.
BIBLIOGRAPHICALNOTE.—Of particular works of Brahms that the reader might wish to study, here are some of the most characteristic and well known. Piano pieces: The Waltzes, op. 39; the Clavierstücke, op. 76, particularly No. 2; the two Rhapsodies, op. 79; and, in his later, more complex style, the piano pieces, op. 116, 117, 118 and 119. Songs: Liebestreu, op. 3, No. 1; Wiegenlied, op. 49, No. 4; the Sapphic Ode, op. 94, No. 4; Ständchen, op. 106, No. 1; Meine Liebe ist grün, op. 63, No. 5; O Kühler Wald, op. 72, No. 3. Chamber works: the two Violin Sonatas, op. 78 and 100, are among his most genial works; the Quartets, op. 25 and 26; the Trio, op. 8; the Sextet, op. 18. Of his orchestral works none are finer than the Second and Third Symphonies, the Violin Concerto, op. 77, and the Variations on a Theme of Haydn, op. 56a. The choral works, of which the Song of Destiny is the greatest, are unhappily seldom given.
BIBLIOGRAPHICALNOTE.—Of particular works of Brahms that the reader might wish to study, here are some of the most characteristic and well known. Piano pieces: The Waltzes, op. 39; the Clavierstücke, op. 76, particularly No. 2; the two Rhapsodies, op. 79; and, in his later, more complex style, the piano pieces, op. 116, 117, 118 and 119. Songs: Liebestreu, op. 3, No. 1; Wiegenlied, op. 49, No. 4; the Sapphic Ode, op. 94, No. 4; Ständchen, op. 106, No. 1; Meine Liebe ist grün, op. 63, No. 5; O Kühler Wald, op. 72, No. 3. Chamber works: the two Violin Sonatas, op. 78 and 100, are among his most genial works; the Quartets, op. 25 and 26; the Trio, op. 8; the Sextet, op. 18. Of his orchestral works none are finer than the Second and Third Symphonies, the Violin Concerto, op. 77, and the Variations on a Theme of Haydn, op. 56a. The choral works, of which the Song of Destiny is the greatest, are unhappily seldom given.