Brahms's Intermezzo in A major, Op. 118 No. 2 — one of six pieces kept by a man who fed most of his own manuscripts into the fire. In 1893, at sixty, he dedicated the set of Six Piano Pieces to Clara Schumann; she died three years later and he followed eleven months after that. It runs five and a half minutes in A major and three-time, and only raises its voice once, after the middle turns to F sharp minor. The full piano score is on screen, note by note.
He burned more than he published, and this set survived
Brahms was merciless with himself. The first symphony took twenty-one years before he would let it go; by his own account he threw away twenty string quartets before allowing one into print. In his last years he burned manuscripts in batches, thoroughly enough that we do not know what was lost.
In 1893, at sixty, he wrote the Six Piano Pieces, Op. 118, and dedicated them to Clara Schumann. It was the second-to-last set of piano music he produced.
Who was Clara? Forty years earlier a twenty-year-old Brahms had knocked on the Schumanns' door with his own music, and Schumann had responded by announcing in print that the man German music was waiting for had arrived. Months later Schumann broke down, threw himself into the Rhine, was pulled out and committed. Brahms moved nearby and helped with Clara and seven children. Schumann died two years after that.
Brahms and Clara went on writing to each other for forty years. What it was cannot be settled — late in life they burned great quantities of those letters between them, and the surviving accounts contradict one another. He never married.
Clara died in 1896. Eleven months later, so did he.
It is looking back from the very first note
The opening tune climbs, but it gives back half a step for every step it takes. A piece in three usually leans on the first beat; this one almost never does — the weight hangs on the second, so it sounds like someone walking and looking back at the same time.
The two hands stay close together, crowded into the middle and lower register, with no display writing up top. The loudest it gets is f, and most of it sits between p and pp. That is what makes it good to leave playing: nothing jumps.
After 2:07 it turns to F sharp minor, the one place it raises its voice. The harmony thickens, the bass starts to sink, and for a stretch four voices each sing their own line — the most recognisable thing Brahms does.
From 3:27 the opening tune comes back, not quite the same: the accompaniment figure has changed, and the sentence is said a second time more loosely.
From 4:30 it closes. The notes thin out, and the last bar holds five.
One hundred and seventeen written bars become one hundred and twenty-five
One hundred and seventeen written bars with one repeat, opening out to one hundred and twenty-five bars and one thousand eight hundred and forty-two sounding notes, in 3/4 and A major. The score carries twenty-six dynamics, fifty-three hairpins and eighty-three pedal spans.
It is in three parts: bars 1 to 48, bars 49 to 76 in F sharp minor, and from bar 77 the opening material again, followed by a close.
Bar counts run between five and twenty-four, averaging fourteen point seven, a narrower spread than most Romantic writing — this piece changes by harmony, not by density.
Bars 24 to 28, and bars 46, 49, 100 and 101, drop below nine notes, and those are the joins between phrases.
Part of the middle section is written in four voices, each line going its own way and still fitting; the notation there is visibly denser than what surrounds it.
The range is E1 to C sharp 6, a little over five octaves, and the shortest note lasts 0.208 seconds — nothing here goes past what the eye can follow.
The difficulty is letting the inner voices speak without covering the tune
First, keep the weight off the first beat. The melodic centre of gravity sits on the second throughout, and playing it with the usual feel for three turns it into a waltz.
Second, the inner voices. In the four-part middle each line has to be audible and none may cover the top one — the right hand is doing two jobs at once.
Third, the registers are close. Both hands crowd the middle and lower range, and a little too much pedal turns it to mud; the changes need to be more frequent than the page suggests.
Fourth, do not drag. The piece never goes above f, so there is nowhere louder to arrive; slowing down does not deepen it, it just loosens it.
The tempo is 72 to the quarter, printed at bar 1 with Andante teneramente and taken as it stands. This edition carries a further twenty-five metronome marks, the transcriber's way of writing rubato; they do not appear on the page but the timing follows them.
We rate this 4 out of 5.
There are five more in the same set
Op. 118 has six numbers: an Intermezzo in A minor, this Intermezzo in A major, a Ballade in G minor, an Intermezzo in F minor, a Romance in F major and an Intermezzo in E flat minor. The two most often played on their own are this one and the last. None of the others has been made yet.
Brahms's other late piano sets — Op. 116, Op. 117 and Op. 119 — are close in character: short, slow, thinly voiced, and well suited to this channel. None has been made yet.
