Take a few minutes and listen to this piano piece.
In 1890, when Johannes Brahms turned 57, he told a friend that his career as a composer was probably over, that he’d done enough. The next year, he wrote his will. But before he died, in 1897, he had a final burst of creativity, including writing four sets of short pieces for solo piano.
They contain introverted, quiet, thoughtful music. Brahms called a lot of these little pieces intermezzos — suggesting that he was just having a brief word with the listener between grander statements.
This one, though, he called a romance: a tender, intimate song without words. Listen to the whole thing.
Then listen to this moment, to the lines in the pianist’s two hands — the melody, higher up, in the right hand, and that calm, regular flow of notes in the left:
Listen to the second section, which Brahms put in a different key for a different mood — swifter, airier, perhaps a memory of a freer time:
Listen to the way that the pianist trills — making a sound that’s like quivering — to get from that second section back to the music from the beginning:
Do you hear the return of that original music in a new way after the contrasting middle section?
With Brahms, at the end of the 19th century, there is often a sense of lateness, or maybe a better word is afterness. His music gives the feeling that he thought he was living and working long beyond the time of true greatness, of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert. That gives his music, especially these pieces near his death, an autumnal quality, a sense of things drawing to a close.
That doesn’t mean they’re treacly. (Think of Rembrandt’s late, russet-colored self-portraits, ever more unsentimental as they gaze deeply on the aging face.) This romance is wistful but not weepy, deeply emotional but dignified. The music is simple; what it’s expressing is not.
There is a lot of music that cries. I associate Brahms’s music, though, with holding back tears, with not confessing to your ex that you’re still in love, with gazing back without lingering, with a stiff upper lip that — like that trill — is ever so slightly quivering.
Zachary Woolfe is the classical music critic of The Times.
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