# Works that Show Brahms at His Most Innovative



## regenmusic (Oct 23, 2014)

This first piano concerto really shows Brahms at the most innovative I've heard him so far. What other works so off his creativity for his times?


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## JACE (Jul 18, 2014)

Which works does Schoenberg discuss in his essay "Brahms the Progressive"? I don't recall off the top of my head -- but it seems like those might address your question. I'm not enough of a music historian to know which of his works are innovative, relative to the work of his contemporaries.

That said, to my ears, Brahms' music has always sounded more rhythmically advanced than the music that preceded it. I think that's the one area that Brahms' music represents a clear step forward. For example, Brahms' rhythms usually seem much more complex than Beethoven's, the composer who was always in Brahms' rear-view mirror.


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

As with a lot of great composers, almost any work he wrote in his maturity shows innovation in some form or other.


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## brianvds (May 1, 2013)

MarkW said:


> As with a lot of great composers, almost any work he wrote in his maturity shows innovation in some form or other.


The interesting thing about Brahms is that his mature style emerged almost immediately. Even quite early works are very much his.


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## Bettina (Sep 29, 2016)

brianvds said:


> The interesting thing about Brahms is that his mature style emerged almost immediately. Even quite early works are very much his.


Good point. Even his Op. 1 Piano Sonata already shows many of his defining characteristics.

The thick chords, the cross-rhythmic patterns, the inner-voice melodies, the motivic development, the allusions to the works of other composers...so much of those typically Brahmsian features are already there in this early work.


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## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

MarkW said:


> As with a lot of great composers, almost any work he wrote in his maturity shows innovation in some form or other.





brianvds said:


> The interesting thing about Brahms is that his mature style emerged almost immediately. Even quite early works are very much his.


No one word wrong on those two posts .


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## Judith (Nov 11, 2015)

I think all his symphonies. He had that wonderful smooth style which was so typical of him!!


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## Andolink (Oct 29, 2012)

Definitely the late piano pieces: ops. 116, 117, 118, 119.


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## ronaldgeorge (Nov 19, 2016)

JACE said:


> Which works does Schoenberg discuss in his essay "Brahms the Progressive"? I don't recall off the top of my head -- but it seems like those might address your question. I'm not enough of a music historian to know which of his works are innovative, relative to the work of his contemporaries.
> 
> That said, to my ears, Brahms' music has always sounded more rhythmically advanced than the music that preceded it. I think that's the one area that Brahms' music represents a clear step forward. For example, Brahms' rhythms usually seem much more complex than Beethoven's, the composer who was always in Brahms' rear-view mirror.


I believe Schoenberg cites the Haydn Variations, noting that Brahms was a ground-breaker in his composing "music about music." I might be wrong, but that's what I recall from long ago. I don't necessarily agree; to me there is something visionary about his _German Requiem._


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

Well, I would say Brahms "invented" the 4 movement piano concerto and made a convincing case for it, though I do believe the impassioned second movement could probably be dropped from it and it would still be one of the greatest three movement concertos ever written. The original concept never caught on, however.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

hpowders said:


> Well, I would say Brahms "invented" the 4 movement piano concerto and made a convincing case for it, though I do believe the impassioned second movement could probably be dropped from it and it would still be one of the greatest three movement concertos ever written. The original concept never caught on, however.


Prokofiev thought 4 and even 5 movement piano concertos were a great idea. PCs No. 2 and 4 are 4s, No.5 is a fiver.


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

Strange Magic said:


> Prokofiev thought 4 and even 5 movement piano concertos were a great idea. PCs No. 2 and 4 are 4s, No.5 is a fiver.


Well, Brahms came before Prokofiev so Brahms is the piano concerto innovator, but also, Brahms Second Concerto is the only extra-movement piano concerto that is "basic repertoire".

Prokofiev's most famous piano concerto and the one performed most often is the conventionally laid out No. 3.


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

I have often thought that his first orchestral Serenade is the only opportunity we will ever have to watch Brahms learning (teaching himself) to be Brahms.


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## Casebearer (Jan 19, 2016)

Brahms really 'swings'. When I was 14 I had Brahms written on my etui together with Roxy Music and Jethro Tull.


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## brianvds (May 1, 2013)

MarkW said:


> I have often thought that his first orchestral Serenade is the only opportunity we will ever have to watch Brahms learning (teaching himself) to be Brahms.


Unfortunately for music historians, he destroyed a large amount of his work. It would have been interesting to see what he considered to be substandard and only worthy of the fireplace, and I suppose he also destroyed a lot of early works that would have given us some insight into the development of his style.


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## jegreenwood (Dec 25, 2015)

ronaldgeorge said:


> I believe Schoenberg cites the Haydn Variations, noting that Brahms was a ground-breaker in his composing "music about music." I might be wrong, but that's what I recall from long ago. I don't necessarily agree; to me there is something visionary about his _German Requiem._


In his biography of Brahms, Jan Swafford asserts that the instrumental version of the "Haydn Variations" were the first freestanding orchestral variations in history.


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## DaveM (Jun 29, 2015)

I can't think of any composer, other than Beethoven, that opened major works such as the Brahms 1st Symphony and 1st Piano Concerto with such powerful statements. It is well known that Brahms was hesitant to compose works like that until he could meet some standard that he felt Beethoven had set for him. And so, it's interesting that these initial works in their respective categories happened to be in the Sturm and Drang category such as Beethoven's 5th Symphony & 5th Piano Concerto.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

jegreenwood said:


> In his biography of Brahms, Jan Swafford asserts that the instrumental version of the "Haydn Variations" were the first freestanding orchestral variations in history.


Swafford is, unusually, mistaken. I researched this some time back and found Salieri's "26 Variations on La Folia di Spagna", dating from around 1815. It's a purely orchestral standalone set of variations. It's about 18 minutes long and can be found on YouTube.






There's also Franck's Variations brillantes on borrowed themes Op. 5 from 1834. It meets all the requirements but since it was written when Franck was 12, you may not want to count it.


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## Becca (Feb 5, 2015)

As much as I like Brahms, I do not seem him as an innovator, rather I would call him an evolutionary, i.e. he didn't jerk the musical world in new directions in the way that a handful of others such as Beethoven, Wagner and Schonberg did. I do not mean this to be demeaning as most of the interesting composers were evolutionary, they took the existing forms and stretched them in interesting ways.

FWIW, here is my list of composer categories. Of course there is no easy cutoff between them...

More-of-the-same, me-too, e.g. many of the baroque composers
Evolutionary, e.g. Tchaikovsky, Vaughan Williams
Transitional, e.g. Berlioz, Stravinsky, Mahler
Innovators (as noted above)


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

Where would Liszt and Paganini fit into this scheme? Maybe a new category (small) of Performance Innovators?


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## Chronochromie (May 17, 2014)

Strange Magic said:


> Where would Liszt and Paganini fit into this scheme? Maybe a new category (small) of Performance Innovators?


Liszt innovated quite a bit more than piano playing tecnique.


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## Lenny (Jul 19, 2016)

Casebearer said:


> Brahms really 'swings'. When I was 14 I had Brahms written on my etui together with Roxy Music and Jethro Tull.


That is so wrong and so right at the same time...

But yeah, at least the 2nd movement of his cello sonata in F major opens in quite jazzy swing... did Brahms invent jazz? :lol:


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## Bettina (Sep 29, 2016)

Chronochromie said:


> Liszt innovated quite a bit more than piano playing tecnique.


Yes! Liszt was a highly innovative composer. He invented the genre of the symphonic poem. Also, he was fascinated with exploring new types of sounds, including whole-tone scales and even atonality. Many of his forms were quite innovative as well, especially his single-movement Sonata in B Minor.

Getting back to the thread topic, I believe that Brahms was quite innovative as well--but in a different way than Liszt. In my opinion, Brahms's most innovative quality was his engagement with earlier musical traditions. He skillfully incorporated Baroque and Classical styles into many of his works. The Passacaglia movement of his 4th symphony is a good example of this. He managed to use Baroque forms without ever descending into pastiche.


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## pjang23 (Oct 8, 2009)

Brahms did much to raise the prominence of the piano in chamber music and to me he is the supreme composer of that arena. I don't understand the craze about string quartets to the exclusion of all other instrumentations, but with him his string quartets are clearly his weakest chamber works, and the piano features in the majority of his chamber output.

He wrote 16 masterpieces of piano chamber music, with every one of those works part of the regular performing repertoire, and I can't think of any other composer who accomplished that much in this arena.


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

pjang23 said:


> Brahms did much to raise the prominence of the piano in chamber music and to me he is the supreme composer of that arena. I don't understand the craze about string quartets to the exclusion of all other instrumentations, but with him his string quartets are clearly his weakest chamber works, and the piano features in the majority of his chamber output.
> 
> He wrote 16 masterpieces of piano chamber music, with every one of those works part of the regular performing repertoire, and I can't think of any other composer who accomplished that much in this arena.


I agree. Brahms String Quartets are his weakest chamber music, relatively speaking, given the dazzling three piano quartets, three piano trios, horn trio, clarinet trio, clarinet quintet, two clarinet sonatas, two string sextets, two string quintets and piano quintet to compare them to.


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## Vaneyes (May 11, 2010)

Symphonies, concerti, requiem, chamber with piano.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Lenny said:


> But yeah, at least the 2nd movement of his cello sonata in F major opens in quite jazzy swing... did Brahms invent jazz? :lol:


He certainly invented the tango.


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## brianvds (May 1, 2013)

hpowders said:


> I agree. Brahms String Quartets are his weakest chamber music, relatively speaking, given the dazzling three piano quartets, three piano trios, horn trio, clarinet trio, clarinet quintet, two clarinet sonatas, two string sextets, two string quintets and piano quintet to compare them to.


I have long found it curious that a traditionalist like Brahms would have such trouble with string quartets (and then write such magnificent string quintets!) He himself apparently once said he had to write twenty before he wrote one worth publishing (and with Brahms, such a statement was probably only partly in jest!)

I like his string quartets, especially the third, but I would agree: they are not remotely on a par with the rest of his chamber output.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

brianvds said:


> Unfortunately for music historians, he destroyed a large amount of his work. It would have been interesting to see what he considered to be substandard and only worthy of the fireplace, and I suppose he also destroyed a lot of early works that would have given us some insight into the development of his style.


Brahms can help you with that, for he failed to destroy one work he clearly thought substandard. Several times he described his Piano Quartet in C minor, Op. 60, in deprecating terms. He even insulted it in a letter to Simrock his publisher, saying it was of little value but that Simrock might want to publish it anyway. It is possible he preserved it only for sentimental reasons because its genesis was tied to his relationship with Clara Schumann. Since I think this work is among the best he ever wrote, the unfortunate conclusion I draw is that Brahms might have burned some of his best music. Op. 60 is one of the most passionate things he wrote, getting nearly unhinged in a couple of spots - which is exactly what I wish he had done far more often. The question makes me shudder because I'm not sure Brahms had very good taste in Brahms.


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## brianvds (May 1, 2013)

EdwardBast said:


> Brahms can help you with that, for he failed to destroy one work he clearly thought substandard. Several times he described his Piano Quartet in C minor, Op. 60, in deprecating terms. He even insulted it in a letter to Simrock his publisher, saying it was of little value but that Simrock might want to publish it anyway. It is possible he preserved it only for sentimental reasons because its genesis was tied to his relationship with Clara Schumann. Since I think this work is among the best he ever wrote, the unfortunate conclusion I draw is that Brahms might have burned some of his best music. Op. 60 is one of the most passionate things he wrote, getting nearly unhinged in a couple of spots - which is exactly what I wish he had done far more often. The question makes me shudder because I'm not sure Brahms had very good taste in Brahms.


Composers frequently don't have very good taste in their own music. No contemporary critic, the composer included, is ever quite as good as decades or centuries of time. (Beethoven rather infamously considered his eighth symphony better than the seventh, an opinion which today would surely be considered a minority view).

On the other hand, I can understand the impulse not to allow one's substandard works to survive into the ages. And Brahms did have a tendency to be self-deprecating - I once read that he described the second movement of his violin concerto as "a feeble adagio." 

Well, we'll never know. Even if all the destroyed works were in fact substandard, they would have given historians some insight into his working methods.


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## Balthazar (Aug 30, 2014)

EdwardBast said:


> Brahms can help you with that, for he failed to destroy one work he clearly thought substandard. Several times he described his Piano Quartet in C minor, Op. 60, in deprecating terms. He even insulted it in a letter to Simrock his publisher, saying it was of little value but that Simrock might want to publish it anyway. It is possible he preserved it only for sentimental reasons because its genesis was tied to his relationship with Clara Schumann. Since I think this work is among the best he ever wrote, the unfortunate conclusion I draw is that Brahms might have burned some of his best music. Op. 60 is one of the most passionate things he wrote, getting nearly unhinged in a couple of spots - which is exactly what I wish he had done far more often. The question makes me shudder because I'm not sure Brahms had very good taste in Brahms.


I completely relate to this. I am just an amateur pianist, but I sense in his late piano pieces a resistance and a pushing against something and then a drawing away at the last moment. And you just want it to go a bit further. I would not go so far to suggest it as an influence, but I see a sensual analogue.

You want to see him go unhinged.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

I'm happy with the Brahms we have, and I don't need to see him go unhinged personally.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Balthazar said:


> I completely relate to this. I am just an amateur pianist, but I sense in his late piano pieces a resistance and a pushing against something and then a drawing away at the last moment. And you just want it to go a bit further. I would not go so far to suggest it as an influence, but I see a sensual analogue.
> 
> You want to see him go unhinged.


Yes. Just a personal philosophy, but if one produces nothing but well-balanced works perfectly within their bounds and over which one has complete control, one isn't trying hard enough.

As for a connection between the restraint in his personal life and his (alleged by me) failure to let go and push his limits in his compositions, nothing could be more suggestive than his comments on the Op. 60 Piano Quartet. In another letter to his publisher Simrock he made a facetious suggestion of cover art for the quartet:

"On the cover you must have a picture, namely a head with a pistol to it. Now you can form some conception of the music! I'll send you my photograph for the purpose. You can use blue coat, yellow breeches and top-boots, since you seem to like color-printing."

This is an allusion to Goethe's Werther, who, dressed in that way, blew his brains out with a pistol over his unrequited love for the wife of his best friend. The allusion is apt because when Brahms drafted the first version of the quartet he was precisely in Werther's position, madly in love with Clara Schumann, the wife of his best friend, who had just been committed to a sanitarium. After revising and completing the quartet years later he seems to have looked back on his youthful passion with disdain and embarrassment, and Simrock was not the only one to whom he apologized for it. This is a man who distrusted his own passions. I like his passionate music, apparently more than he did.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

tdc said:


> I'm happy with the Brahms we have, and I don't need to see him go unhinged personally.


Well, apparently, according to Brahms ^^^, you have seen it, in the third Piano Quartet. Do you like it? Or does it not seem significantly different from his other chamber music?


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## Kivimees (Feb 16, 2013)

Brahms+clarinet is my recommendation.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

EdwardBast said:


> Well, apparently, according to Brahms ^^^, you have seen it, in the third Piano Quartet. Do you like it? Or does it not seem significantly different from his other chamber music?


I like it, but it would not be in my top ten favorite Brahms works. It is a good work and emotionally intense, but I've never thought of it as 'unhinged' and I think Brahms comments on the work are exaggeratory. I think one of the things that makes Brahms so special, is that he was a Classicist in the Romantic era. One of the things that irks me is when people suggest that he was copying Beethoven, as I find his approach completely different from Beethoven as well as any other composer of his era. His more restrained approach in a Romantic context is one of the things that makes him quite unique. (Mendelssohn was like this to an extent as well, but not as ambitious)

The inverse of this is Beethoven's Romantic approach in a Classical context, which creates a completely different aesthetic and musical experience.

If one wants wild and unhinged passionate music there is Beethoven and plenty of others one can listen to. Trying to add this element into Brahms music in my view would subtract much more than it would add. Then he really would become just another composer trying to emulate Beethoven.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

tdc said:


> I like it, but it would not be in my top ten favorite Brahms works. It is a good work and emotionally intense, but I've never thought of it as 'unhinged' and I think Brahms comments on the work are exaggeratory. I think one of the things that makes Brahms so special, is that he was a Classicist in the Romantic era. One of the things that irks me is when people suggest that he was copying Beethoven, as I find his approach completely different from Beethoven as well as any other composer of his era. His more restrained approach in a Romantic context is one of the things that makes him quite unique. (Mendelssohn was like this to an extent as well, but not as ambitious)
> 
> The inverse of this is Beethoven's Romantic approach in a Classical context, which creates a completely different aesthetic and musical experience.
> 
> If one wants wild and unhinged passionate music there is Beethoven and plenty of others one can listen to. Trying to add this element into Brahms music in my view would subtract much more than it would add. Then he really would become just another composer trying to emulate Beethoven.


I agree with all of the above, except for the last paragraph. Opus 60 seems to me that rare instance where he does get Beethovenian, particularly in the first movement. My point of disagreement is only that I don't think having the intensity of that movement more often would have been a bad thing. As for imitating Beethoven, had he been so inclined - and I agree he wasn't - he would likely have been the one best able to pull it off.

Oh, one other disagreement. I don't think Brahms was exaggerating in his evaluation of the work, but he might have had other reasons beyond its overly passionate nature for thinking less of it. It had a particularly messy history and was cobbled together in a way that is unusual for Brahms, so perhaps that had something to do with it too.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

EdwardBast said:


> I agree with all of the above, except for the last paragraph. Opus 60 seems to me that rare instance where he does get Beethovenian, particularly in the first movement. My point of disagreement is only that I don't think having the intensity of that movement more often would have been a bad thing. As for imitating Beethoven, had he been so inclined - and I agree he wasn't - he would likely have been the one best able to pull it off.
> 
> Oh, one other disagreement. I don't think Brahms was exaggerating in his evaluation of the work, but he might have had other reasons beyond its overly passionate nature for thinking less of it. It had a particularly messy history and was cobbled together in a way that is unusual for Brahms, so perhaps that had something to do with it too.


Good points about the opus 60.

On reflection the last sentence of my previous post was exaggerated, but I do think it would go in that direction (in other words his reputation as being unique would be less). It wouldn't surprise me if he would still be a very popular composer if he was more Beethoven-esque, but I think he would be looked at as less innovative, because I think his innovation in part is due to his unique temperament in the Romantic era. In addition to this his temperament is a big part of what I like about his music, so from my perspective its a 'don't fix what isn't broken' situation, but I think for some individuals some of the aspects I enjoy about his music could be their stumbling blocks.


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