This week, a first. Johannes Brahms’s First Symphony, in C minor. But if there’s one thing I want you to try and to do with this piece, it’s to hear it without the clichés of its supposed associated historical accretions: the fact that it took Brahms 14 years to complete the piece because he felt the weight of Beethoven so much on his shoulders; or the fact that the big tune in the finale sounds a wee bit like the one in Beethoven’s 9th ("any ass can see that", Brahms said); or even that its instantly acknowledged symphonic success after its premiere in 1876 meant that it was dubbed "Beethoven’s 10th". I think we should reclaim Brahms’s First on its own terms, not because it continues what Beethoven might have done with the symphony had he somehow lived another few decades, but because the piece presents a completely different idea of what the symphony could be. Whatever the modesty of Brahms’s own assessment of his music, his First Symphony is a magnificently immodest achievement, a piece that takes history on, in both sense of the phrase – and wins.

So, a few moments that will try to make the case: firstly, the very opening, the slow introduction before the tortuous Allegro gets going. To find music that sounds anything like this, the models are not Beethoven or even Schumann, but Bach, and possibly even earlier repertoires of German music. Brahms composes a richly chromatic counterpoint at the start of his symphony, music that’s rhythmically and expressively connected to the opening of Bach’s Matthew Passion. If Brahms was worried about Beethoven, he shows it by bypassing entirely the latter’s ideas of clearly identifiable thematic cells and continual, dynamic, dialectical development. Instead, this introduction is defined by music that’s a polyphony of different musical ideas all happening simultaneously. Listen to the opening again, and hear how Brahms counterpoints that rising line in the violins and cellos with the descending, lamenting musical line in the woodwinds and violas. The texture isn’t reducible to a single musical thought, a "theme" or a "melody", but is defined rather by a network of interrelated musical lines churning away at the same time.

If that sounds a wee bit complex, that’s because it is! Brahms was attempting to make a symphony that works in musical space as well as time, one that has all the internal consistency and multi-dimensional splendour of a Bach fugue but also has the dynamism and energy of a large-scale orchestral work. No wonder it took him a few years: Brahms was reforging the symphonic project for the late 19th century. And he does it: listen to the way the main tune of the Allegro, the main part of the first movement, is reclaimed about two-thirds of the way through: it’s another pitting of simultaneously rising and descending lines against each other, along with a thrillingly emphatic bass line, a moment that clinches both the music’s contrapuntal consistency and its symphonic power.

Brahms’s compositional high-wire act of that polyphonic work-out in the first movement is sidestepped by the slow movement and the Allegretto e grazioso that come second and third in the symphony. But there’s a covert radicalism going on here too: again, directly contradicting Beethoven’s example in all of his symphonies (apart from the 8th), Brahms does not even try to compose a wildly energetic scherzo, but rather the genteel and subtle character piece of his Allegretto; the slow movement in turn is the opposite of Beethoven’s visionary symphonic songs, but an intimately lyrical study crowned by the florid outpouring of a solo violin.

Brahms has turned the symphony inward, in both musical and emotional senses. He is resolutely focused on the inner workings of his musical material rather an overt expressive programme – let alone an attempt to change the world, as Beethoven’s Ninth wants to do – and for all its public grandeur as a large-scale symphony, this music sounds as if it’s addressed to us as individuals rather than speaking to our collective humanity.

Yet Brahms’s finale changes all of that. This movement is his solution to what he saw as the 19th century's symphonic problem - the tendency for the pieces to be weighted towards their opening allegros, to have worked out all their major structural tensions by the end of the first movement. Brahms’s fourth movement is different: everything is at stake here. It’s the longest part of the symphony, and from the outset, its drama is set out on a bigger stage than the previous three movements. Brahms puts us in the middle of sublime, terrifying, and minor-key nature at the start of the finale in a swirling, impressionistic Adagio. But the mists clear and from the heights, a horn-call (transcribed by Brahms from the alphorns of Switzerland) sounds in resplendent C major – a premonition of the trajectory of the whole movement. But to get there, we need a big tune, and the most assertively dynamic drama of the whole symphony - which is exactly what Brahms provides with that melody - the one his first listeners kept comparing to Beethoven. There’s a moment of exquisite tension and release when the horn call returns, now harmonised by an achingly dissonant chord, then salved when the music melts into a major key. And at the very end of the symphony, there’s the most overtly, heroically triumphant music that Brahms ever composed for an orchestra. But what makes it moving rather than bombastic is the sense that this is a hard-won musical and personal victory for its composer. On one hand, this music crowns the work’s dramatic trajectory, but it also celebrates Brahms’s own vanquishing of his symphonic demons. And if we’ve only the ears to hear it, we’ll hear how completely he created something subtly, multi-dimensionally new.

Five key recordings



Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra/Daniel Barenboim a live concert from Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre that made me feel the music could go no other way when I heard it.

Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique/John Eliot Gardiner: mind you, Gardiner’s performance, from the other end of the musical universe, makes me feel the same…

Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra/Riccardo Chailly: Chailly’s is a patina-stripping performance of simultaneous tradition and radicalism.

NBC Symphony Orchestra/Arturo Toscanini: Toscanini finds an intense, compelling, if sometimes claustrophobic power in this late recording.

The Gunther Schuller Orchestra/Gunther Schuller: a leftfield choice, you might think? Schuller’s performance attempts to prove the points about interpretation he makes in his book The Compleat Conductor. Listen out for revelations such as the return to the main theme in the first movement: no messing about with tempo or exaggerations of articulation, just plain, simple, and devastating. symphonic power.

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