During the 1890s death took a terrible toll on Brahms's circle of friends. In 1892 Elisabet von Herzogenberg died at the age of 45 and in the following year Hermine Spies succumbed at 36; in 1894 Billroth, Bülow and Spitta all died within a three-month period. Brahms himself was beginning to feel his age. Though in robust health, late in 1890 and again early in 1894 he declared his work as a composer at an end; at least two symphonic movements were sketched but left incomplete. At both times the artistry of Richard Mühlfeld, clarinettist of the court orchestra in Meiningen, stirred him from his lethargy, inspiring a rich harvest of chamber works with clarinet (opp.114, 115 and 120), the last issued in 1895. In 1891 Brahms collected and published 13 canons composed from the 1850s onwards, and in 1894 he gathered in seven volumes his arrangements for voice and piano of 49 German folksongs. His four collections of short piano pieces opp.116–9 seem to represent a similar activity, though evidence suggests that most if not all the pieces were recently composed. […]
Among the late collections opp.116–19, Brahms's last works for piano, the Fantasien op.116, dubbed a ‘multi-piece’ by one critic, have the strongest claim to be considered as a coherent whole because of thematic, harmonic and stylistic connections. The set, divided like op.76 between intermezzos and capriccios, begins and ends with energetic pieces in D minor; in the interior there is a group centred on E major/minor. The Intermezzo in E op.116 no.4 shows how fluid Brahms's conception of structure had become. The three main thematic units fall into neither conventional ternary nor recapitulating binary form, but rather are varied continuously so that one is justified in speaking of what Schoenberg called ‘musical prose’, a discourse that unfolds without patterned repetition.
In a letter to his friend Rudolf von der Leyen, Brahms called the three Intermezzos op.117 ‘Wiegenlieder meiner Schmerzen’ (‘lullabies of my sorrow’). In the first piece the association with the lullaby is made explicit: the rhythm is a softly rocking 6/8 and Brahms prefaced the music with a pair of lines from a Scottish ballad, as translated by Herder, beginning ‘Schlaf sanft mein Kind’ (‘Sleep softly, my child’). It has been suggested that the other two intermezzos in the set are also related to Scottish ballads.
In Brahms's late piano pieces we begin to see a breakdown of the traditional distinction between melody and harmonic support, between ‘above’ and ‘below’. The Intermezzo in F minor op.118 no.4 unfolds as a canon, sometimes free, sometimes strict, between the hands. The thematic material is extraordinarily compressed: in the middle section, the canon at the octave is based on nothing more than a sustained chord followed by a single note. A still stricter spatial symmetry characterizes the harmony and texture of the Intermezzo in E minor op.116 no.5. The triad played by each hand in the first six bars is an exact mirror of that in the other hand. Moreover, each chord appears on a weak beat and resolves to bare, two note dissonances on strong beats. Brahms thus reversed the traditional metrical procedure of associating the succession weak–strong with dissonance–consonance.
Extracted from
The New Grove Dictionary
Brahms
Piano Pieces,
Opp. 116, 117, 118 & 119
Helene Grimaud, piano
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