Program
Johannes Brahms (1833 – 1897)
String Sextet No. 1 in B-flat major, Op. 18 (1860)
String Sextet No. 2 in G major, Op. 36 (1864 – 1865)
Details
String sextet is not the most popular chamber ensemble instrumentation in classical music. Between Luigi Boccherini’s Six String Sextets (1776) and Arnold Schoenberg’s famous sextet The Enlightened Night (1899), not a lot of works for two violins, two violas, and two cellos are known to have established themselves in the world concert repertoire.
Brahms’ two string sextets represent the pinnacle of the romantic interpretation of this genre. Both sextets were written by Brahms in his younger years, but bear neither a stamp apprenticeship nor the features of ‘laboratory’ composing work. These vividly independent compositions won the concert stage and took a lasting place on the music stands of amateur musicians immediately after their creation. Brahms, deeply immersed in the elements of home and amateur music-making (including while on duty in Hamburg and Vienna), created a variety of chamber ensembles that do not require extreme virtuosity from performers, yet offer them a special kind of pleasure – the opportunity to communicate with each other without words, exchanging purely musical “thoughts”. This “sociability” is most evident in Brahms’ sextets: the term, which the musicologist Boris Asafyev introduced into circulation in relation to Tchaikovsky’s music, is well suited to the chamber and instrumental music of Vienna’s favourite, whom Tchaikovsky himself detested.
Johannes Brahms wrote the first string sextet in 1860. The melodic and clear composition inherits Haydn and Schubert, it is closely related to the music of Viennese everyday life. Clara Schumann heard the second part of the sextet during its creation: Brahms made a piano arrangement of Andante and presented it to her for her birthday (now it is known as the Theme and Variations in D Minor). In 1865, Brahms completed the Sextet No. 2 in G major, and there was also a place for greetings to Clara Schumann in it: together with the motif a-g-a-d-e — transcription of the name of his first love, singer Agatha von Siebold, the composer wove into the fabric of the sextet a melody sent to Clara back in the Dusseldorf years.
The Sextet No. 2, among other things, became a battlefield for Brahms’ friend, Eduard Hanslick, against the programmatic musical thinking of Liszt and Wagner. In a review of the sextet Op. 36, the musicologist wrote: “Such compositions in their gracious modesty are, in fact, the best criticism and response to the great deeds of the musicians of the future. The fact is that Brahms is a musician to the bone, while about Wagner and Liszt one could say the same words as Plutarch about Damon, the music teacher of Pericles: ‘He seems to have been a consummate sophist, but to have taken refuge behind the name of music in order to conceal from the multitude’”. Subsequently, Hanslick’s train of thought will focus into a sharp maxim: “sonically moving forms are solely and exclusively the content and subject matter of music.” Whether one agrees or argues with the Austrian preacher of “pure music”, it is not useless to remember that his statement is based, among other things, on his knowledge of Brahms’ chamber music – melodic, emotional and exceptionally “sociable”.