The Double Concerto was Brahms' final work for orchestra. It was composed in the summer of 1887, and first performed on 18 October of that year in the Gürzenich [de] in Cologne, Germany.[1] Brahms approached the project with anxiety over writing for instruments that were not his own.[2] He wrote it for the cellist Robert Hausmann, a frequent chamber music collaborator,[3] and his old but estranged friend, the violinistJoseph Joachim. The concerto was, in part, a gesture of reconciliation towards Joachim, after their long friendship had ruptured following Joachim's divorce from his wife Amalie.[4][5] (Brahms had sided with Amalie in the dispute.)
The concerto makes use of the musical motif A–E–F, a permutation of F–A–E, which stood for a personal motto of Joachim, Frei aber einsam ("free but lonely").[6] Thirty-four years earlier, Brahms had been involved in a collaborative work using the F-A-E motif in tribute to Joachim: the F-A-E Sonata of 1853.
Joachim and Hausmann performed the concerto, with Brahms at the podium, several times in its initial 1887–88 season, and Brahms gave the manuscript to Joachim, with the inscription "To him for whom it was written." Clara Schumann reacted unfavourably to the concerto, considering the work "not brilliant for the instruments".[7]Richard Specht also thought critically of the concerto, describing it as "one of Brahms' most inapproachable and joyless compositions". Brahms had sketched a second concerto for violin and cello but destroyed his notes in the wake of its cold reception.[citation needed] Later critics have warmed to it: Donald Tovey wrote of the concerto as having "vast and sweeping humour".[8] Its performance requires two brilliant and equally matched soloists.
Scholarly discussion
Richard Cohn has included the first movement of this concerto in his discussions of triadic progressions from a Neo-Riemannian perspective.[9] Cohn has also analysed such progressions mathematically.[10] Cohn notes several progressions that divide the octave equally into three parts, and which can be analyzed using the triadic transformations proposed by Hugo Riemann.
^He disguised his reservations with joyless joking in his letter to Clara Schumann: "...I have had the amusing idea of writing a concerto for violin and cello. If it is at all successful it might give us some fun. You can well imagine the sort of pranks one might play in such a case," he wrote, adding "I ought to have handed on the idea to some who knows the violin better than I do." Litzmann, Schumann/Brahms Letters 8/1887, quoted by Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms: a biography 1997:539.
^For Hausmann he had written the Second Cello Sonata the previous summer.
^"This concerto is a work of reconciliation— Joachim and Brahms have spoken to each other again for the first time in years", Clara Schumann noted in her journal after a rehearsal in Baden-Baden in September 1887.
^Schwartz, Boris (Autumn 1983). "Joseph Joachim and the Genesis of Brahms's Violin Concerto". The Musical Quarterly. LXIX (4): 503–526. doi:10.1093/mq/LXIX.4.503.
^Musgrave, Michael (July 1983). "Brahms's First Symphony: Thematic Coherence and Its Secret Origin". Music Analysis. 2 (2). Music Analysis, Vol. 2, No. 2: 117–133. doi:10.2307/854245. ISSN0262-5245. JSTOR854245.
^Wollenberg, Susan (February 1993). "Reviews of Books: Beiträge zur Geschichte des Konzerts: Festschrift Siegfried Kross zum 60. Geburtstag (eds. Reinmar Emans and Matthias Wendt". Music & Letters. 74 (1): 77–81. doi:10.1093/ml/74.1.77. ISSN0027-4224. JSTOR735204.
^Stein, George P. (October 1971). "The Arts: Being through Meaning". Journal of Aesthetic Education. 5 (4). Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 5, No. 4: 99–113. doi:10.2307/3331623. ISSN0021-8510. JSTOR3331623.
^Cohn, Richard (March 1996). "Maximally Smooth Cycles, Hexatonic Systems, and the Analysis of Late-Romantic Triadic Progressions". Music Analysis. 15 (1). Music Analysis, Vol. 15, No. 1: 9–40. doi:10.2307/854168. ISSN0262-5245. JSTOR854168.
^Cohn, Richard (Spring 1997). "Neo-Riemannian Operations, Parsimonious Trichords, and Their Tonnetz Representations". Journal of Musical Theory. 41 (1). Journal of Music Theory, Vol. 41, No. 1: 1–66. ISSN0022-2909. JSTOR843761.
^Student of Camillo Oblach's at the G.B. Martini School of Music, Bologna, Baldovino was cellist with the Trio Italiano d'Archi and the Trio di Trieste: see [1] here.
