Il Quintetto in fa minore op. 34 fu una tra le composizioni di Brahms che ebbero una elaborazione decisamente tormentata e piena di ripensamenti. Originariamente era stato concepito nel 1861 come Quintetto per archi nella stessa formazione strumentale (due violini, viola e due celli) ideata da Schubert per il suo Quintetto in do maggiore. Questa versione fu però distrutta dall’ autore dopo le obiezioni formulate da Joseph Joachim e Clara Schumann, i cui suggerimenti erano sempre tenuti nella massima considerazione da Brahms: in particolare la vedova di Schumann suggerì che certi spunti tematici e sviluppi strutturali della scrittura sarebbero stati più adatti al pianoforte. Brahms riscrisse il brano in forma di Sonata per due pianoforti e lo eseguì a Vienna insieme a Carl Tausig nell’ aprile del 1864, ma anche questa volta gli ascoltatori non rimasero soddisfatti del risultato e Clara Schumann consigliò una ulteriore revisione, operata da Brahms che traspose il pezzo in forma di quintetto per pianoforte e archi. La versione pianistica fu pubblicata alcuni anni più tardi come Sonata per due pianoforti op. 34b. L’ autografo di questa stesura fu donato da Brahms, durante un soggiorno a Baden-Baden, alla principessa Anna von Preußen che in cambio gli regalò il manoscritto autografo della Sinfonia K. 550 di Mozart. La prima esecuzione assoluta del brano nella stesura definitiva si tenne in forma privata a Basel, in casa della famiglia Riggenbach-Stehlin, con Brahms al pianoforte.

In questa presentazione di Misha Donat, scritta come nota di accompagnamento a un CD della Hyperion, è riassunta in modo efficace tutta la cronologia della creazione del Quintetto:

In the autumn of 1862 Brahms sent Clara Schumann the first three movements of a quintet in F minor for two violins, viola and two cellos—the same ensemble that Schubert used for his great C major Quintet D956. Her response was unreservedly enthusiastic:

What inner strength, what richness in the first movement, with the first subject immediately seizing hold of you! How beautifully written for the instruments—how easily I can picture them neatly bowing away … How bold the transition at letter B, how intimate the subsidiary first subject, then the second subject in C sharp minor, then the development of the latter and the transition back to the first subject again, and how wonderfully the instruments blend together, and that dream-like passage at the end, then the accelerando and the bold, passionate ending—I can’t tell you how moved I am by it, and how powerfully gripped. And what an Adagio—it sings and sounds blissful right up to the last note! I start it over and over again, and don’t want to stop. I like the Scherzo very much, too, only the trio seems somewhat very short to me? And when will the last movement arrive?

Not long afterwards Brahms was able to send the complete work to his other chief musical advisor, the violinist Joseph Joachim. ‘It is’, Joachim assured Brahms, ‘a piece of the greatest significance, full of masculine strength and sweeping design—that much is immediately apparent to me. I congratulate you, and shall be happy to hear the piece … Of course, I should prefer to play it through to you first … The quintet is difficult, and I fear that without an energetic performance it will sound a little unclear.’ But by April 1863, having performed the work on several occasions, Joachim had serious reservations about the effectiveness of its scoring. ‘I am reluctant to let it out of my hands without having played it through to you’, he told Brahms:

That would have been the best—indeed, the only—way of being of help to you. For I can’t be schoolmasterly over the details of a work whose every line shows proof of an almost overwhelming creative strength, and one that is full of spirit through and through. What I miss in it for unalloyed pleasure is, to pinpoint it in a single phrase, an attractive sonority. And I believe that if you were to hear it calmly this is something you would feel too after a while. Immediately after the second line, for instance, the instrumentation is not energetic enough to my ears to convey the powerful rhythmic convulsions; the sound is almost helplessly thin for the musical thought. Then again for long stretches everything lies too thickly. You’ll have to hear for yourself how it lacks repose for the ear … I find the passage in the last movement with the baroque hidden fifths and the rather insignificant melody really unpleasant; also the restless canonic continuation on the next page. You surely can’t like that either: it sounds artificial!

Brahms clearly took Joachim’s strictures to heart, because the following year he rescored the work in a radically different form, as a sonata for two pianos. At the same time, with characteristic self-critical thoroughness, he destroyed the string quintet, so that we have no means of knowing to what extent he revised its musical content. When Clara Schumann learned of the work’s transmutation she did not conceal her surprise. ‘I can hardly believe what you write to me about your quintet!’, she told Brahms on 10 March 1864. ‘Did you have it performed, and was it a failure? And for that reason you went and made a duo out of it? You seem not to have been satisfied with it in its original form, or rather its sound? Could you not have changed it slightly—there were only certain passages that didn’t sound well, but many others that were so completely quartet-like!’

A few months later, Clara Schumann played the two-piano sonata with the conductor Hermann Levi—one of the few outstanding musicians of the day to appreciate the genius of both Brahms and Wagner. (He conducted regularly at Bayreuth, and gave the premiere of Parsifal.) Clara was once again overwhelmed by the music’s grandeur, but, she told Brahms, ‘it is not a sonata, rather a work whose ideas you could—and should—distribute among the whole orchestra, as though out of a horn of plenty!’:

Many of the most beautiful ideas are lost on the piano, recognizable only to the performer, and not enjoyable for the audience. The very first time I played it I had the impression of a transcribed work, but I thought I was prejudiced and for that reason didn’t say anything. But Levi pronounced the same judgement quite decisively, without my having said a word … It feels to me after the work as though I have read a long tragic story! But please, dear Johannes, do agree just this time, and rework the piece once more. If you don’t feel up to it now, let it rest for a year and then take it up again—certainly, the work will afford you the greatest pleasure.

Brahms followed Clara’s advice, though rather than put the work aside he decided to revisit it while it was still fresh in his mind. In scoring it this time as a piano quintet, he was clearly attempting to arrive at an ideal amalgam of his two earlier versions, though there are moments—the fortissimo restatement of the first movement’s main theme, for instance; or the grandiose C major second theme of the Scherzo—that still seem to cry out for the greater weight of the two pianos. On the other hand, the smooth main theme of the slow movement, and—more particularly—the sustained sounds of the finale’s slow introduction, are undeniably better suited to the string ensemble. When Hermann Levi heard the work in its latest guise he told Brahms:

The quintet is beautiful beyond measure; no one who didn’t know it in its earlier forms—string quintet and sonata—would believe that it was conceived and written for other instruments. Not a single note gives me the impression of an arrangement: all the ideas have a much more succinct colour. Out of the monotony of the two pianos a model of tonal beauty has arisen; out of a piano duo accessible to only a few musicians, a restorative for every music-lover—a masterpiece of chamber music of a kind of which we have had no other example since ’28.

In the same letter to Brahms, of 9 November 1864, Levi made suggestions for improving the scoring of certain passages, some of which the composer accepted. One significant change concerned an angular passage in triplets in the central section of the slow movement, which Levi feared was too awkward for the cello. Brahms duly transferred it to the viola. However, for all the reservations about the two-piano version of the work expressed by both Levi and Clara Schumann, Brahms never lost his affection for it. He had already given a public performance of the sonata in Vienna, together with the famous pianist Carl Tausig; and when he sent the score to the Swiss publisher Jakob Rieter-Biedermann (who had issued Brahms’s D minor Piano Concerto after it had been rejected by the Leipzig firm of Breitkopf und Härtel) he made it clear that he regarded it as an equally viable version of the work. ‘To me and to everyone who has played and heard it’, said Brahms, ‘it is particularly attractive in this form, and it will probably be well received as an interesting work for two pianos.’ The work in both its definitive versions was dedicated to Princess Anna von Hessen, who had been present on one occasion when Brahms played the sonata with Clara Schumann, and had been so taken with it that Brahms gave her the manuscript score. In gratitude, she presented the composer with the most precious addition to his collection of musical autographs—Mozart’s great G minor Symphony No 40.

Hermann Levi’s description of the piano quintet as the most significant chamber work since the year 1828 was a reference to the death of Schubert, and there can be no doubt that in writing this work in the first instance for a Schubertian ensemble Brahms was paying deliberate homage to his great predecessor. As in Schubert’s C major Quintet, the theme of the slow movement unfolds in the middle of the texture in mellifluous parallel thirds and sixths, and it is likely that Brahms allotted it initially to second violin and viola (as did Schubert the broad main subject of his Adagio). The ending of the Scherzo, with its final note C preceded by a dramatic appoggiatura on D flat, forcibly recalls the closing bar of Schubert’s finale; and the manner in which the main subject of Brahms’s last movement is given out, above a non-legato accompaniment in regular semiquavers, may again prompt us to think of Schubert—this time, the finale of the C major Grand Duo D812, a work Brahms may well have played with Clara Schumann.

Schubert is not the only great composer who casts his shadow over Brahms’s work. In opting for the dark key of F minor, and a beginning that has the main subject given out in stark octaves followed by a dramatic outburst of semiquavers, Brahms seems consciously to recall the opening bars of Beethoven’s Appassionata Piano Sonata Op 57. Brahms’s semiquavers are actually more organically generated than Beethoven’s: far from being merely a means of whipping up excitement, they are an accelerated version of the solemn opening idea. Brahms maintains the music’s highly charged atmosphere by retaining the minor mode for his second subject, which appears in C sharp minor—a key that is to make a return at the start of the finale’s coda.

The recapitulation in Brahms’s opening movement finds him borrowing another idea from Beethoven’s Appassionata—and again putting it to highly personal use. Like Beethoven, Brahms fuses development and recapitulation into an uninterrupted flow, with the music’s tension maintained by means of a single note tapped out drum-like in the bass. The note is the same in both works—a repeated C that lends a dissonant aspect to the reprise of the main theme that unfolds above it in the home key. So unstable is this moment in Brahms’s piece, and so completely does one stage of the movement merge into the next, that the true recapitulation appears to begin only with the explosive return of the semiquavers.

The smooth main melody of the A flat major slow movement eventually gives way to a middle section that sets out in E major, presenting a more energetic theme with a yearning upbeat figure featuring an ascending leap of an octave. The subtlety with which Brahms unifies his material is shown in the reprise of the opening section, where the octave leap is incorporated into the main theme’s accompaniment.

The Scherzo is not in the home key, but in C minor, and its atmosphere of subdued drama is one that Beethoven often favoured when writing in this key. The grandiose C major theme that bursts out shortly after the start is actually an expansion of the quiet march-like idea that precedes it, and the trio is based on a closely related theme.

The finale’s slow introduction is the most sombre portion of the work, and only gradually do its tortuously chromatic phrases acquire a more diatonic aspect, so that the music may lead seamlessly into the uncomplicated theme of the Allegro itself. Towards the end the piece appears to be heading towards a peaceful conclusion, before a much quicker coda, based on a rhythmic transformation of the rondo theme, brings the work to a headlong finish.

Misha Donat ©2007

Confrontiamo adesso tre versioni storiche del Quintetto op. 34, la cui discografia è vastissima e di livello molto elevato. Iniziamo con quella, registrata nel 1938, da Rudolf Serkin e dal leggendario Adolf Busch String Quartet formato da Adolf Busch, Gösta Andreasson, Karl Doktor ed Hermann Busch. Fin dalla fondazione del gruppo Rudolf Serkin fu uno tra i collaboratori stretti oltre che grande amico di Adolf Busch del quale divenne più tardi il genero tramite il matrimonio con la figlia Irene.

Meno conosciuta dagli ammiratori di Serkin rispetto alla celebre incisione con il Budapest Quartett, questa lettura ha uno slancio espressivo assolutamente coinvolgente. Glenn Gould dichiarò spesso che questa era la sua versione discografica prediletta del pezzo.

Questa invece è l’ incisione realizzata nel 1963 per la Culumbia Masterworks da Leon Fleisher insieme con il Juilliard String Quartet.

Leon Fleisher, nativo di San Francisco e scomparso da pochi giorni all’ età di 92 anni, aveva studiato con Artur Schnabel e si era affermato come uno tra i più autorevoli interpreti del repertorio classico prima cha la sua carriera venisse prematuramente spezzata da problemi fisici che gli fecero perdere l’ uso della mano destra. Le sue registrazioni dei due Concerti di Brahms con Georg Szell e la Cleveland Orchestra sono considerate dai critici e dagli appassionati tra le migliori dell’ intera discografia. Anche questa interpretazione risulta davvero esemplare per profondità di approccio e consapevolezza stilistica.

Tra le mie versioni predilette di questo capolavoro, un posto particolare spetta a questa stupenda esecuzione di Christoph Eschenbach e dell’ Amadeus Quartet, pubblicata dalla DG nel 1969 e insignita di riconoscimenti prestigiosi come il Grand Prix du Disque.

Per i melomani della mia generazione, Christoph Eschenbach è una figura familiare da molti anni sia come direttore che come pianista. Alcune tra le sue incisioni degli anni Settanta come l’ integrale delle Sonate di Mozart, quella dei Lieder di Schumann con Dietrich Fischer Dieskau e il Primo Concerto di Beethoven sotto la direzione di Herbert von Karajan rappresentano ancora oggi punti di riferimento della discografia insieme a questa incisione del Quintetto di Brahms. Un’ esecuzione di squisita bellezza basata sulla perfetta collaborazione reciproca di strumentisti dalla tecnica straordinaria. Dopo tanti anni che conosco questo disco, da me comprato per la prima volta quando ero ancora uno studente liceale, mi colpisce ancora il suono luminoso, dal colore di seta degli archi nel secondo movimento e la perfetta sincronizzazione di tutte le parti nel terzo, oltre che la splendida progressione drammatica del Finale. Inoltre, la qualità del suono dei dischi analogici DG alla fine degli anni Sessanta era senza alcun dubbio la migliore di tutte le etichette contemporanee. Per il mio personalissimo gusto, probabilmente è ancora questa la versione di riferimento del brano.

Buon ascolto a tutti.