Piano Journal: Brahms Intermezzo Op. 117 No. 2
The Intermezzo Op. 117 No. 2, which I have been working on for a few weeks, is the first piano piece by Brahms I have studied seriously. I’ve always had a bit of a blind spot about Brahms; when I was younger I perceived him as too dense and Germanic, lacking the swooningness that appealed to me then. The reductive way of putting it — at least, the way I hear it — is that while some of the Romantic composers emphasized melodies, Brahms conveys beauty more through texture and chords. There’s not a whole lot of Brahms you can hum compared to, say, Tchaikovsky.
This piece is very beautiful — beautiful enough to show up on a lot of compilations of “most relaxing piano classics” — and it is also all about chords. In places, especially at the beginning, its arpeggiated chords sound a little like a Bach prelude, which explains why there’s a Glenn Gould recording of it (his performance makes some allowances for romanticism but still sounds like Glenn Gould). I recommend instead this much warmer interpretation by Van Cliburn, which takes a slower pace than most of the other recordings.
Brahms wrote this intermezzo (plus the other two in the series) late in his life, in 1892. He was in his late fifties, visiting the spa down of Bad Ischl in Austria and admiring the pretty young piano students, especially the Hungarian pianist Ilona Eibenschütz, who had been a child prodigy and was now almost twenty. He shared the three intermezzi with her, and Ilona in turn wrote about them to Brahms’s platonic soulmate Clara Schumann. Clara was intrigued, asked Brahms to send them to her, and then wrote to him of this second intermezzo that she had practiced it “with bliss.” (All this info comes from the preface in my Henle addition of Op. 117)
Here I must pause and note that the love between Clara Schumann and Brahms was, depending on whose interpretation you believe, either a very intense platonic friendship based on admiration, or one of the great unfulfilled romances of classical music. This article from the Guardian describes their affair and the mystery of how it came apart.
My teacher has been telling me not to rush — it’s tempting to speed — and also to avoid landing on the notes of the melody too heavily. I’m also sensing that it’s going to be some work to avoid muddy pedaling in some of the longer passages.
I’ll end with this poem about C. Schumann and Brahms, by Lisel Mueller, titled Romantics:
The modern biographers worry
“how far it went,” their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means
when he writes he thinks of her constantly,
his guardian angel, beloved friend.
The modern biographers ask
the rude, irrelevant question
of our age, as if the event
of two bodies meshing together
establishes the degree of love,
forgetting how softly Eros walked
in the nineteenth-century, how a hand
held overlong or a gaze anchored
in someone’s eyes could unseat a heart,
and nuances of address not known
in our egalitarian language
could make the redolent air
tremble and shimmer with the heat
of possibility. Each time I hear
the Intermezzi, sad
and lavish in their tenderness,
I imagine the two of them
sitting in a garden
among late-blooming roses
and dark cascades of leaves,
letting the landscape speak for them,
leaving us nothing to overhear.