11/10/2023 0 Comments Jin high note studio recordingThe second Capriccio is the one of Brahms’ most famous piano pieces, beloved of students, a jaunty dance in 2/4 marked grazioso that distills the atmosphere of Viennese gemütlichkeit. Throughout the set, ingenious cross-rhythms (especially quarter notes against triplets) and constantly shifting accents create a restless, dynamic mood. 76 offers a fine balance between four capriccios (fanciful, agitated, and daring) and four intermezzos (lyrical, pensive, and playful). His piano miniatures are brimming with seething sensuality and turbulent outbursts of passion, expressed in a concise but dense harmonic and rhythmic language. This does not mean, however, that Brahms’ music is devoid of feeling or emotion. But Brahms completely rejected the idea of “program” music, in stark opposition to Wagner and Liszt, instead embracing abstraction and “pure” music without descriptive titles or narratives. Although he had written three piano sonatas early in his career, later he came to prefer smaller and more flexible forms such as capriccios, intermezzos, ballades, scherzos, rhapsodies, and variations. ![]() ![]() Some 17 years later, in 1878, Brahms composed the Eight Piano Pieces, Op. Even Richard Wagner acknowledged Brahms’s accomplishment, observing that the set exhibited “what could still be done with the old forms.” On the given bass, I invent something actually new, I discover new melodies in it, I create.” The set contains numerous references to earlier creators of variations, especially Bach (the Goldberg Variations) and Beethoven (the Diabelli Variations), but also employs more contemporary styles, including the spicy Hungarian rhapsody of variation 13. Brahms’ friend Max Kalbeck described Handel’s sturdy theme as “chiseled from marble.” The 25 variations-set in sharply contrasting moods, rhythms, and harmonic textures-build in increasing intensity and vigor to a majestic concluding fugue that revisits preceding motifs and ranges dramatically over the entire keyboard.įor Brahms, it was the bass line that provided the anchor for the variations, “the firm foundation on which I then build my stories. In his Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, composed in 1861 and published the following year, Brahms engages in an intricate and exuberant stylistic dialogue with his predecessor, applying an encyclopedic variety of genres and styles to Handel’s slim Baroque model, an aria only eight measures long from the 1733 Suite de Pièces pour le Clavecin. The Suite served as a handy “party piece” for Handel’s many students, who included Princess Caroline, future Queen of England, and other members of European royal families.īorn 148 years after Handel, Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) held his music (especially Messiah) in high regard. Preceded by a Prelude and two courtly dances (a folksy Allemande and a courtly Courante), the “Air con Variazioni” provides plenty of rigorous finger exercise. ![]() Although Percy Young writes with sober disapproval that “there is no recorded instance of Handel’s having had dealings with blacksmiths, harmonious or otherwise,” the image has stuck fast. The ringing sound of hammers striking the anvil allegedly inspired him to write the ringing “hammered” repeated notes that intensify in velocity as the variations progress, growing from the eighth notes in the original tune to 16th notes, then to 24 and finally to 32 notes per measure, assigned first to the right hand and then to the left in mirrored E-major symmetry. ![]() 5 has long borne the descriptive-and most likely spurious-title “The Harmonious Blacksmith.” Popularized and elaborated after Handel’s death, the story goes that Handel (1685–1759) once heard the infectious, folksy tune that becomes the subject of five ingenious variations in the last of the Suite’s four short movements when he sought shelter from the rain in a blacksmith’s shop. One of the eight keyboard suites published in 1720 under George Frideric Handel’s personal supervision, the cozy, domestic Suite No.
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