In the last years of his life, Brahms wrote a series of miscellaneous pieces for piano. In every respect, these pieces are far from the pugnacious piano works of Brahms’ youth. These are more reflective and introspective.

Brahms’s Opus 117 was written in 1892. It consists of three short pieces styled as ‘intermezzos’ – pauses for reflection, transitional moments between heavier emotions.

No 2’s main musical idea is a chain of notes in linked pairs in the right hand, placed over flowing figurations in the left hand that ripple through various keys. The mood rises from the sorrowful to the almost defiant, and back.

The third Intermezzo, in C-sharp minor, provides relief from the desolation of the Second, with a lyrical and expansive mood.

^{Note by Andrew Mellor}

Johannes Brahms
^1833–97

Showing early musical promise, the young Johannes Brahms supplemented his parents’ meagre income by playing in the bars and brothels of Hamburg’s infamous red-light district. In 1853 he presented himself to Robert Schumann in Düsseldorf, winning unqualified approval from the older composer. Brahms fell in love with Schumann’s wife, Clara, supporting her after her husband’s illness and death. The relationship did not develop as Brahms wished, and he returned to Hamburg; their close friendship, however, survived.

In 1862 Brahms moved to Vienna where he found fame as a conductor, pianist and composer. The Leipzig premiere of his German Requiem in 1869 proved a triumph, with subsequent performances establishing Brahms as one of the emerging German nation’s foremost composers.

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Schoenberg wrote his Fünf Klaviertstücke (Five Piano Pieces) between July 1920 and March 1923. It was a time of transition for the composer, who was starting to experiment with a new method of writing.

The ‘twelve tone’ method freed music from allegiance to a particular key by treating all twelve notes of the scale equally. It was first glimpsed in this work – though only in the final waltz (not played today).

Schoenberg believed piano music should contain ‘as few notes as possible’. In these short pieces, each hand etches careful, rhythmically complex lines against the other.

Despite its clarity, Schoenberg was determined his music would sound both free and moody. There is a sense of tuneful melancholy in the first movement ‘very slow’, and of mania in the second, ‘very fast.’

^{Note by Andrew Mellor}

Arnold Schoenberg
^1874–1951

One of the most influential 20th-century composers, Schoenberg has justly been described as the ‘reluctant revolutionary’, pioneer of a method of composition that broke with long-standing traditions of harmony and melodic writing.

His structured use of the twelve notes of the scale was misunderstood and condemned by many. Those who regarded the twelve-note method as emotionally sterile were forced to reconsider when Schoenberg completed his highly dramatic opera Moses und Aron in 1928. Shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933, the Schoenbergs emigrated from Germany and eventually settled in the US. Here, he taught and composed a series of refined twelve-note masterpieces.

Berg was one of Schoenberg’s most receptive pupils. He wrote his Piano Sonata in 1908, effectively a graduation piece to prove what he had learned.

He had learned a few things: how to spin-out a long musical conversation from variations on a single motif – and how to write in clear structural shapes.

Berg had also learned to be himself. He was a musician who loved long, shapely melodies, and who felt the need to respond to the crisis of Romanticism after Wagner.

Berg’s Piano Sonata does all those things. It is restlessly tuneful and bursting with feeling.

^{Note by Andrew Mellor}

Alban Berg
^1885–1935

Although piano lessons formed part of Berg’s general education, the boy showed few signs of exceptional talent for music. He struggled to pass his final exams at the Vienna Gymnasium, preferring to learn directly of new trends in art, literature, music and architecture from friends such as Oskar Kokoschka, Gustav Klimt and Adolf Loos.

On graduating from school, Berg accepted a post as a local government official, but in October 1904 was inspired by a newspaper advertisement to study composition with Arnold Schoenberg. He studied for six years with Schoenberg, who remained his close friend and mentor.

In 1910 Berg completed his String Quartet, in which he revealed an independent creative flair. As an innovative composer, Berg successfully married atonality – and, later, a harmonic and melodic language based on the use of all twelve tones of the chromatic scale – with forms from the past. Traces of popular music also surface in his works.

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Webern studied with Schoenberg alongside Berg. He wrote his Variations for Piano in the year from October 1935.

Only the last movement of the three is a standard set of variations based on an explicit theme. Webern intended the title more as a reflection of Schoenberg’s idea of ‘total variation’ already demonstrated by Berg: that the music would spin out from a single idea.

Webern’s music is always precise and intricate. This piece is also condensed and fragmentary – paying allegiance to Schoenberg’s ‘as few notes as possible’ rule (it also obeys his twelve-note method).

There are puzzles and games in all the three movements. Webern compared the mirror games of the ‘moderate’ first movement’s noncommittal waltz to ‘an intermezzo by Brahms’.

The ‘very fast’ second movement is dominated by leaping themes imitating each other at staggered intervals (in ‘canon’). The essence of this hand-crossing music, said Webern, was its playfulness.

The ‘calm flowing’ variation movement starts proper with a statement of the simple theme and follows with variations, each eleven bars long.

For Webern, a good pianist would find intense expressiveness in this apparently terse music.

^{Note by Andrew Mellor}

Anton Webern
^1883–1945

Born in Vienna in 1883, Webern was introduced to music by his mother, a talented amateur pianist. From the autumn of 1904 until 1908, Webern took private composition lessons from Arnold Schoenberg. The two men became close allies, and their pupil-teacher relationship endured long after formal studies were concluded.

With limited experience and no training, Webern slowly established a career as a conductor. During the 1920s and early 1930s he proved successful as a conductor, introducing new scores to his audiences. In 1929 he toured as a conductor to Munich, Frankfurt, Cologne and London. His mature works, lyrical and beautiful in nature, show a remarkable concision of thought, with formal procedures governed by his development of the 12-tone composition method pioneered by Schoenberg.

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Brahms’ career was kick-started in 1853 when he visited Robert and Clara Schumann, taking them samples of his work.

One of the works he took had been completed earlier in the year: the Piano Sonata that would later be labelled Brahms’ Opus 1. The Schumanns were impressed. Robert compared the sonata to a symphony in disguise.

It is a bold, rhetorical and grand piece, a world away from the Intermezzos that would follow four decades later. Brahms had an obvious model: Beethoven.

Still, the sonata was also highly progressive – and in similar ways to the other works heard today.

Not only does its slow movement contain a miniature ‘theme and variations’ (on an old, courtly love song), its four movements are also tied together by the transformation of other structurally important melodies.

For example: the ‘climbing’ music that opens the first movement also forms the basis of the wild final movement. A fragment of music heard at the very end of the slow movement forms the basis of the playful third movement.

In between Brahms conjures up the sort of contrast of key, mood and character that justifies Schumann’s comparison to a symphony in disguise.

^{Note by Andrew Mellor}