“Bartók had [...] an urge for clarity, precision and the finest nuance of thought, which drew him to investigations of technique and style, to razor-sharp constructions and sophisticated sound dosages,” recalled Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet of Béla Bartók. His colleague Paul Sacher, who commissioned the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta in 1936, followed by the Sonata for Two Pianos and the Divertimento for String Orchestra, expressed a similar sentiment: "Bartók's precision was astonishing. He always carried a metronome with him and used it to control the tempos, even when he was playing himself [...] His passionate objectivity permeated everything. He himself was crystal clear and demanded the utmost in differentiated precision from everyone.”

Planned down to the last detail

Clarity, precision, sophistication, objectivity – these traits of Bartók's personality are directly reflected in his music for string instruments, percussion and celesta. This begins with the outward appearance: instead of calling the composition a “symphony” – which would have been entirely justified for a work with four very different but interrelated movements – he limited himself to the exact designation of the instrumentation. In addition to the strings, the “string instruments” also include the piano and harp. The percussion instruments include xylophone, timpani, drums, cymbals and tam-tam. And the celesta, a steel-plate piano, does not belong to either group; it is therefore mentioned additionally in the title. Bartók's pursuit of precision and clarity continues in the idiosyncratic positioning of the instruments. The arrangement he proposed differs from the usual one mainly in that the strings are divided into two complete orchestras. In the score, Bartók then specifies the playing times of the individual movements: the Andante tranquillo should last exactly 6:30 minutes, the Allegro 6:55 minutes, the Adagio 6:35 minutes and the Allegro molto 5:40 minutes.

Exciting mathematical experiments

One of the “razor-sharp constructions” admired by Ernest Ansermet is the first movement. Bartók conceived it as a fugue. Its chromatic theme is first heard in the violas, starting on the note A. The second entry begins a fifth higher, i.e. on E, the third a fifth lower than the first, on D. Each even-numbered theme entry (4th, 6th, 8th, etc.) now begins a fifth higher than the previous one, each odd number (5th, 7th, 9th, etc.) a fifth lower, and at the furthest point of the circle of fifths (E flat or D sharp), the two strands meet again. By this point, the volume has increased from pianissimo (very soft) to fortissimo (very loud). The rest of the movement leads the theme back to its starting point, A, and to the initial pianissimo – but in a modified form. The theme appears in inversion: ascending steps become descending, descending steps become ascending. And the theme entries follow each other in an interlocking manner: before one has faded away, the next one already begins, so that the two intertwine. A short coda connects both versions of the theme at the end.

Brilliance and silence

One might assume that such logical, almost mathematically constructed music would sound sober and abstract. But the opposite is true: the plaintive gesture of the theme, the dynamic crescendo and the sophisticated instrumentation all create effects of great sensual appeal and oppressive expressiveness. The remaining movements offer further examples of Bartók's ‘passionate objectivity’: the fast second movement, which the composer himself analysed as ‘sonata form’, pits the two sections of the orchestra against each other and works with constantly changing time signatures and playing techniques. In some places, the so-called “Bartók pizzicato”, which is plucked in such a way that the strings of the string instrument snap back hard against the fingerboard, also contributes to the unusual sound. The third movement, Adagio, with its mysterious atmosphere, is a typical “night music” piece, as Bartók had previously experimented with in the piano piece Sounds of the Night from the cycle Outdoors from 1926 or in the 4th and 5th String Quartets from 1928 and 1934 respectively. Irregular Bulgarian rhythms and archaic scales inspired by Bartók's research into folk music characterise the finale. Its strongly contrasting sections are assembled like scenes from a film.

With his clear and sensual music for string instruments, percussion and celesta, Béla Bartók met with great enthusiasm at the premiere on 21 January 1937 by Paul Sacher's Basel Chamber Orchestra. A worldwide triumph followed, and as early as March 1938, Universal Edition was able to advertise the composition as follows: ‘Never before has a modern orchestral work enjoyed such universal success and spread so rapidly as this new work by Béla Bartók. [... It] was performed almost fifty times in its first year. The work was repeated in many cities.’

Jürgen Ostmann

Symphony No. 2 by Johannes Brahms

There are places that have a special charm, allowing you to relax and stimulating your thoughts – as if a spirit, a genius, were at work there, sparking new ideas. Composers have always sought out such places. Richard Wagner – perhaps stylising it somewhat in retrospect – associated the inspiration for the orchestral prelude to Rheingold with his morning awakening in the Italian coastal town of La Spezia. Gustav Mahler, on the other hand, was only able to concentrate on his symphonies during the summer months, when the theatres were closed, due to his conducting commitments, and so he set himself up in small houses away from his actual holiday home, in what he called his ‘composing huts’.

Kisses from the muse under the open sky

For Johannes Brahms, too, his surroundings were a source of creative inspiration. His ideas came to him while walking: an early riser, he regularly went on strenuous walks, during which he sometimes worked himself into a veritable frenzy. When his friend Max Kalbeck unexpectedly encountered him one morning, the composer rushed past him without recognising him, his eyes ‘glowing like those of a predator – he gave the impression of being possessed.’ Apparently, the master had been seized by an inspiration that now had to be put down on paper as quickly as possible. To do this, he needed places where he could enjoy the familiar conviviality of his circle of friends in peace and quiet, away from the hustle and bustle of the city.

Still described today as ‘Carinthia's best-preserved late Wilhelminian style lakeside villa ensemble’, Pörtschach – which at that time had just been connected to the Southern Railway from Vienna to Italy – must have been an idyllic revelation for Brahms. More elated than he had been in a long time, he wrote in a letter to the Viennese music historian and critic Eduard Hanslick: “The melodies fly by so fast that one must be careful not to step on any of them.” During his first of three summers in Pörtschach, he wrote not only the four-hand piano arrangement of his First Symphony, but also the entire Second; and the two are connected in a hidden way – as the composer often seems to have conceived works in pairs.

Unequal siblings

“The second one will be different,” Brahms assured his friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim, after the First Piano Concerto (originally planned as a symphony) had failed “brilliantly and decisively”. Brahms followed his First Symphony, premiered in 1876, with a second one the very next year, which was also quite “different”. The first, in C minor, was an examination of the tradition in the spirit of Beethoven and Schumann, which Brahms perceived as a burden – and was received as such by his contemporaries (Hans von Bülow immediately called it “Beethoven’s Tenth”) – in that it ultimately transformed a tragic underlying disposition into a hymn of reconciliation between man and nature.

The Second Symphony in D major was completely different. However, the composer gave his friends and acquaintances the most contradictory indications as to how it should be interpreted. He once wrote that it was “cheerful and lovely” like nature at Lake Wörthersee (to Eduard Hanslick), “elegiac in character” (to Clara Schumann) or even “so melancholic that you cannot bear it. I have never written anything so sad, so minor: the score must appear with a black border” (to his publisher Fritz Simrock). Or would this symphony, as he assured the music-loving lawyer Adolf Schubring, be “a completely innocent, cheerful little piece”, a “delicate charm”? Once again, he instructed the publisher: “You must add a black border to the score so that its melancholy is also evident on the outside!” Brahms often hid his feelings behind a veil of irony. But what did he hope to achieve with these descriptions, which were so easily seen through as misleading exaggerations? To steer expectations in the wrong direction, only to surprise everyone?

Irritating shadows

Most early listeners actually perceived the symphony as a cheerful, friendly work in keeping with its key, as Brahms' Pastoral, so to speak. But there are still some things that are irritating. Why does a Carinthian idyll need heavy brass instruments such as three trombones and a tuba, which Brahms does not use in any of his other symphonies?

Perhaps the irony points to “the communication of a moment of truth”, to Brahms’ “broken relationship with cheerfulness, with the unbroken pastoral world”, as musicologist Reinhold Brinkmann suggests: the mourning border may remain a joke, but the celebration of paradisiacal nature did not come out of the blue, but was hard-won. After all, the music is also constructed down to the smallest detail, full of thematic references and allusions, evoking history – the main theme of the first movement quotes the rhythm of Beethoven's Eroica – intertwining apparent accompaniment with thematically significant elements and repeatedly deviating from the friendly soundscape: with rumblings of timpani, with “gloomy, lugubrious tones”, as Brahms’ esteemed older colleague Vincenz Lachner heard them, with small strokes of fate and tones foreign to the chord (described by Brahms himself as “voluptuously beautiful”) – even if the overall style is preserved.

Questions about the meaning of life

When Lachner asked about the trombones, Brahms replied that he had tried to do without them – but “their first entry belongs to me, and I cannot do without it and therefore the trombones.” He had to “confess that I am, incidentally, a deeply melancholic person, that black wings constantly rustle above us,” adding that the symphony is “followed by a little treatise on the big ‘why’”: a subtle allusion to his motet Warum ist das Licht gegeben den Mühseligen, Op. 74 No. 1.

Now, the meaning of life is not explained there either, but the question was essential to Brahms. It, he wrote, “casts the necessary shadow on the cheerful symphony and perhaps explains those timpani and trombones” and at the same time also the jubilant finale, which is almost too triumphant for such a supposedly sunny work.

Malte Krasting