The Brahms Connection

of the Vienna Singakademie. Soon after making the city his home, he struck up a friendship with Joseph Gänsbacher, an amateur cellist who had studied law. He also took singing lessons before becoming a singing teacher himself at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, becoming professor in 1876 at the time Brahms had been appointed music director of the Society.

Brahms and Joseph Gänsbacher would play chamber music together at Brahms’ apartment, and it was to Gänsbacher that Brahms dedicated his Sonata in
E minor, Opus 38, composed between 1862-65. The first two movements of the Sonata date from 1862, together with an Adagio movement which Brahms withdrew, leaving the Sonata without a slow movement. The surviving finale followed in 1865, the complete Sonata first appearing in print the following year, published by Simrock.

Whatever the work’s provenance, Brahms’ Opus 38 is the finest Cello Sonata to appear since those of Beethoven, the length of time its composition took before the composer was satisfied anticipating the care Brahms took over his First Symphony, which finally appeared in 1876 after 21 years in gestation.

The Cello Sonata’s three-movement structure is unusual for the period. The first movement is by far the most extensive; the pulse is moderate and, uniquely, employs three themes, although not so varied as classical ‘first and second subject’ nomenclature would customarily infer. The music’s rather sombre mood is only lightened somewhat towards the end.

The second movement – a rare Minuet in a Sonata of this period – opens and finally returns as a courteous intermezzo-like dance, affording great contrast to the music of the first movement, and heightened by a Trio section which may appear Schumannesque to some listeners. The Sonata ends – again, rarely – with a mainly fugal finale. It has been pointed out that the subject is virtually the same as one that frequently appears in Johann Sebastian Bach’s Kunst der Fuge, thereby forming one of Brahms’ tributes to the baroque era. However, as if looking back to the first movement, the main subject of the fugue is answered throughout by three countersubjects: Karl Geiringer claimed the initial main theme of the first movement is a reminiscence of the Third contrapunctus from the Kunst der Fuge. Be that as it may, the resultant texture throughout the Sonata’s opening and closing movements is extraordinarily detailed, Brahms’ demands on the players – both technical and musical – being considerable.

It was reported, years after Brahms’ death, that during a private run-through of the Sonata Gänsbacher complained to Brahms that the piano was too loud, and he could not hear his cello: ‘Lucky for you!’, Brahms is said to have replied – a comment which, if true, was surely not meant maliciously: Brahms was noted for his somewhat sarcastic humour. Nonetheless, there is a musical point to be made – the E minor Cello Sonata was the first of Brahms’ seven sonatas for solo instrument and piano. A dozen years were to elapse before a successor appeared (not for cello, that was to come over twenty years later, but the first of his three Sonatas for violin); for Brahms, himself a pianist, the piano in his Sonatas would have assumed equal importance from the start.

Robert Fuchs was fourteen years younger than Brahms, having been born close to the Styrian capital of Graz in 1847. He attended the Vienna Conservatoire where he studied with the legendary Otto Dessoff, among other professors, and by 1875 Fuchs himself was on the staff of the Conservatoire. He eventually became Professor of Composition there, and – in 1893 – Director.

As a teacher, Fuchs was widely admired; such later masters as Mahler, Sibelius, Hugo Wolf, Franz Schmidt, Alexander von Zemlinsky and Franz Schreker all studied with him. Fuchs’ music was much admired by his contemporaries and students as well as by Artur Nikisch, Felix von Weingartner and Hans Richter, but it is claimed the main reason for the later neglect off his music was his unwillingness to promote his own compositions – but many were published, and were therefore available, within a few years of having been written.