Brahms: Symphony No. 2
There is a tendency – learned, certainly, out of emotional self-protection, rather than innate – among artists to not take critics terribly seriously. The sting of that first bad review fades quickly as an artist reads the absurd critical drubbing laid on Beethoven’s 3rd and 9th Symphonies, for instance; conversely, a glowing notice can’t help but pale a little when you read the critical praise once heaped on such comparative nonentities as Beethoven’s rivals Clementi and Spohr. After all, if the critics know so well how to write great music, why don’t they just do it themselves?
We must imagine, however, that Brahms felt a little differently, for Brahms’ compositional career was pretty well made by a single good review. That review came from a critic who did know how to write great music, Robert Schumann, in Germany’s leading musical periodical, the Allgemeine musicalische Zeitung. In a front-page article, Schumann proclaimed the arrival of “an artist at whose cradle Graces and heroes stood guard,” a genius who “was called forth to give the highest expression of our time.” Spohr and Beethoven notwithstanding, getting such a review in a popular and respected journal is a boon to even the thickest-skinned artist; getting it from a critic who manifestly and beyond all question knows what he’s talking about is almost beyond prayer. Schumann’s article appeared in 1853, when Brahms was just 20; never again did he lack an audience.
Or perhaps Brahms didn’t feel differently. From that point he was a celebrated throughout his life, but he became among the most self-critical of musicians: if nobody else was going to criticize him, it seems, he decided to criticize himself. He destroyed much more music than he ever allowed to see the light of day, and labored through 20 years of false starts and revisions before finally offering a first symphony to the world in 1876.
The Second Symphony, in contrast, flowed from Brahms’ pen in just a matter of weeks in the summer and fall of 1877. And whereas the First wrestles strenuously with the ghost of Beethoven (Brahms was always open about his anxiety over Beethoven’s influence), the Second has to be ranked among Brahms’ sunniest pieces. Most of its ideas came to the composer during a vacation to a mountainside lake cabin in Austria, and even in its most dramatic moments and the nostalgic intensity of its 2nd movement Adagio, it seems to bask in the gentle air of an Alpine summer. When Brahms’ friend Theodor Billroth first played through the piece, he exclaimed, “It is all rippling streams, blue sky, sunshine, and cool green shadows!”
The great pianist and composer Clara Schumann (who, yes, was also Robert’s wife), wrote in her diary after a visit from Brahms as he was working on the piece:
Johannes came this evening, and he played the first movement of his second symphony in D Major, and it delighted me…. Also, he played some of the last movement, which gave me great joy. This symphony will bring him more success than the first, and its genius and marvelous workmanship will impress the musicians, too.
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Chris Vaneman is the Dean of the School of the Arts and Associate Professor of Flute at Converse University. Chris frequently leads the Spartanburg Philharmonic pre-concert lecture series “Classical Conversations,” and occasionally performs as a substitute flutist in the orchestra.