For Karol Berger

This article begins with an analysis of the ‘F.A.E. Sonata’ (fall 1853), a work for violin and piano composed jointly by Robert Schumann (movements 2 and 4), Albert Dietrich (first movement), and Johannes Brahms, for their returning friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim. The title of the work derives from the musical motto that Joachim had chosen as his own, representing the words ‘Frei aber einsam’ (free but alone). The analysis identifies the unifying elements of the movements; allusions play a role, especially regarding Beethoven.

The study then proposes that Wagner's 1850 essay ‘The Artwork of the Future’ inspired this collegial effort as a rebuttal to several ideas, suggesting that Joachim took his personal motto as a contradiction of Wagner's statement: ‘The solitary individual is unfree’ (Der Einsame ist unfrei). One of the more intriguing sections for Schumann and his followers was likely the chapter entitled ‘The Artist of the Future’. There he asserts that individuality will never be as consequential as a collective effort, proclaiming that ‘the free artistic community is therefore the basic prerequisite for the artwork itself’. Schumann challenged his devoted disciples to take Wagner at his word and compose something as a collective. The stakes of the dispute between Schumann and Wagner were high: a path into the future that best continued the line connecting both of them to Beethoven. This sonata was composed at the same time as Schumann's article, ‘New Paths’ (Neue Bahnen), which also constitutes a response to Wagner's The Artwork of the Future.

This article examines cross-relationships and mutual influences in the D-minor symphonies and concertos written in the 1850s by a close-knit circle of composers: Johannes Brahms, Robert Schumann, and their friends Joseph Joachim, Julius Otto Grimm and Albert Dietrich. Outlining the overlapping compositional timelines of Brahms's First Piano Concerto (at one point a candidate to become his first symphonic work), the violin concertos of Joachim and Schumann, and the symphonies of Grimm and Dietrich, it demonstrates that the pieces were shared among the composers during their periods of composition and explores musical correspondences indicating mutual influences both among the composers and from other specific works. The musical choices involved in this group of pieces seem to point to an underlying backdrop of Beethovenian influence involving specific works from Beethoven's body of orchestral music, an oeuvre concluding with an unforgettable symphonic work in D minor—to which the younger generation's collection of works may relate symbolically. This study not only emphasizes the central role that Beethoven played in the minds of these composers in the mid-1850s, but also underscores the musical intimacy that extended from the social intimacy of the composers in the Brahms–Schumann circle.

Beethoven's String Quintet, Op. 29, has been described as a ‘wallflower’ work that, without enough suitors, remains on the sidelines of the string chamber music repertoire. But in the nineteenth century it had a prominent champion, Joseph Joachim, whose performances of the quintet must have attracted the attention of his close friend, Johannes Brahms. The opening theme of Brahms's String Sextet, Op. 18, is clearly reminiscent of the beginning of Beethoven's quintet. Evidence from Donald Francis Tovey's recollections of Joachim, Joachim's correspondence with the Brahms biographer Max Kalbeck, and the manuscript of Op. 18 shows that Joachim influenced an important revision that aligns the beginning of Brahms's sextet closely with the opening of Beethoven's Op. 29 also in terms of texture and formal design.

The striking tremolo opening and virtuosic scale passages in the finale of Beethoven's quintet prefigure similar elements in the last movement of Brahms's Op. 36 sextet. But the deeper relationship between these movements lies in certain shared formal elements: a common emphasis on sound, texture and sharp contrasts between agitato and pastoral elements as defining features of the overall form – and several distinctive similarities of contrapuntal strategy, form and tonal design between the substantial fugatos that dominate the development sections of both movements.

It is often observed that Brahms wrote chamber works in pairs. Scholars have often posited that his two string sextets form such a pair, but the separation of four years in their inceptions and his extensive use of Baroque-style materials composed in the 1850s in the later sextet have made this argument tenuous. It now emerges that an unusual pairing feature of Brahms's string sextets is that both works respond to Beethoven's ‘wallflower’ masterpiece.

To speak of Brahms and Beethoven in the same breath is almost a cliché: Brahms was intimately conscious of Beethoven's music from early youth. This article describes the details of his youthful involvement, the compositions he had in his repertoire as well as those other works which had a powerful effect on his development. By age 20, Brahms was frequently compared to Beethoven by people who met him or heard him play. My interest is in the way he was influenced by Beethoven and the manner in which he eventually found his own voice.

The compositional history of his First Symphony provides the primary focus: its long gestation, and the alleged quote by Brahms given in Max Kalbeck's massive biography: ‘I'll never write a symphony, you have no idea what it feels like … to hear the footsteps of a giant behind one’. The reference is presumably to Beethoven, but there exists no corroborating evidence that Brahms ever said those words. They gained credence as one writer after another simply accepted Kalbeck's word. Yet substantial evidence exists that in writing his biography, Kalbeck distorted and even invented ‘facts’ when it suited his purposes, including a specific instance dealing with writing a symphony.

An alternative view of the symphony's long gestation is based on a view of Brahms's compositional history. He wrote for musical forces he knew at first hand, and only from 1872 to 1875 did he have command of an orchestra. Intriguingly, while fulfilling the contemporary accepted demands of a symphony after Beethoven, Brahms devised an unusual strategy for the final movement, the basis of its great success.

Like several of his predecessors, Brahms reintroduces themes from one movement into a later one in several of his instrumental works. Historical circumstances and changing historical consciousness affected a composer's use of thematic recall. For Beethoven (per Elaine Sisman) recalling an earlier theme provided the creative stimulus to move forward to the end of a piece, in accordance with the linear concept of history that defined Beethoven's Enlightenment world view. Brahms's use of inter-movement thematic recall often expresses a more wistful and melancholy view of the past and focuses on the ability of recall to provide a dramatic narrative. In his earliest use of cyclical return, the Op. 5 Piano Sonata (1853), the Andante second movement is echoed and transformed by the ‘Ruckblick’ fourth movement, as Brahms plays on the poetic inscription of the former movement to raise the specter of lost love and mortality. In a more complex web of thematic recall, the op. 78 Violin Sonata (1878) combines allusions to a pre-existing pair of interrelated songs from his Op. 59 with a newly composed, recurring instrumental theme to create a multi-layered, somber character in the piece. Both of those works draw on an earlier, romantic sense of yearning for return. Near the end of his career, however, the quiet emergence and eventual dissipation of opening material at the close of the Op. 115 Clarinet Quintet (1891) reflects Brahms's awareness of his place at the end of an artistic tradition, and thereby conveys a post-Romantic conception of history.

As the Western world celebrated the dawn of its third millennium, devotees of nineteenth-century art music started to prepare for a spate of bicentennials. By 2013, Hector Berlioz, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner had been honoured with symposia, concerts, exhibitions and premieres the world over. These events offered opportunities for participants to take stock of who these composers once were, who they are now, and how they might endure to the next milestone anniversary.