Tender Brahms

Johannes Brahms was not a man who easily became emotional. He spoke little, drank a lot of coffee, and cultivated a reputation as a curmudgeon. At forty, he looked like a sixty-year-old philosopher with a beard, and in old age, he only let the beard grow longer. But this seemingly gruff Viennese bourgeois had another side – one best heard in his chamber music.

Toward the end of his life, Brahms believed he had said everything he had to say. In 1890, he announced his retirement from composing. His friends were skeptical – he was only 57 and didn’t seem like someone who could sit around doing nothing. And they were right, because just a year later, Richard Mühlfeld appeared in his life – a clarinetist from the Meiningen orchestra. Brahms fell in love… not with the man (though he held him in high regard), but with the sounds he could draw from the instrument.

Enchanted by the clarinet’s tone, he composed two masterpieces for Mühlfeld: the Trio in A minor, Op. 114 and the Quintet in B minor Op. 115. Both were written almost simultaneously, in 1891, and both are proof that Brahms was far from having said his “last word.”

The Trio is an intimate conversation: piano, clarinet, and cello – each with its voice, yet intertwined in a delicate, almost peer-like dialogue. The Quintet, on the other hand, is a work of larger scale – dense, profound, full of returns and pauses. Some have heard in it melancholy and acceptance of passing time-others, another chapter in a musical life that Brahms clearly wasn’t ready to end.

Brahms's Trio in A minor, Op. 114, performed by Anthony McGill (clarinet), Clive Greensmith (cello), and Conrad Tao (piano):

Interestingly, although the clarinetist was his direct inspiration, Brahms believed so much in the value of this music that he accepted alternative versions: the Trio also exists with a viola, and the Quintet, in a piano transcription.

Brahms wasn’t expressive in words, but in sounds – absolutely. Especially when he thought he had nothing left to prove.

Brahms' Quintet in B minor, Op. 115, performed by Damien Bachmann (clarinet) and the Quatuor Ébène string quartet: