Johannes Brahms (1833 - 1897)

Sonata No.1 in E Minor for cello and piano, Op. 38
Sonata in D Major, Op. 78
(transcribed for cello and piano by Paul Klengel from Violin Sonata in G Major)
Cello Sonata No.2 in F Major, Op. 99

Johannes Brahms was born on 7th May 1833 in the Gängeviertel district of Hamburg, the son of a double-bass player and his wife, a seamstress seventeen years her husband's senior. It was intended that the boy should follow his lather's trade and to this end he was taught the violin and cello, but his interest in the piano prevailed, enabling him to supplement the family income by playing in dockside taverns, while taking valuable lessons from Eduard Marxsen.

In 1853 Brahms embarked on a concert tour with the Hungarian violinist Eduard Rernenyi, during the course of which he visited Liszt in Weimar, to no effect, and struck up a friendship with the violinist Joseph Joachim, through whose agency he met the Schumanns, established now in Düsseldorf. The connection was an important one. Schumann was impressed enough by the compositions of his own Brahms played to him to hail him as the long-awaited successor to Beethoven. Schumann's subsequent break-down in February 1854 and ensuing insanity brought Brahms back to Düsseldorf to help Clara Schumann and her young family. The relationship with Clara Schumann, one of the most distinguished pianists of the time, tasted until her death in 1896.

It was not until 1862, after a happy period that had brought him a temporary position at the court of Detmold as a conductor and piano teacher, that Brahms visited Vienna, giving concerts there and meeting the important critic Eduard Hanslick, who was to prove a doughty champion, pitting Brahms against Wagner and Liszt as a composer of abstract music, as opposed to the music-drama of Wagner and the symphonic poems of Liszt, with their extra-musical associations. Brahms finally took up permanent residence in Vienna in 1869, greeted by many as the real successor to Beethoven, particularly after his first symphony, and winning a similar position in popular esteem and similar tolerance for his notorious lack of tact. He died in 1897.

It was in 1862 that Brahms wrote the first two movements of his first Cello Sonata, the year of his first visit to Vienna, the city that was to welcome him as the heir of Beethoven. In 1862, however, there still seemed some possibility of employment in his native Hamburg and this was where his ambitions lay. The Cello Sonata was to have had a third, Adagio movement, but this was discarded, and the work was finally completed in 1865, alter the death of the composer's mother and at a time when the German Requiem was again in his mind. The sonata makes full use of the more sombre possibilities of the cello, inherent in its lower range. The opening theme of the first movement establishes this mood, momentarily lightened in the lilting closing theme of the exposition, which has been preceded by a characteristically dark-hued B minor theme. The closing theme, now in E major, ends the movement. The Allegretto quasi menuetto opens with a group of notes that is to serve as a concluding figure to the principal cello theme, a melody that has graver implications than are usual in a traditional minuet. The contrasting Trio, in F sharp minor alter the A minor of the first part of the movement, offers a suaver outline, with a miraculous interweaving of cross-rhythms between the two instruments. The E minor Symphony of Brahms was to make use of a theme derived from Bach for its massive final passacaglia. The final Allegro of the E minor Cello Sonata takes its fugal subject from the same composer's Art of Fugue, a work that has also been suggested as a possible source for the first subject of the first movement. The piano announces the subject in the left hand, answered by the cello a fourth lower and with a third entry an octave higher from the piano. The entry of the cello is accompanied by a countersubject in typically contrasted rhythm, a device for which Brahms shows his fondness again and again. These cross-rhythms continue as a feature of the movement, with its remarkable combination of traditional, formal technique with the sensibility of a later age.

Brahms spent the summer of 1886 at Hofstetten, near Thun, by Lake Thun, in Switzerland. Here he was able to work in peace in the countryside in a room looking towards the Bernese Alps. He was, at the same time, near his friend Joseph Victor Widmann, the poet and writer, who lived near Berne. Brahms had met Widmann at a music festival in Switzerland some years before. Now he was able to spend every Saturday at Widmann's house, discussing the latest books and articles with which his friend might be concerned. As earlier summers at Pörtschach had proved a fertile source of inspiration, so Thun allowed the composer an opportunity to work on music of particularly lyric intensity. The first summer saw the composition of the F major Cello Sonata, the A major Violin Sonata and the C minor Piano Trio, while the following years brought the Double Concerto for violin and cello, the Zigeunerlieder and the third and final violin sonata.

The F major Cello Sonata, Opus 99, is a less somber work than its predecessor in E minor. The writing is more lyrical and shows an almost youthful exuberance and intensity, apparent as the cello presents the first theme, over the tremolo notes of the piano. The second subject is entrusted at first to the piano, which soon breaks into those cross-rhythms that are a recurrent feature of the composer's style. Cello tremolo notes end the first section of the movement and return during the course of a dramatic development. The second movement shifts to the remote key of F sharp major, an effectively mysterious change of tonality already implied in the brief excursion into F sharp minor of the first movement. The second theme of the Adagio, however, is in F minor, a somber counter part of the key of the first movement, and explores the darker, lower range of the cello, before returning, with plucked notes, to the subtly modified first key and melody. The third movement, marked Allegro passionato, has a piano part of even greater technical complexity than that of the first movement, offering further problems of balance to performers. Three piano chords lead from the F minor opening section to an F major Trio, which touches briefly on the key of F sharp, a semitone higher, giving once again that sudden and mysteriously ethereal effect experienced in the Adagio. The final Rondo, written first with apparent haste and later corrected by the composer, seems at first too insubstantial for the preceding movements, the third of which had seemed so conclusively final. Intervening episodes, however, add a touch of the more serious, before the final version of the first theme, which is to be played either with the bow or pizzicato by the cello.

The G major Violin Sonata, Opus 78, was written during the summer of 1879 while Brahms was staying at Pörtschach. The transcription for cello and piano, once attributed to Brahms, was made in 1897 by the Leipzig musician Paul Klengel, brother of the cellist Julius Klengel. The first movement allows the cello to introduce the main theme, with its waltz-like lilt, over piano chords, a transition bringing those cross-rhythms that are typical of Brahms. The cello moves to the second subject, joined by the piano, the first theme re-appearing with a pizzicato accompaniment, a suggested repetition of the exposition, which in fact leads to a central development section. A recapitulation ends in a coda that recalls the principal elements of the main theme. The Adagio, opened by the piano, joined by the cello in the main theme, moves into a minor key in a solemn memory of the rhythmic figure that had started the first movement. The first theme returns in more expansive form, followed by the second, now more gently optimistic, as it leads to the final appearance of the principal theme. The Finale, opening with the now familiar rhythmic figure of the first bar of the sonata, a memory of the composer's Regenlied, a setting of a nostalgic poem by the North German student of dialect Klaus Groth, and of Nachlang, the setting that follows. There is are turn to the theme of the Adagio, now developed, before the re-establishment of the original key and a conclusion that reminds us of what has passed.

Maria Kliegel
Maria Kliegel achieved significant success in 1981, when she was awarded the grand prix in the Rostropovich Competition. Born in Dillenburg, Germany, she began learning the cello at the age of ten and first came to public attention five years later, when, as a student at the Dr. Hochsches Conservatory in Frankfurt, she twice won first prize in the Jugend Musiziert competition. She later studied in America with János Starker, serving as his assistant, and subsequently appeared in a phenomenal series of concerts in America, Switzerland and France, with Rostropovich as conductor. She has since then enjoyed an international career of growing distinction as a soloist and recitalist, offering an amazingly wide repertoire, ranging from Bach and Vieuxtemps to the contemporary.

Kristin Merscher
Kristin Merscher was born in Frankfurt am Main and as a seven-year-old had her first regular piano instruction there at the Conservatory .One year later she moved with her family to Hanover, studying at the Hanover Hochschule für Musik. From 1977 until 1980 she studied in Paris with an eminent teacher at the Conservatoire, with regular summer master-classes with György Sebok in Switzerland and at Indiana University. She made her début at the age often in a piano concerto by Haydn and her first solo recital at the age of fourteen, later embarking on a solo career which has taken her to the principal music centres of Europe, to the Far East and to Canada and the United States of America, as well as to the Middle East.