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Brahms, Mühlfeld, and Weber

Author: mrn
Date: 2010-02-03 19:22

The other day after salzo started a thread about the Brahms Sonatas, I got to thinking about Brahms and Mühlfeld. It sort of occurred to me that while there is a lot of talk about Mühlfeld's playing having inspired Brahms to write his clarinet music, it tends to focus on Mühlfeld himself and speculating as to what HE sounded like as a player. A lot of that seems to be based on less-than-meaningful hearsay (such as Brahms' calling Mühlfeld "Fräulein Klarinette") and some biographical facts of questionable significance, combined with some kind stylistic extrapolation from Brahms' works.

What surprises me is that not so much gets said about what it was Mühlfeld was actually playing that first caught Brahms' attention. It surprises me, in particular, because most of us instrumentalists play lots of different styles of music. If someone was inspired by an Eddie Daniels performance or a Richard Stoltzman performance, for example, it would clearly make a difference whether what they heard was a jazz tune or the Mozart Concerto.

As it turns out, we know from the historical record that there was a particular piece that Brahms heard Mühlfeld play that made him fall in love with Mühlfeld's playing: Weber's Concerto No. 1. It was his performance of that piece with the Meiningen Orchestra in March of 1891 that prompted Brahms to write to Clara Schumann that "nobody can play the clarinet more beautifully than Herr Mühlfeld." (see Eric Hoeprich, "The Clarinet," p. 193).

That wasn't the last time Mühlfeld played Weber 1 for Brahms & Co., either. As Clara Schumann wrote in her diary entry for February 16, 1895, "Mühlfeld played for us the Weber f-minor concerto that we took a great interest in. He played it most beautifully..." (my translation--see B. Litzmann, "Clara Schumann und ihre Freunde," p. 595 for the original German)

So keeping this in mind, I went back for another listen for Brahms' Sonata No. 1 the other day and it began to occur to me that the piece was likely at least as inspired by Weber's Concerto No. 1 as it was by Mühlfeld himself. For one thing, the Brahms Sonatas and Weber Concertos have the obvious similarity of being written in the same respective keys--No. 1 in f-minor, No. 2 in Eb-Major.

Another interesting thing I noticed was that the opening three notes of the first movement in the piano, which seem to constitute the main thematic element of the piece, are basically an inversion of the first three notes in the clarinet part to the first movement of Weber's Concerto No. 1, which starts by going down a fourth then up a step (Brahms goes up a fourth, then down a second--with diatonic intervals in a minor key, of course, so the intervals change size slightly depending on whether you're going up or down, but it's still a 4th followed by a 2nd, however you slice it) This same three note figure shows up all over the place in this Sonata in various forms. In fact, in the 3rd movement of the Sonata, although Brahms tinkers with the intervals a little (using 3rds instead of 4ths), he, at the same time, plays essentially the same 3 note theme (it's recognizable as such, anyway) and its inversion back-to-back, as if to clue the listener in to the fact that the original 3 note theme from the first movement is actually an inversion of something else.

(The initial line played by the *clarinet* in the first movement of the Brahms 1st Sonata, on the other hand, most closely resembles Beethoven's Appassionata sonata, which is also in f-minor, starts with the same notes as the clarinet part in Brahms, and also like the Brahms 1st movement [Allegro appassionata], makes frequent use of Neapolitan chords in its opening. We all know Brahms had a special affinity for Beethoven, so who says he couldn't have had more than one inspiration for this movement?)

Other similarities in the first movement include the dramatic use of dotted rhythms (the eighth-eighth-dotted eighth-sixteenth rhythmic theme), which is suggestive of the orchestral introduction to the Weber Concerto and the dramatic use of subito fortes early on in both pieces. The first movements of both pieces also include flashy upward runs (a Weber trademark) and end in relatively quiet codas. The first movements of both pieces are also in 3 (beats per measure, that is).

The second movement of the Sonata is rhythmically similar to the Weber 1 second movement, and once you get past the pickup notes, actually starts on the same tone (although it's in a different key).

The fourth movement of the Sonata also seems to be modeled after Weber 1. Rhythmically and metrically (2/2 vs. 2/4), it's very similar to the 3rd movement of the Weber Concerto No. 1 (especially the repeated eighth notes at the end of the clarinet's initial main phrase in the opening of the Brahms movement (following the introduction), which resemble the little 16th note figures at the end of the clarinet's first phrase in the Weber movement. Like the last movement of the Weber, it's in the same key (F Major), and it also has a middle section in which the main theme is restated in the minor key before returning to the major key.

So the Sonata No. 1 by Brahms and the Concerto No. 1 by Weber seem to be patterned after each other to some extent--at least to me they seem that way. I've never seen anyone else try to compare these two pieces like that before--I doubt I'm the first--but I thought the apparent similarities I found between the two pieces were interesting enough to mention.

Post Edited (2010-02-03 20:17)

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