Brahms Symphony No. 1.

There are two aspects of tonight’s featured work, Brahms Symphony No. 1, that I would like to explore.  

In my view, great music and great composers are like great architecture and great architects.   To really achieve the pinnacle of accomplishment they must combine, in equal part, on one hand a strong artistic vision and on the other a strong sense of structural engineering.   Let us for a moment, imagine that we are approaching our own City Hall, here in Dallas.   One sees Mr. Pei’s bold, beautiful, seemingly free-standing ‘wedge’.   This is certainly the height of artistic vision.   Then if we shift the focus slightly, one is equally staggered by the fact that the whole edifice is supported by a giant “C” shaped cantilever, weighed down by the underground parking lot that runs right across the square.   (This is what I like to refer to as the “unseen fifty percent”.)

So it is with the music of Brahms.   One is instantly aware of bold and beautiful artistic vision and then by shifting the focus to the sometimes unseen, unheard fifty percent one is equally staggered by his immutable compositional structure.

Brahms was born in 1833 and this year marks the centenary of his death.   This, first symphony was not written until 1876 and points us to the extraordinary fact that Brahms’ major symphonic output is encapsulated in a fourteen year period between 1873 and 1887.   This seemingly late outpouring prompted the great essayist Dr. Tovey to write that “there is atleast as much experience of orchestral writing behind Brahms’ first symphony as there was behind Beethoven’s third”. Given the extraordinary symphonic content in the two orchestral serenades, the great ‘D’minor piano concerto, which almost certainly started out as a symphony,  the German Requiem and of course the masterful Haydn variations,  I would venture that there was even more experience than that.

Bearing these things in mind I hope you will enjoy with renewed vigour a first symphony that is not the naïve outpouring of youth nor a tentative utterance of an early work,  but the consummate mastery of a style that will excite your intellect as well as your heart.

Prepared and written by Zane Dalal for subscription series audiences at the Dallas Symphony,  June 1996.   Delivery approx.  5 minutes.  Intended as gist for extemporized, “unread”, comments from the podium, prior to downbeat.