They were composed in the Austrian Dolomites, in the village of Pörtschach, in 1878, where Brahms tried to rest and recover after the heavy concert load thrust upon him by his growing fame. He was completing his Second Symphony and beginning to pen Piano Concerto No. 2. Rhapsodies emerged as an aside to these great works. Yet the intensity of emotion they brought does not allow to treat them as marginal.
Biographers have no easy task guessing the origin of their high tension, their pathetic gesture, their elevated tone. A consequence, perhaps, of the clash of two attachments in the composer’s personal life? While that to Clara Schumann remained unchanged, he formed a new one to Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, his one-pupil and, at the time in question, the wife of a German composer of the third guild. He described her in his own words as “a slender woman in blue velvet and with hair of gold.” And it was to her that he dedicated both Rhapsodies.
• Rhapsody in B minor op. 79/1. Captivating from the very first bar, it holds you tense till the very end, clashing agitation against reverie. The former, constrained, is exactly what fills the initial theme, agitato. It will recur several times, almost an obsession. Set against it is the reverie, lyrically singing in a longing D minor. This singing, in fact, is done to a note heard in Chopin (Impromptu in A flat major) and foreshadowing Grieg (The Death of Aase in Peer Gynt). In-between these turn-taking games, in a bright B major, there appears for a while music in musette style, a seeming reflection of the pastoral aura of the mountains where it has been composed.
• Rapsodia in G minor op. 79/2 continues this play of emotion and mood. Brahms brings to the fore an expression of molto passionato: passionate and explosive. It is complemented by a mysterious mood more proper to a ballad than to a rhapsody. The entirety of the piece has been covered in a mist of melancholy. Brahms's stylistic fingerprint betrays, at the same time, the provenience of his music: the North. As proven already by Madame de Staël, that was the origin of melancholy reverie over the mystery of life, of the Romantic experience of the sorrow of existence and of the discontent of human fate.