Thirteen years have gone by. Brahms has already composed almost all he ever would. He has still five years to live, five remaining years of what is known as his “final” phase: two clarinet sonatas, Four Serious Songs, eleven chorale preludes and twenty piano miniatures. There is no pianist who would not know them, who would not love them, who would not meditate upon them.
1892 was the borderline year. Its beginning saw the sudden death of the “golden-haired” Elisabeth von Herzogenberg; in the summer, of Brahms’s sister, another Elisabeth (Else). Brahms went to Bad Ischl in the Salzburg region and began composing his unforgettable series of piano miniatures: fantasies, capriccios and intermezzos, romances, rhapsodies and ballads; when completed, they were enough for four opuses: 116, 117, 118 and 119.
Opus 116 consisted of three capriccios and four intermezzos. They were unlike any pieces he had ever entrusted to piano. No longer a conversation with the audience, these were now but monologues, nay, soliloquies: conversations with himself. His capriccios – violent and volatile – asked questions with no answers. His intermezzos introduced some calm into the cycle. The original idea was to close it already on the fourth miniature, Intermezzo in E major.
• Capriccio in D minor op. 116/1 is brimming with almost-chaotic energy. The endless syncopation of musical narration seems an obstinate yet pointless struggle against the invisible.
• Intermezzo in A minor op. 116/2 is a moment of repose and of reflection, singing and lyrical. Its middle part is filled with an arabesque of a melody searching for a way out. It is extraordinarily beautiful and fragile, a return to the point of departure, a melancholy dwindling of narration.
• Capriccio in G minor op. 116/3. Violence strikes back with running tones in a tempo of Allegro passionato, amplified by unisons of both hands. Trio, in E flat major, is filled with chord progressions, at times singing, at times irate.
• Intermezzo in E major op. 116/4 is the essence of personal lyricism, concentration neighbouring on reverie. The music wanders around the keyboard, stops and then goes on, only responding to intuition, impulse, memory.
Brahms converses with himself in tones.
Mieczysław Tomaszewski
