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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 December 2020
This article examines cross-relationships and mutual influences in the D-minor symphonies and concertos written in the 1850s by a close-knit circle of composers: Johannes Brahms, Robert Schumann, and their friends Joseph Joachim, Julius Otto Grimm and Albert Dietrich. Outlining the overlapping compositional timelines of Brahms's First Piano Concerto (at one point a candidate to become his first symphonic work), the violin concertos of Joachim and Schumann, and the symphonies of Grimm and Dietrich, it demonstrates that the pieces were shared among the composers during their periods of composition and explores musical correspondences indicating mutual influences both among the composers and from other specific works. The musical choices involved in this group of pieces seem to point to an underlying backdrop of Beethovenian influence involving specific works from Beethoven's body of orchestral music, an oeuvre concluding with an unforgettable symphonic work in D minor—to which the younger generation's collection of works may relate symbolically. This study not only emphasizes the central role that Beethoven played in the minds of these composers in the mid-1850s, but also underscores the musical intimacy that extended from the social intimacy of the composers in the Brahms–Schumann circle.
1 Fifield, Christopher (The German Symphony between Beethoven and Brahms: The Fall and Rise of a Genre (Burlington: Ashgate, 2015), 267–8)Google Scholar notes the ‘relative paucity’ of symphonic composition in the 1850s. By 1871, a performance of the Dietrich symphony evoked from one critic the comment that ‘the decision to write a symphony, and the happy execution of this decision, must be described as a remarkable event’; see H.D., ‘Sinfonie (in D-moll) von Albert Dietrich für Grosses Orchester, op. 20, Leipzig und Winterthur, J. Rieter-Biedermann. Partitur 5 Thlr. 25 Ngr. Stimmen 8 Thlr. 15 Ngr. [Erster Satz (Schluss Folgt)]’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 6 (1871), 257.
2 Daniel Bennett Chiarilli, ‘Concertos without Virtuosity? Virtuosity, Composition and Critical Distortions of the Violin Concerto in the Nineteenth Century’ (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2011), 3.
3 See, for example, ‘Ludwig van Beethoven, Skizzenbuch ‘Petter’ zu verschiedenen Werken (op. 92, op. 93, op. 96, op. 113, WoO 140 u.a., Autograph’: Nice to Know: From Piano Concerto to Eighth Symphony’, Beethoven-Haus Bonn, www.beethoven.de/en/media/view/4685762201124864/, accessed 26 June 2017.
4 A good reference source for more information on these composers and their relationships with Brahms is Clive, Peter, Brahms and His World: A Biographical Dictionary (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2006)Google Scholar.
5 Schumann, Robert, ‘Neue Bahnen’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 39/28 (28 October 1853), 185–6Google Scholar.
6 Johannes Brahms to Julius Otto Grimm, Heidelberg, September 1856 in Johannes Brahms: Life and Letters, ed. Avins, Styra, trans. Eisinger, Josef and Avins, Styra (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 142Google Scholar.
7 Clive, Brahms and His World, 182–3. For Grimm's own account of the meeting, see Julius Otto Grimm, ‘Erinnerungen aus meinem Musikerleben’, Jahresbericht des Westfälischen Provinzialvereins für Wissenschaft und Kunst 29 (1900–01), 151–2. In a letter from autumn 1854, Joachim characterizes Grimm as ‘Brahms's best friend’; see Joseph Joachim to Gisela von Arnim, 20 October 1854, in Joseph Joachims Briefe an Gisela von Arnim, 1852–1859, ed. Johannes Joachim (Göttingen: Dr. Hubert, 1911), 64, cited in ibid., 183. See also Hunnius, Carl, Julius Otto Grimm: Ein Künstlerleben und Schaffen (Reval: Franz Kluges, 1905)Google Scholar and Ludwig, Franz, Julius Otto Grimm: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der musikalischen Spätromantik (Bielefeld: Velhagen & Klasing, 1925), 12ffGoogle Scholar.
8 Dietrich's letter informing Joachim of Schumann's breakdown in late February 1854 is preserved in Letters from and to Joseph Joachim, ed. and trans. Nora Bickley (London: Macmillan, 1914; reprinted New York: Vienna House, 1972), 60–62.
9 Grimm's compositional output was limited due to his other musical occupations, particularly teaching and conducting. He published 28 opuses, including songs, solo piano works and a handful of chamber and orchestral pieces.
10 Robert Pascall, ‘Dietrich, Albert (Hermann)’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 8 May 2017) and Avins (ed.), Johannes Brahms, 17.
11 Clive, Brahms and His World, 106. Brahms was also godfather to Joachim's first child, born in 1864 and named ‘Johannes’ after the composer.
12 Clive, Brahms and His World, 105; Fifield, The German Symphony, 233. See also Halfmann, Christoph, Albert Dietrich: Komponist und grossherzoglicher Hofcapellmeister in Oldenburg (Cologne: Darling, 2010)Google Scholar. During this period, Dietrich aided in facilitating the premiere of Brahms's German Requiem in Bremen in 1868, a milestone often regarded as coinciding with a new level of success in Brahms's career. See for instance Avins, Johannes Brahms, 352–7 and Franz Gehring and Bernd Wiechert, ‘Reinthaler, Karl (Martin)’, in Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online www.grovemusic.com (accessed 5 June 2017).
13 See Brodbeck, David, ‘Medium and Meaning: New Aspects of the Chamber Music’, in The Cambridge Companion to Brahms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 100Google Scholar.
14 Dietrich, Albert, Erinnerungen an Johannes Brahms in Briefe besonders aus seiner Jugendzeit (Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1898)Google Scholar.
15 Among the most comprehensive studies of Schumann's Violin Concerto is Struck, Michael, Robert Schumann: Violinkonzert D-Moll (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1988)Google Scholar; see also his Die umstrittenen späten Instrumentalwerke Schumanns: Untersuchungen zur Entstehung, Struktur und Rezeption (Hamburg: Karl Dieter Wagner, 1984), especially chapter 9. On the work's compositional timeline, see also for example Steinberg, Michael, The Concerto: A Listener's Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 419Google Scholar; Schumann, Eugenie, ‘Eugenie Schumann: Über das letzte Werk ihres Vaters Robert Schumann’, Schweizerische Musikzeitung 78/1 (1938), 9Google Scholar; Joachim to Moser, reproduced in Moser, Andreas, Joseph Joachim: A Biography, trans. Durham, Lilla (London: Philip Wellby, 1901), 138Google Scholar; and Louis Stephen Hajosy, ‘Robert Schumann's Violin Concerto WoO 23: A Reappraisal of the Work and Its Suppression’ (MA Thesis, University of Georgia, 2000), 49–50.
16 For a general overview of the formal structure and major features of the Schumann concerto, including the possible influence of Bach, see for example Kerman, Joseph, ‘The Concertos’, in The Cambridge Companion to Schumann, ed. Perrey, Beate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 189–92Google Scholar.
17 See for example Arthur M. Abell, ‘Joachim's Analysis of the Schumann Work’, New York Times 5 December 1937, 219; Litzmann, Berthold, Clara Schumann: An Artist's Life, Based on Material Found in Diaries and Letters, trans. and abridged from the 4th edn by Grace E. Hadow (London: MacMillan, 1913), vol. 2: 118Google Scholar; Michael Struck, Die umstrittenen späten Instrumentalwerke, 253; and Joachim to Robert Schumann, 17 November 1854, in Letters from and to Joseph Joachim, 93. On the notion of the concerto's reflecting Schumann's deteriorated mental state, see also John Daverio, ‘Songs of Dawn and Dusk: Coming to Terms with the Late Music’, in The Cambridge Companion to Schumann, especially 268, 269, 273–5 and 283–4 and Lachat-Sarrete, Priscille, ‘Robert Schumann: La Fantaisie en Ut Majeur et le Concerto en Ré Mineur pour Violon et Orchestre: Une saga mouvementée’, Ostinato Rigore: Revue Internationale d’Études Musicales 22 (2004), 164–72Google Scholar.
18 On the fascinating history of the work's rediscovery and 1937 publication and premiere, see for example, Palmstierna, Erik, Horizons of Immortality: A Quest for Reality (New York: Coward-McCann, 1938)Google Scholar; MacLeod, Joseph, The Sisters d'Aranyi (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969)Google Scholar; Struck, Die umstrittenen späten Instrumentalwerke, 314–16 and Struck, Robert Schumann: Violinkonzert D-Moll (WoO 23), 7–21; Helliwell, Clifton, Music in the Air (Padstow: Tabb House, 1989), 87–9Google Scholar; and Hirsch, Lily E., ‘Segregating Sound: Robert Schumann in the Third Reich’, in Rethinking Schumann, ed. Kok, Roe-Min and Tunbridge, Laura (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 56Google Scholar. Eugenie Schumann's protestations appear in ‘Eugenie Schumann: Über das letzte Werk ihres Vaters Robert Schumann’.
19 Clara Schumann: Ein Künstlerleben nach Tagebüchern und Briefen, ed. Berthold Litzmann, 2nd edn (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1906), vol. 2: 280. Composed a few weeks before the violin concerto, in late August 1853, was another Schumann work in D minor: the Introduction and Allegro, Op. 134, which Schumann later dedicated to Brahms.
20 Eugenie Schumann, ‘Eugenie Schumann: Über das letzte Werk ihres Vaters Robert Schumann’, 8–10.
21 Abell, ‘Joachim's Analysis of the Schumann Work’, 219.
22 See Hajosy, ‘Robert Schumann's Violin Concerto WoO 23’, 74–5.
23 Brahms to Joachim, Düsseldorf, 19 June 1854, as published in Brahms, Johannes Brahms Briefwechsel, vol. 5: Johannes Brahms im Briefwechsel mit Joseph Joachim I, ed. Andreas Moser (Berlin: Deutsche Brahms Gesellschaft, 1921; repr. Tutzing: H. Schneider, 1974), vol. 5: 47. Max Kalbeck suggested that the work started out as a symphony (of which the early piano version may have been a pre-orchestrational sketch) and was inspired by Brahms's first experience of hearing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony – but the work is clearly referred to as a sonata in the writings of members of Brahms's immediate circle (Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms, 4th edn (Berlin: Deutsche Brahms-Gesellschaft, 1921; repr. Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1976), vol. 1: 164–5). See, for example, Dietrich, Erinnerungen an Johannes Brahms, as published in English translation by Hecht, Dora E. in Recollections of Johannes Brahms (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1899), 49Google Scholar.
24 See, for example, Brahms to Joachim, Düsseldorf, 19 June 1854 and Brahms to Joachim, Düsseldorf, 27 July 1854, as published in Brahms, Briefwechsel, vol. 5: 47 and 55–6, respectively, and George S. Bozarth, ‘Brahms's First Piano Concerto, op. 15: Genesis and Meaning’, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Konzerts: Festschrift Siegfried Kross zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Reinmar Emans and Matthias Wendt (Bonn: G. Schroeder, 1990), 211–12.
25 Johannes Brahms to Robert Schumann, Düsseldorf, 30 January 1855, in Johannes Brahms, 85 and Johannes Brahms to Clara Schumann, Düsseldorf, 7 February 1855, in Clara Schumann – Johannes Brahms: Briefe aus den Jahren 1853–1896, ed. Berthold Litzmann (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1927), vol. 1: 76.
26 Bozarth, ‘Brahms's First Piano Concerto’, 215–16 and 241; Reynolds, Christopher, ‘A Choral Symphony by Brahms?’, 19th-Century Music 9/1 (1985), 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Daverio, John, Crossing Paths: Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 148CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
27 MacDonald, Malcolm, Brahms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 201), 99Google Scholar. See also Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms, vol. 1: 292–3.
28 Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms, vol. 1: 166; translations from Reynolds, ‘A Choral Symphony’, 4. Others have responded to Kalbeck's claims with scepticism; see, for example, Geiringer, Karl, Brahms: His Life and Work, 2nd revised edn (New York: Da Capo Press, 1982), 248Google Scholar.
29 Johannes Brahms to Clara Schumann, 30 December 1856 in Clara Schumann – Johannes Brahms: Briefe, vol. 1: 198. The autograph manuscript of the movement also bears the mysterious inscription ‘benedictus, qui venit, in nomine Domini!’ It remains unclear why this is so, but among the proposed explanations (again stemming from Kalbeck) is that this is another reference to Robert Schumann, whom Brahms and others apparently sometimes called ‘Mynheer Domine’ – or perhaps to Schumann's wife, who literally bears his name. (See Max Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms, 1: 166 and Christopher Reynolds, ‘A Choral Symphony’, 5. The manuscript page is reproduced in Bozarth, ‘Brahms's First Piano Concerto’, 224. Reynolds, (‘A Choral Symphony’, 6–7) points out that the melody of the Adagio is built on the work's opening leaps and thus argues that Clara's theme appears literally ‘within’ Schumann's here. The latter seems to me the most convincing interpretation, as it is consistent with Brahms's own characterization of the movement as a portrait of Clara.
30 Brahms's Op. 23 variations (1861) were based on a theme that Schumann had written down at Endenich, unwittingly recalling a melody from the slow movement of his own Violin Concerto (Clive, Brahms and His World, 409).
31 See for example Daverio, ‘Songs of Dawn and Dusk’, 281–2; and ‘Menuhin Praises Concert in Reich: But Young Violinist Deplores …’, New York Times (28 November 1937), 1; Menuhin to Vladimir Golschmann, 22 July 1937, quoted in Magidoff, Robert, Yehudi Menuhin: The Story of the Man and the Musician (London: Robert Hale, 1956), 203–4Google Scholar; and Abell, ‘Joachim's Analysis’, 219. Guan-Ting Liao points to similarities between the Schumann Concerto and Mendelssohn's First Violin Concerto, in the same key. See Guan-Ting Liao, ‘A Text-Critical Analysis of Robert Schumann's Violin Concerto in D Minor, WoO 1, in Comparison with Other Romantic Violin Concertos’ (DMA diss., University of Connecticut, 2012), 42–3.
32 See MacDonald, Brahms, 279 and Starobinsky, Georges, ‘Brahms et la Nostalgie de l'Enfance: “Volks-Kinderlieder”, Berceuses et “Klaus-Groth-Lieder”’, Acta Musicologica 74 (2002), 188–94Google Scholar; Berry, Paul, Brahms Among Friends: Listening, Performance, and the Rhetoric of Allusion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 236CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Brodbeck, ‘Medium and Meaning’, 117–18 and 236–7.
33 Schumann's Fourth Symphony, Op. 120, is a much more familiar Schumann work in D minor than the Violin Concerto. Although it corresponds to the genre of Brahms's Op. 15 in that work's prior form, the Symphony is yet another example of a work further removed in time and biographical confluence from Brahms's Concerto, and it bears to that work's tumultuous opening much less of a resemblance than does Schumann's Violin Concerto. The opening of the Brahms Concerto has been likened to that of Schumann's Symphony; see Roger Moseley, ‘Brief Immortality: Recasting History in the Music of Brahms’, PhD diss. (University of California, 2004), 111–12 and Bozarth, ‘Brahms's First Concerto’, 227–8n62. But the Symphony's opening is slow, not driving, and doesn't have the Piano Concerto's intensity.
34 Even in the first movements, however, there are important differences that must be acknowledged: the broad structure of the expository materials (like Joachim and Beethoven, Schumann employs double-exposition form, with both expositions moving to the relative major for the second theme; Schumann's first movement ends in D major, unlike the other opening movements discussed; and Schumann's first movement (and entire work) is conceived on a much smaller scale than the Joachim and Brahms examples.
35 These features, which have led Schumann's Concerto, like Brahms's and Joachim's, to be referred to as ‘symphonic’, are symptoms, at least in Schumann and Brahms, of the works’ relative deemphasis on virtuosic display, a characteristic reflective of the composers’ broader aesthetic values (and also, perhaps, of the origins of Brahms's work in non-concerto genres). Changes made to the Schumann work by later musicians, including Paul Hindemith, have attempted to enhance the virtuosic element. See Liao, ‘A Text-Critical Analysis’, 9–10 and Marsha Jones Wederquist, ‘The Brahms, Schumann and Joachim Violin Concerti: An Analysis of Relationships’, MA thesis (University of Wyoming, 1961), 120–21.
36 Robert Schumann to Joseph Joachim, Düsseldorf, 6 January 1854, in Robert Schumanns Briefe, Neue Folge, 2nd revised edn, ed. F. Gustav Jansen (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Haärtel, 1904), 390 and, for example, Dahlhaus, Carl, Johannes Brahms: Klavierkonzert Nr. 1 D-moll, op. 15 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1965), 31Google Scholar.
37 Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms, 1: 164–5 and Reynolds, ‘A Choral Symphony’, 3–25. Reynolds has also proposed an allusion to Beethoven's Fidelio in the Concerto's second movement (‘A Choral Symphony’, 6–7).
38 Jacquelyn Sholes, Allusion as Narrative Premise in Brahms's Instrumental Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 133–78. See also, for example, Rosen, Charles, ‘Influence: Plagiarism and Inspiration’, 19th-Century Music 4/2 (1980), 91–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar, elaborating on Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis, 3: 74, 118.
39 Daverio, Crossing Paths, 235 and Malcolm MacDonald, ‘“Veiled Symphonies”? The Concertos’, in The Cambridge Companion to Brahms, 160. See also Joachim to Clara Schumann, 31 December 1859 and c. 13 March 1860 in Letters from and to Joseph Joachim, 183 and 192. For early performance reviews of Joachim's Concerto, which tend to focus on the work's technical difficulty and ‘Hungarian’ style, see for instance The Musical World (5 May 1860), 29 and (15 March 1862), 166, as well as an uncited review by Eduard Hanslick quoted in Moser, Joseph Joachim, 187–8.
40 On Joachim's correspondence with Brahms regarding drafts of the work, see Reynolds, ‘A Choral Symphony’, 5. The letters indicate that Joachim was familiar with the first movement in its earlier forms, but that he did not necessarily see the other movements until the piece had been reworked as a concerto. See also Joseph Joachim to Clara Schumann, Hanover, 3 January 1858, in Letters from and to Joseph Joachim, 160.
41 See Clara Schumann to Johannes Brahms, 20 December 1858 in Letters of Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms, 1853–1896, ed. Berthold Litzmann (New York: Longmans, Green, 1927; repr. New York: Vienna House, 1971), 1: 94.
42 See Daverio, Crossing Paths, 236.
43 Tovey, Donald Francis, Essays in Musical Analysis (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), 3: 118Google Scholar. See also MacDonald, ‘“Veiled Symphonies”?’, 160–61. During the period surrounding his own Concerto's composition, Joachim was of course very much involved as both instrumentalist and conductor with the concerto and symphony repertory of Beethoven. For example, he had performed the Beethoven Violin Concerto for the Niederrheinische Musikfest at which his friendship with the Schumanns began to develop in May 1853. Joachim's correspondence in the 1850s also includes several references to performances of Beethoven's symphonies, particularly the Sixth and the Ninth. See letters from 13 February 1856 to Ferdinand David, to Clara Schumann on 1 December 1857 and 3 January 1858, and to his parents on 11 January 1859, all written from Hanover (Letters from and to Joseph Joachim, 119, 156, 160 and 178).
44 See MacDonald, ‘“Veiled Symphonies”?’, 161.
45 Tovey writes that, ‘Brahms's finale clearly shows the influence of the finale of the Hungarian Concerto. Both … are closely modelled on that of Beethoven's C-Minor Concerto; but it is from Joachim that Brahms has derived the main points in which his form differs from Beethoven's.’ (‘Joseph Joachim, Hungarian Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, op. 11’, in Brahms and His World, ed. Walter Frisch, 1st edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990; originally published in Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis, 3: 153). As others have recognized since, Tovey's chronology, and thus his tracing the lineage of Brahms's Concerto to Joachim's, is in error; see, for example, MacDonald, ‘“Veiled Symphonies”?’, 301n13.
46 See, for example Daverio, Crossing Paths, 296–7n92 and MacDonald, ‘“Veiled Symphonies”?’, 301n13.
47 Joachim's finale is considerably more chromatic than Beethoven's, just one aspect lending the Joachim work some of its Hungarian flavour (along with, for example, phrase endings that turn down by half-step and then back up by half-step or minor third, chromatically raised fourth scale-degrees, etc.). Other features include the fiery spirit and dazzling technical display associated with this style. On the ‘Hungarian’ elements of the Concerto's style, see for example, Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis, 3: 111–13.
48 MacDonald, ‘“Veiled Symphonies”?’, 161. MacDonald further suggests here that this was ‘a concern maybe more pressing for Joachim (who had already perpetrated a one-movement concerto in the approved Lisztian manner) than Brahms’.
49 See, for example, MacDonald, ‘“Veiled Symphonies”?’, 161 and Tovey, Essays in Musical Analysis, 3: 107 and 111. Tovey (107) refers to an ‘element of conflict between symphony and concerto in the first movement’ of Joachim's work. Brahms, however, takes the lack of soloistic virtuosity in his first movement farther than Joachim does, possibly reflecting both the origins of the work in non-concerto genres, as well as the fact that Brahms had neither the virtuosic reputation nor ability for which Joachim was celebrated, also a feature associated with the musical style of Joachim's native Hungary.
50 This is discussed in detail in Sholes, Allusion as Narrative Premise, chapter 4, especially 154–65.
51 The stately dotted rhythms give Schumann's opening theme a bit of the flavour of a baroque French overture, or of Handel. Handel's potential influence on Schumann is examined in Boetticher, Wolfgang, ‘Das Fortleben Händels in der Geisteswelt Robert Schumanns’, in George Friedrich Händel: Ein Lebensinhalt – Gedenkschrift für Bernd Baselt (1934–1993) (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1995), 289–96Google Scholar.
52 Brahms may have had something similar in mind in his D-major Serenade, Op. 11 (1857–58), his first completed orchestral work, and one that makes clear references to Haydn's last symphony, which is in the same key. Ultimately, and famously, Brahms of course alludes to the ‘Ode to Joy’ from Beethoven's last symphonic movement in the finale of his actual First Symphony, thereby indeed taking up where Beethoven left off.
53 See, for example, H.D., ‘Sinfonie (in D-moll) von Albert Dietrich’, 260 and H.T., ‘Symphonie in D-moll von Julius O. Grimm (Symphonie für grosses Orchester componiert und Richard Barth gewidmet von Julius O. Grimm, Op. 19, Leipzig, J. Rieter-Biedermann. Partitur M. 20. Stimmen M. 27. Vierhaendiger Clavierauszug vom Componisten M. 9) [Besprechung]’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 11/2 (12 January 1876), 20, unnumbered footnote. More recently, Fifield writes that the ‘sinister mood’ at the outset of Grimm's Symphony is ‘heavy with traces of Beethoven's Ninth’ (The German Symphony, 270). Grimm's inexperience as a symphonist shows in this work, which features an unusual amount of sustained and repeated-note accompaniment and harmonic stasis, even in the first movement's development section.
54 Fifield, The German Symphony, 267.
55 Fifield, The German Symphony, 267.
56 Grimm had moved to Göttingen in 1855 to teach, and he also conducted a local choir and community orchestra there. The Symphony was subsequently performed in Berlin on an unknown date, in Münster on 9 November 1872 and in Leipzig at the Gewandhaus on 16 January 1873, conducted by Grimm, before it was published in 1874. See Fifield, The German Symphony, 268 and 280, as well as H.T., ‘Symphonie in D-moll von Julius O. Grimm’, 20.
57 Ludwig (Julius Otto Grimm, 27) claims to have seen the sonata-form finale in manuscript. Fifield (The German Symphony, 269n48) reports that it has not been possible, even with the assistance of archives and libraries in Göttingen, Muenster and Berlin, to locate this manuscript, nor to determine whether this finale in sonata form was performed at Göttingen in 1857.
58 Some reviews of the 1870s refer to the Symphony as ‘new’, but this may simply mean that the work was new and unfamiliar to audiences at the locations involved. That the word ‘new’ was applied by reviewers several years apart in order to reflect new means and venues of presentation is illustrated by appearance in, for example, both a performance review in the Münsterischer Anzeiger on 12 November 1872, cited in Fifield, The German Symphony, 268, footnote 45 and a review by ‘T.H’. of the newly published score in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 11/2 (1876), 17. As for why the work would have remained unperformed and unpublished for so many years, it seems that Grimm, working at Münster, was thoroughly occupied with performance activities and also did not have an orchestra at his disposal that would have been able to play his Symphony; see Fifield, The German Symphony 269–70.
59 The final sequence of movements is: I. Sostenuto, Allegro; II. Trauermarsch; III. Scherzo: Presto; IV. Finale: Allegro Vivace.
60 Ludwig, Julius Otto Grimm, 27.
61 Ludwig, Julius Otto Grimm, 27.
62 Fifield, The German Symphony, 267 and 279. Like Joachim, Grimm provided feedback and assistance (especially with orchestration) on drafts of Brahms's D-minor Concerto as it took shape, beginning in Grimm's case, quite early. In March or April 1854, Grimm wrote to Joachim of Brahms, ‘hardly had he delighted us with his [B-Major] Trio than he had finished three movements of a Sonata for two pianos, which seems to be even more sublime’ (Julius Otto Grimm to Joseph Joachim, Düsseldorf, 9 March 1854 in Briefwechsel, 5: 31; English translation from Letters from and to Joseph Joachim, 66). As he reworked the piece into a symphony, Brahms relied heavily not only on Joachim but also on Grimm for advice. (See Johannes Brahms to Joseph Joachim, Düsseldorf, 27 July 1854 and 12 September 1854 in Letters from and to Joseph Joachim, 75 and 76.)
63 Fifield, The German Symphony, 280, citing Johannes Brahms to Julius Otto Grimm, Hanover, early February, 1857, in Johannes Brahms Briefwechseln, vol. 4: Johannes Brahms im Briefwechsel mit J.O. Grimm (Berlin: Deutsche Brahms-Gesellschaft, 1908), 49.
64 Albert Dietrich, Erinnerungen Johannes Brahms in Recollections of Johannes Brahms, 49–50. There is no known testimony from Brahms's circle regarding the fate of the other, ultimately rejected inner movement of Brahms's sonata, but Christopher Reynolds has argued for musical connections between both that movement and a possible, undocumented symphonic finale on the one hand and the third movements of both the finished Concerto and the Requiem on the other. (Reynolds, ‘A Choral Symphony’, 18–19). As for the sonata-symphony finale, despite the fact that Clara Schumann, Grimm and Deitrich all played or heard the work's first three movements, there is no suggestion that they, or anyone else, ever saw a final movement; Reynolds nonetheless suggests that ‘a fourth movement is clearly implied in Brahms's letter to Joachim (19 June 1854), which refers to playing the first three movements … and also in Clara's earlier diary entry (24 May 1854) about playing with Brahms “three movements of a sonata by him”’ (Reynolds, ‘A Choral Symphony’, 25n38, citing Dahlhaus, Johannes Brahms: Klavierkonzert Nr. 1, 3). Although one could easily argue that these passages suggest nothing more than Brahms's intention to complete a fourth movement, Reynolds suggests that at least a partial draft of such a movement may well have existed and, on the basis of musical parallels between movements of the finished Concerto and the third movement of the Requiem, argues (17) that ‘remains of Brahms's rejected [sonata-symphony] finale are most likely to exist’ in that Requiem movement and that, furthermore, Brahms's symphonic finale may have been intended as a choral finale for his would-be first symphony, an obvious nod to Beethoven's Ninth.)
65 It is perhaps worth mentioning that Grimm seems finally to have completed his Symphony in the period immediately following the completion, premiere and ensuing publicity and popularity of Brahms's Requiem. Like Dietrich, Grimm would certainly have recognized the Requiem's second movement as having derived from the earlier sonata-symphony movement, and it would be only natural if that called to mind for Grimm his own concurrent symphonic attempt and its associated funeral march. Brahms's having finally put his own Trauermarsch to good use in a successful requiem may have inspired Grimm to complete and publicize his own symphony. In the absence of further concrete evidence, this remains supposition, but the timing and known circumstances are at least worth considering.
66 Ultimately, Brahms goes Grimm one further in this regard by removing the movement from the work altogether and placing it in a much different musical and generic context.
67 As Fifield has noted, however, the third movements of the Grimm and Dietrich symphonies do have in common a featured hemiola effect (The German Symphony, 273).
68 On Brahms's difficulties in composing a finale for the work that would become his D-minor Piano Concerto, see for instance Reynolds, ‘A Choral Symphony’, 17. On Grimm's long labour with his own finale, see Ludwig, Julius Otto Grimm, 27.
69 Grimm's movement distinguishes itself structurally from the others through the inclusion of an additional statement of the refrain and first episode materials before the coda. Grimm's is the only symphonic movement and, as such, lacks the cadenza present at the comparable point in the other finales. The additional statements of the refrain and episode near the conclusion of the movement perhaps stand in for the bars of the cadenza, compensating in order to add additional substance to the conclusion of the movement.
70 Jerry Dubins, for example, writes that ‘Dietrich's D-minor Symphony is his second, completed towards the end of 1868’ (‘Dietrich Symphony in D. Violin Concerto. Introduction and Romance’, Fanfare: The Magazine for Serious Record Collectors (May/June 2009), 126); Don O'Connor (‘Symphony in D Minor; Violin Concerto; Introduction Romance’, 130) states that Dietrich's ‘first symphony is apparently lost’. Fifield (The German Symphony, 233), however, records that Dietrich ‘wrote a symphony in 1854, which was performed at Leipzig on 14 December that year, but neither score nor parts have survived’.
71 Pascall, ‘Dietrich, Albert (Hermann)’.
72 Raymond Knapp writes that Dietrich ‘contributed a D-minor symphony with overt connections to Brahms (performed 1854 and published 1876)’ (Knapp, Raymond, Brahms and the Challenge of the Symphony (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1997), 32Google Scholar). Evidence of some substantive difference between the 1854 work and the later one is suggested (but not confirmed definitively) by Dietrich's testimony (Recollections of Johannes Brahms, 18) that he conducted his ‘first symphony’ in Leipzig in 1854 and that it ‘remained in manuscript form’; it is unclear whether the later work constitutes a distinct ‘second symphony’ (and, if so, whether it may still draw, perhaps heavily, on the first, unpublished one) and whether the first work ‘remained in manuscript’ indefinitely or merely as of the 1854 performance in Leipzig. Dietrich indicates that the symphony he dedicated to Brahms was completed by 1869 (Recollections of Johannes Brahms, 73).
73 Ludwig, Julius Ottoe Grimm, 27.
74 Dietrich, Recollections of Johannes Brahms, 49; see also Reynolds, ‘A Choral Symphony’, 8.
75 Fifield, The German Symphony, 233.
76 Johannes Brahms to Clara Schumann, [Hamburg, after 15] October 1868, in Johannes Brahms, 369. Brahms seems to have been fonder of Dietrich's Violin Concerto (O'Connor, ‘Symphony in D Minor; Violin Concerto; Introduction Romance’, 130).
77 See, for example, reviews published in Leipzig's Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 4/10 (10 March 1869), 79 and 4/13 (31 March 1869), 102–3 of performances in Oldenburg and Bremen, respectively. Indeed, when the piece was performed at Frankfurt-am-Main in 1871, reviewers referred to it as ‘entirely new’ (The Musical World 49 (18 March 1871), 159 and Dwight's Journal of Music 31/1 (8 April 1871), 5). The work was published by 1870, when it was advertised in, for example, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (16 February 1870), 56.
78 See Dietrich, Recollections of Johannes Brahms, 72–3. The work was generally well-received. For contemporary reviews, see Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 4 /45 (10 November 1869), 358; Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 4/13 (31 March 1869), 102–3 (which reports that the Symphony, when conducted by the composer at Bremen, was ‘received with great applause and deserved to be described as prominent in our days’); H. D., ‘Sinfonie (in D-moll) von Albert Dietrich’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 6/18 (3 May 1871), 277–8; and H. D., ‘Sinfonie (in D-moll) von Albert Dietrich’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 6/17 (26 April 1871), 257–8, which reports on ‘the decisive and penetrating success which the Symphony of Dietrich has found’ upon its performances at Leipzig, Dresden, Cologne and elsewhere. Even negative reviews included some grudging praise; see Dwight's Journal of Music 31/1 (8 April 1871), 5. The work, despite having fallen into obscurity since, was apparently one of the most frequently performed new symphonies of the time (Dubins, ‘Dietrich Symphony in D. Violin Concerto. Introduction and Romance’, 126, citing Jürgen Pilch, liner notes for Albert Dietrich, Symphony, Violin Concerto, Introduction & Romance, Alexander Rumpf, Oldenburgisches Staatsorchester et al., CPO 777 314, 2008, 2 compact discs.)
79 Dietrich's second theme is motivically linked to the first. It begins with a lower-neighbour figure recalling that from the beginning of the movement.
80 For example, see Knapp, Brahms and the Challenge, 32 on the relationship of Brahms's D-minor Concerto (and also the Requiem) to Hans Huber's ‘Tell-Symphonie’ in D minor, Op. 63 (1881).