Symphony #1 Theme (Fourth Movement): A Song History

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Johannes Brahms took the better part of two decades to finish his first symphony; accounts place its beginnings in sketches of the 1850s or in the early 1860s, and he completed the score in September 1876.[1][2] Even in the early 1870s, with the opening movement already done, he told the conductor Hermann Levi that he would never write a symphony.[3] The work was first heard on 4 November 1876 in Karlsruhe, under Otto Dessoff, a venue Brahms preferred to Vienna and its exacting critics.[1][2]

Watercolor of a deep Alpine valley with sheer blue-grey cliffs and mountains on either side.

John Ruskin, The Valley of Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland, watercolor, gouache, pen and brown ink, ca. 1866. The valley of Lauterbrunnen in the Bernese Alps, from which Brahms sent Clara Schumann the first form of the finale's horn call in 1868; the watercolor has no connection to the symphony.

The theme dulcimer players know from the fourth movement is the broad, hymn-like C major melody that the strings take up after the finale's slow introduction.[1][2][3] That introduction builds toward a horn call whose first form Brahms had sent to Clara Schumann from the Bernese Alps in 1868 as a birthday greeting.[2][3] The main tune drew comparison with the Ode to Joy in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony; the critic Eduard Hanslick pointed out the likeness, and Brahms, when it was raised with him, replied that "any ass could see" it.[1][2][3] The conductor and pianist Hans von Bülow went further and dubbed the whole work "Beethoven's Tenth."[1]

The symphony reached New York under Leopold Damrosch on 15 December 1877, and it has since come to rank among the central symphonies of the Austro-German repertoire.[1][2] Shelley Stevens sets the finale's theme for solo mountain dulcimer in DAD tuning in Classical Music For Mountain Dulcimer, a Fingers Of Steel collection of twenty-six intermediate classical pieces written out in both standard notation and tablature.[4]

Our book that contains the song "Symphony #1 Theme (Fourth Movement)"

Sources

  1. Encyclopaedia Britannica: "Symphony No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 68".
  2. Boston Symphony Orchestra: "Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Opus 68".
  3. Berliner Philharmoniker: "Symphony No. 1 in C minor, op. 68".
  4. Fingers Of Steel: "Shelley Stevens, Classical Music For Mountain Dulcimer".
  5. Image: John Ruskin, The Valley of Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland, watercolor, gouache, pen and brown ink, ca. 1866. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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