Sunday Night Special … Johannes Brahms’ Symphony No. 4

Hello Everyone, my name is Peter Cudlipp. Welcome to another in the occasional series of extra episodes of the Classical For Everyone podcast. Episodes which I call Sunday Night Specials.

The name comes from the night of the week when for some of us, insomnia hits the hardest… and for me, and I hope for you, getting lost in some music is a much better thing to do than stare at the ceiling or at a phone screen.

Now I’m not choosing the music with the hope that it will send you to sleep, though it’s fine if it does… this is music to keep you company.  And of course this series is for everyone… but it is perhaps intended a little more for those of you whose sleep has been troubled.

The idea of the special is to play you just one piece, uninterrupted and in its entirety… with a few minutes of background explained at the end of the episode… if you’re interested. But the main thing is to get straight into the music.

Here now is Johannes Brahms Fourth Symphony written in 1885. It is in four parts and is about 39 minutes long. And this recording is from 2021 and it is the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra conducted by Manfred Honeck.

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I hope you enjoyed that performance of Johanes Brahms Fourth Symphony written in 1885. That performance was by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra conducted by Manfred Honeck.

And now here are a few minutes of background for you. And I have to thank my AI pal Claude for the legwork that I am basing this on.

Johannes Brahms completed his Fourth Symphony in the summer of 1885. He was fifty-two years old — not yet old, but conscious of age, conscious of legacy, and conscious of the long shadow cast by Beethoven over every composer who dared to write a symphony in the second half of the nineteenth century. He had waited until he was forty-three to complete his First, so paralysed was he by that shadow. By the Fourth, he had made his peace with it — or perhaps more accurately, he had decided to walk directly into it.

He showed the score to friends before its premiere, as was his habit, playing through it on the piano with the conductor Hans von Bülow. The response was uncertain. The Brahmsian inner circle — people who admired him deeply — struggled with it. Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, one of his most trusted correspondents, found it austere to the point of coldness. Even von Bülow, who had championed Brahms with something close to religious fervour, was unsure. Brahms himself seems to have expected this. He wrote to a friend that he feared the symphony might taste ‘cool, somewhat bleak, not quite welcoming’.

The premiere in October 1885, with Brahms conducting his own work, was a qualified success. The audience applauded warmly enough, and the third movement — that sudden burst of uncomplicated energy — brought the house to its feet. But the work as a whole unsettled people. It was dark in a way that felt deliberate. It withheld what symphonies were expected to provide.

What Brahms had done, in the finale especially, was extraordinary and in some ways almost perverse. He had taken a form from the Baroque — the passacaglia, a set of variations over a repeating bass line — and used it to close a Romantic symphony. The bass line itself he borrowed from Bach's cantata ‘Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich’. "For you, Lord, I long" — or more literally, "After you, Lord, I yearn."

He was reaching back two centuries, past Beethoven, past Mozart, almost to a pre-Classical world, as if to say: this is where music comes from, and this is where it returns. The finale has the quality of an inevitable conclusion — something being worked out, exhausted, and finally released, rather than triumphantly resolved.

The critical reception over time has been almost entirely one of deepening reverence. Its reputation grew steadily and has never seriously faltered. But it has attracted, alongside the reverence, a persistent undertow of melancholy in how people talk about it — because it was the last. Brahms never wrote another symphony. Whether that was a considered decision, a loss of confidence, or simply a recognition that there was nothing left to say in that form after this, nobody has ever quite been able to determine.

He wrote chamber music, songs, the late piano pieces — works of extraordinary inwardness — but the symphonic voice went silent.

There is something in that silence which echoes the symphony itself. The passacaglia does not end with a shout. It ends with an accumulation of weight that eventually becomes stillness. And then there is nothing more.

My name is Peter Cudlipp and I hope you enjoyed this Sunday Night Special of the ‘Classical For Everyone’ podcast. There will be a regular episode in the next few days and another Sunday Night Special in perhaps a few weeks. Thanks for listening.