After the Fourth Symphony Brahms wrote only one more work in which he
employed the orchestra, the double concerto for violin and 'cello.
Thenceforth until his death his creative activity was devoted to chamber
music, piano compositions, and songs for chorus or for solo voice.
This concerto he composed at Thun in Switzerland during the summer of
1887. To Elisabeth von Herzogenberg he referred to it in a letter of
July 20: "I can give you nothing worth calling information about the
undersigned musician. True, he is now writing down something that does
not figure in his catalogue--but neither does it figure in other
persons'! I leave you to guess the particular form of idiocy."
The "particular form" Walter Niemann calls an experiment in the revival
of the old Italian orchestral concerto, the "concerto grosso" of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so signally illustrated by Handel
and Bach, in which the orchestral tutti of the concerto grosso is
contrasted with a concertino for a group of soloists.
But here Brahms was experimenting also with a curious concertino
consisting of a violin and a 'cello and with unaccustomed combinations
of instrumental timbres. In effect his concerto grosso is distinctly
late Brahms and a far cry from the concerto grosso of musical antiquity.
Hardly was the double concerto completed before it was performed
privately at the Baden-Baden Kurhaus, Brahms conducting and Joachim and
Robert Hausmann, a distinguished 'cellist, playing the solo instruments.
The same artistic confraternity took part in the first public
performance, on October 18, 1887, at Cologne. On a copy of the work that
Brahms presented to Joachim he wrote: "To him for whom it was written."
The first movement (Allegro, A minor, 4-4) opens with an introductory
passage in which the orchestra alludes to the chief subject and the
'cello follows with a rhapsodic recitative. The woodwind give out in A
major the initial phrase of the second subject. Both subjects are heard
in the first tutti. A rising syncopated theme in F major is also to be
carefully noted.
The slow movement (Andante, D major, 3-4) is described by Niemann as
"most lovely ... a great ballade, steeped in the rich, mysterious tone
of a northern evening atmosphere." Four notes for the horns and woodwind
bring on the flowing chief melody
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broadly sung by the solo instruments in octaves.
The finale (Vivace non troppo, A minor, 4-4), which has been called the
"clearest of rondo types," abounds in thematic material. The first
subject
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announced by the 'cello and repeated by the violin, has the gypsy flavor
so dear to Brahms. It can be detected in another melody assigned to the
clarinets and bassoons against rising arpeggios by the solo instruments,
which is prominent in the development. The coda, tender at first and
then exuberantly joyous, concludes the double concerto, and at the same
time the composer's employment of the orchestra, in a triumphant A
major.