Classical Music | Violin Music

Recorded on 05/12/2010, uploaded on 09/02/2010

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Scherzo for Violin and Piano in C Minor, WoO posth.2       Johannes Brahms

Johannes Brahms composed the Scherzo for violin and piano in April 1853. The work originated from an idea that a "surprise" composition should be given to the famous violinist Joseph Joachim when he came to Düsseldorf to give the premiere performance of another composer, Robert Schumann's Fantasy, Op. 131. Schumann himself wrote an intermezzo and finale, Albert Dietrich offered the first movement and Brahms supplied the scherzo movement. The composers dubbed the project F. A. E. Sonata; after the phrase that Joachim had taken as his personal motto: Frei aber einsam ("Free but alone").

The Scherzo is written in a traditional three-part form. The opening section is of stormy character where short rhythmic elements are combined with emotional and chromatic legato lines. The middle section is based on a beautiful lyrical theme in C Major. After the return to the first section, the Scherzo ends with a grand and majestic coda. Although Brahms was only twenty years old when he wrote this piece, the music already bore many of the characteristics that appeared in his mature works: rich harmonic vocabularies, insistent rhythmic vitality, a clear sense of the development of the motive, and use of full textures.      Korbinian Altenberger

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.