Johannes Brahms / photo by unknown photographer, 1872

Revised July 2, 2022

Johannes Brahms composed his Second Symphony during the summer of 1877, on the shores of an Austrian lake. Its cheerful, bucolic nature has caused some people to call it Brahms’ “Pastoral” symphony. Unlike Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, however, Brahms made no attempt to describe birdsong, storm, or any other aspect of nature.

Of his four symphonies, the Second remained his personal favorite. Hans Richter and the Vienna Philharmonic premiered it on December 20, 1877. 

The stormy and dramatic first symphony took Brahms an agonizing 15 years to complete. The warm and lyrical Second Symphony flowed easily from his pen only a year later. As he wrote to Eduard Hanslick, “So many melodies fly about that one must be careful not to step on them.”

Setting up false expectations

The Viennese public expected Brahms to follow his first symphony with something similar. He enjoyed setting up false expectations. He wrote to his publisher Fritz Simrock, “The new symphony is so melancholy that you will not be able to bear it. I have never written anything so sad, so minorish: the score must appear with a black border.”

Brahms also enjoyed teasing friends about the progress of his works with misleading comments. He told one, friend that the orchestra would play “with crepe bands on their sleeves because of its dirge-like effect.”

To his friend Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, he wrote,

The new symphony, too, is merely a Sinfonie, and I shall not need to play it to you beforehand. You have only to sit down to the piano, put your small feed on the two pedals in turn, and strike the chord of F minor several times in succession, first in the treble, then in the bass (ff and pp), and you will gradually gain a vivid impression of my “latest.”

To another friend he wrote, “I do not know if I have a pretty symphony; I must inquire of learned persons.” This last comment refers to hostile critics, who promptly pronounced the new symphony disagreeably intellectual, cold-blooded, wearisome, and altogether something to avoid.

Complaints of Wagnerian critics

Immaculata Symphony Orchestra / Jim, the Photographer via Flickr https://www.flickr.com/photos/jcapaldi/6319700790/in/photostream/

Here are a couple of reviews from Nicolas Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective:

From Dwight’s Journal of Music, March 15, 1879, probably copied from a German review:

We do not find ourselves at all alone in saying that the Second Symphony of Brahms does not improve upon acquaintance. There is a certain feebleness, a sugar-and-water character in the subject matter of the themes; and when it comes to the working up, it is done with an unstinted use of contrapuntal means . . . It is fragmentary and disjointed; the rhythm and the tempo and thoughts themselves are continually changing without warning and apparently without reason; and there is nothing like development or continuity.

From W.F. Apthorp’s review in the Boston Courier, January 11, 1879

I have studied the second movement of the Second Symphony of Brahms with the greatest attention. Well! I have not the faintest idea what the composer means. . .  It seems as if it were only by the greatest effort that Brahms could firmly fix his own conception. Whatever he writes, he seems to have to force music out of his brain as if by hydraulic pressure . . . It would take a year to really fathom the Second Symphony, and a year of severe intellectual work, too. One would only like to be a little more sure that such effort would be repaid.

Even critics normally favorable to Brahms’ music were disappointed that he had not tried to reproduce the thunder of his first symphony. The audience at the premiere in Vienna had probably not studied the reviews. Since they didn’t have the benefit of knowing what the learned critics thought, they received the new work enthusiastically.

Brahms as a symphonist

A bust of Johannes Brahms in the palace gardens in Detmold / Bernd Sieker via Flickr.  Brahms lived and worked in this small town for a couple of years.

While his contemporaries labored to construct programmatic movements and clever ways to link them, Brahms still worked with clear divisions between movements. All four of his symphonies begin and end with weighty, monumental movements.

Although he has a reputation for never going beyond Beethoven, he did not adhere to Beethoven’s method of handling sonata form. He imbued it with variation techniques and a non-Lisztian thematic transformation.

His inner movements in the first three symphonies all adhere to a simple three-part song form. The outer sections have only one theme. The middle sections provide harmonic and thematic contrast.

The third movements in particular show that Brahms was no imitator of Beethoven. They’re not quite scherzos. They have a little of the character of a minuet or ländler, but they’re not quite dance movements.

The Second Symphony

In a sense, Brahms was correct when he characterized the Second Symphony as a Sinfonie, although the chord of F minor has nothing to do with it. On the surface, at least, it is a profusion of pretty melodies, one following on the heels of another. It is almost unrelentingly cheerful and sunny.

Almost.

Clara Schumann noted the somber mood in parts of the first movement, when the timpani roll like roaring thunder and the trombones play somber chords.

When Vinzenz Lachner asked Brahms why he darkened such a cheerful symphony in this way, Brahms wrote back. In his letter, he referred to another notable work he completed that summer, a motet that raises existential questions about the misery of life: “Warum ist das Licht gegeben dem Mülseligen?” (“Why Is the Light Given to the Wretched?”)

I have to confess that I am a severely melancholic person, that black wings are constantly flapping above us, and that in my output – perhaps not entirely by chance – that symphony [the Second] is followed by a little essay about the great ‘Why.’ If you don’t know this, I will send it to you. It casts the necessary shadow on the serene symphony and perhaps accounts for those timpani and trombones.

Beneath the sunny surface is the Brahmsian intellect. Note that he called it a necessary shadow. Too much cheer could easily have made the piece trite. The second movement is pensive, philosophical, and the most “difficult” of the four to comprehend.

Brahms derived his melodies from a very few germ motives and placed them in a complex contrapuntal web. These two aspects complement each other. The beauty of the melodies keeps the complexity from becoming bewildering—at least to anyone but Wagnerian critics. The complexity rescues the melodies from mere surface prettiness.