230. Perfectionist

The Concert - Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Works for strings by Brahms performed by A Far Cry on December 9, 2012 and Musicians from Marlboro on May 10, 2015.

• Johannes Brahms: Hungarian Rhapsody
• Brahms: String Quartet in C Minor, Op. 51, No. 1

Imagine if, before you published your first string quartet, you wrote and discarded twenty others? As the All Music Guide notes, in his entire compositional life, Brahms produced just three string quartets to Haydn’s 68, Mozart’s 23, and Beethoven’s 16. This is all the more striking if one considers Brahms’ relatively long lifespan of 63 years compared to, say, Mozart, who died at age 35.

We’ll hear Brahms’s first published quartet on our podcast today, the String Quartet No. 1 in C minor, in a performance by Musicians from Marlboro. It’s not hard to hear what made this piece so challenging to write. Brahms creates a quartet that is very tightly structured, with themes that recur throughout the length of the work, not just within the individual movements, and a carefully constructed harmonic architecture.

Before we dive into the quartet, though, we begin with a piece that shows Brahms’s lighter side: an orchestral version of his Hungarian Rhapsody, arranged for the chamber orchestra A Far Cry by their cellist Alastair Eng.