In the 19th century, composers rarely if ever used different time signatures in the same piece, but Brahms was a rhythmic rascal and his cross rhythms are legion, which is one reason Schoenberg admired him so much.) (A quick word about the rhythm here: the time signature says three beats to a measure, but this main theme falls precisely in four beats. So it’s no surprise that his first sextet begins with a cello singing tenderly the main theme. As we know from his orchestral music, Brahms reveled in the gutsy strength and soulful expressiveness of the lower instruments. The appeal to Brahms of a string sextet was based, one supposes, on the possibilities presented by the deep sonority of its two cellos and two violas playing off the soprano brilliance of two violins. As was his life-long friendship with Joachim It was Joachim who made possible Brahms’ introduction to the Schumanns – Robert and his pianist wife Clara – a relationship that was crucial to his career and his life. But his debt to Reményi didn’t stop there, for it was he who introduced the young composer to Joseph Joachim who, although only two years older than Brahms, was at age 21 already a famous artist, known from the time he was 13 when he played the Beethoven Violin Concerto under Mendelssohn’s baton. At the elbow of this brilliant player, young Johannes learned much about the instrument’s technique and capabilities and, as a bonus, came to know and love the Hungarian music Reményi always included on his programs. When he was only 17 he went on the road as accompanist to the Hungarian violinist Eduard Reményi. The most accessible of the strings, the violin, was not Brahms’ personal instrument, but he came to understand it in a very personal way, in an almost hands-on way. Don’t look for a logical explanation the ways of this ever-cautious creative genius are wonderfully mysterious. And he composed his only violin concerto a year before turning out a sonata for violin and piano. He certainly did very well by the violin and cello in the B-major Piano Trio when he was barely 20, in 1853, but he found it easier to combine six strings, which he did in two sextets just a few years later, than he did in the Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven-proven string quartet, which he didn’t venture until about 1865, well after the sextets. Strange as it may seem, Johannes Brahms clearly had a hang up when it came to writing for strings.
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