Although Johannes Brahms was just 50 when he composed his Third Symphony, he looked back to younger days with the musical quotation of the motto “Frei aber froh” (“Free but happy”) which was his defiant response to his friend Joseph Joachim’s Frei aber einsam (“Free but lonely”).
Brahms remained single throughout his lifetime, despite a number of infatuations and an especially close relationship with Clara Schumann – both before and after the sad death of her husband Robert at age 46.
We know that the composer wrote the Symphony quickly, in the summer of 1883 in Wiesbaden, working in a rented studio with a view of the Rhine valley. The dramatic aspects of the Third Symphony, the shortest of the four Brahms wrote, are intensified by the compactness of this work.
The F-A-F motif is heard immediately in the rising exclamation from the winds that opens this passionate work.
Between the powerful first movement and the similarly exciting finale, Brahms inserted two more relaxed movements, which some claim are based on sketches for an abandoned Faust project from a few years earlier.
Brahms was a natural pianist who started playing in public as a teenager in Hamburg’s waterfront pubs. His music combines the serious and the playful, the intellectual and the earthy in a way that reminded many of his contemporaries of Beethoven.
There is a mastery apparent in everything Brahms composed, from his charming piano miniatures to his majestic symphonies.
Here is Herbert Blomstedt to speak with you about Brahms’ Third (fast forward to end the Dutch introduction):
