ExclusiveBrahms: 3 Intermezzo, Op. 117 No. 3

【Classical music and nature 古典音樂小站】Johannes Brahms: 3 Intermezzo, Op. 117 no. 3. This beautiful piece was preserved by European Archive. It has Creative Commons license (Public Domain Mark 1.0 Universal) and is provided through www.musopen.org.

The most commonly used term is also characteristic of late Brahms: Intermezzo. As it were in passing, between the lines, without claiming anything so important, the ageing Brahms wanted to express himself. His Viennese critic friend Eduard Hanslick once remarked that in Brahms's late chamber music the scherzo gives way to the intermezzo. In the piano music, too, the waves (seem to) smooth out, while at the same time a deep melancholy creeps in.

It is the monologue of a lonely man that Brahms put down on paper here. From Bad Ischl, in the summer of 1892, he wrote to Eusebius Mandyczewski, the librarian of the Musikfreunde in Vienna, asking him to send him 'a 24-36 landscape format for piano', i.e. the horizontal music paper then popular for piano pieces. That year he completed the Fantasies, Op. 116, and the Intermezzi, Op. 117.
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Brahms also took the presumed motto for No. 3, ‘O weh! o weh, hinab ins Tal’ (Alas! Alas, down into the valley), from Herder's cycle of folk poetry. In any case, the lines of Herder's translation can easily be applied to the beginning of the piece: a laboriously winding melody that revolves around the third of the C-sharp minor chord.

Regarding the performance of the Intermezzi, op. 117, Clara Schumann remarked: ‘The pieces are not difficult in terms of dexterity, but the intellectual technique they contain requires a fine understanding, and one must be very familiar with Brahms to play them as he intended.’ Source: kammermusikfuehrer.de)

Brahms was very fond of Switzerland, particularly of Thun and the region around its lake, often finding musical inspiration on his long hikes here.

The video was captured at Lake Thun, Switzerland by Christian Schlegel. It was edited by Wenjing Ma.



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