Day Fourteen: Analysis of Brahms 3

Brahms transforms this chordal music into one of the most exciting and thrilling symphonic climaxes of the 19th century.

This post is part of 14 Days of Harmony, a free course for musicians who want to deepen their understanding of harmony, and learn how to develop their connection with sound as a result. You can view the entire course here.

Always start with the biggest overview. 

When analyzing a piece, always try to keep the larger perspective in mind. In the moment of hearing the music, do so with your full spirit and attention and try and forget all of the rules. When going back to learn the piece at a deeper level, try to connect the details to the bigger picture, as we saw how to do in our last lesson.

The Brahms movement that we're looking at is a large piece of music, so we'll practice keeping a larger perspective by focusing on just the first minute of the last movement. We won't get too bogged down with details, and we're only applying what we know to try and hear the piece in a new way. 

Take a listen first, you can follow along with the full score as well, and then we'll dive into the analysis.

Opening of Brahms 3, Fourth Movement

Celibidache Munich Philharmonic 1979

High level thoughts from first listening. 🎧

It's clear from listening that the music on the large level of this excerpt appears to organize into two big sections. The first section is the opening material that has underlying harmony but the main parameter that guides the ear seems to be melodic. Then there is a contrasting passage with notes that move together in a more homogenous and chordal way, that have a solemn and almost prayerful quality to the harmony. 

Deep Dive Analysis of the first minute of Brahms 3rd Allegro: 

The opening melodic material

Figure 1. Here is a totally unconventional analysis of the Brahms but I hope that my explanation will help this image make sense. It reflects how I hear it. This piano reduction is itself a form of harmonic reduction of the original score. As you can see from bar 1 the harmony has to be inferred since, well, the music is in unison. Brahms begins this movement with a 4 bar melody that has an inner harmonic rhythm that changes once per bar. I labeled the harmony with Roman numerals just to indicate the feeling. For a true analysis of the opening material, the piece would require a more complicated melodic analysis since so much of what opens up later on can be found in the opening bars, but we'll save that for a discussion in a counterpoint course, which is considered a separate field of music theory.

The main idea is that the 4 bars breathe like a V-i-V-i cadence in F minor. You can confirm that since the notes on the first two downbeats are C and F. The next 4 bars, 5-8, open up a harmonic perspective; the orchestra is no longer in unison, we hear thirds and sixths, the stuff of our familiar tertian harmony. This time though, the 4 bar phrase ends on the C major chord; a true half cadence in F minor.

Starting on bar 9, we hear a variation of the first 4 bar phrase. Each element of the variation is a new contrast, and as you can see Brahms is applying several contrasts at once, which is typical during this period of high-Romanticism. But the way that Brahms introduces these contrasts is so unique and connected to what comes before that the contrasts are welcome by the ear. 

In bar 9 we hear the same exact notes as the beginning in the soprano but now it is one octave higher. We are also not going with the underlying harmony of the beginning, but introducing a much richer harmony by going to the submediant of F, Db major. Even though Brahms writes the same pitches, the melody on bar 9 is extended in time, a melodic augmentation, so that the motif that appeared on the downbeat of bar 2 is now on the third beat of bar 10 (the motif is labeled green in Figure 1). This kind of rhythmic displacement is very typical in the writing of Brahms, where he achieves a music that almost feels upside down. The melodic balance is gained back by extending the same motif (light blue) in the variation melody again so that the concluding phrase is as it first appears, on the downbeat (purple). 

Let's again at the extension. From the beginning until bar 9, we've only heard F minor (tonics and dominants) but very suggestively; not a single tonic chord was played and only the harmony of C major comes in at bar 8 for the half cadence. By hearing the notes of the beginning again, Brahms gives the hint of stability but that actually makes the extension over Db highly musical, because he gives time for the ear to hear the change. The extension that introduces the Db major chord is followed with a Bb minor 7th chord and an E major, which all points to Ab major (IV, ii7, and V respectively in Ab major). Ab major is the stable mediant of F minor, and is the parallel major, so it makes sense as to how Brahms has moved to this harmonic region so quickly. The second melodic extension starts on Ab major, instead of the dominant of F minor, clearly developed from the beginning, and now introduces another contrasting harmony, the remote chord of Gb major. Gb major isn't really in the key of Ab major, but it is the Neapolitan (bII) of F minor. The Gb is followed up by the G diminished chord and a C major chord, hinting much more strongly at a bII-iiº-V-i cadence in F minor. But, we don't ever get the resolution and confirmation of F minor, still, our phrase ends on C major. This time, the C major doesn't feel like a half cadence, the C major feels more stronger than that. It has been tonicized and strengthened by its own dominant of G major (measure 17).

The Contrasting Chordal Passage

This special passage appears almost out of nowhere. The vague suggestions of Ab major and F minor from the beginning unfolded through the churning strings and distant winds, but now with the entrance of the brass, like a signal, Brahms indicates that something new is coming. 

In my reduction and analysis, I indicate everything that came before measure 18 with a simple C major chord (in parenthesis). This summarizes the opening and also represents the harmony that comes just before this passage. 

Connecting us from the churning beginning to this stable chordal music are just 2 notes, Eb. It itself is different from anything that is in C major (C-E-G), but immediately we hear a new note to go with the Eb, Ab: a new fifth, and a familiar one, one that was strongly hinted at in the opening bars, as we saw. The step from C major to Ab major feels like an introverted step, as we remember from our study of the intervals.