Brahms composed the Second Cello Sonata in his Swiss summer retreat at Thun in 1886. The extraordinarily productive month of August also saw the composition of his A major Violin Sonata, the C minor Piano Trio, and several songs. As he wrote the Cello Sonata, Brahms had in mind the masterful playing of Robert Hausmann, cellist of the Joachim Quartet. Hausmann’s ability to make anything sound good gave Brahms free rein to ignore certain idiomatic constraints and make technical demands, such as quick fingered tremolos on lower strings and uncharacteristic leaps.

Hausmann and Brahms gave the first public performance in Vienna on November 24 of that year. Though the work is now acclaimed as a masterpiece of Brahms’s later style combined with some of the ardent pathos of his youthful works, it received a sharply negative review by Hugo Wolf, a notorious Brahms detractor, which is famously quoted in English translation by Nicolas Slonimsky in his Lexicon of Musical Invective:

To write down, to print, to have performed anything like the new Cello Sonata by Herr Dr. Johannes Brahms and not to be infected by this madness is no longer a trifle—and upon my heart, I am beginning to acquire respect for myself. . . . What is then nowadays music, harmony, melody, rhythm, meaning, form, when this rigmarole seriously pretends to be regarded as music? If Herr Dr. Johannes Brahms intends to mystify his admirers with this newest work, if he wants to make fun of their brainless veneration, then it is of course something else, and we marvel at Herr Brahms as the greatest bluffer of this century and of all future millennia.

Dramatic leaps in the cello and tremolos and broken chords in the piano characterize the agitated main theme of the first movement. Tremolos for both instruments turn out to provide much of the texture of the movement. Brahms constantly and characteristically undermines the movement’s 3/4 meter, beginning as early as the seventh and eighth measures as the cello leaps into high register with a syncopated variant of a hemiola (two beats in the time of three).

The slow movement, with its singular marking Adagio affettuoso, is an unquiet and explosive one. One of its most surprising features is its key—F-sharp major, or the Neapolitan of the tonic F major, which led some biographers to suggest, without hard evidence, that this could have been the discarded slow movement of Brahms’s E minor Cello Sonata. Its unexpected harmonic manipulations, however, make it highly unlikely that Brahms could have written this movement twenty-one years earlier. Further, precedents do exist for unusual sequences of keys of movements—in the music of Haydn, for example, one of Brahms’s revered predecessors. Just as surprising is the secondary area in F minor. Prevalent in this movement but a rarity in Brahms’s works for solo strings is his frequent use of pizzicato (plucked strings) in high and low registers.

The stormy, shadowy scherzo contains one of Brahms’s most taxing piano parts. Elisabet von Herzogenberg, a fine amateur pianist from whom Brahms often sought reactions during this period, liked the work immensely, but said that she would need to hear Brahms himself play the difficult third movement. The melody of the contrasting trio section is one of Brahms’s most ravishing. Though the trio begins in F, it again touches briefly on the F-sharp major key of the preceding movement.

The finale relaxes the mood with a brief, cheerful rondo, into which Brahms slips one darker episode in minor that features sighing figures. Brahms recalls the rondo theme in G-flat major at its third appearance, surely a link to its enharmonic equivalent, F-sharp major, of the slow movement. Karl Geiringer’s examination of the original manuscript of the F major Cello Sonata (in the possession of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna) revealed that the last movement “seems to have been written with quite peculiar speed, as though the master could hardly write fast enough to put the rush of ideas on paper.” Such speed is entirely in keeping with that miraculously productive month of August.

—©Jane Vial Jaffe