Johannes Brahms had worked on and off for fifteen years to complete his first symphony, but the second took him only four months. He wrote it in a small village by a beautiful lake, and he was apparently inspired by the setting.
“The melodies fly so thick here,” he wrote to a friend, that you have to be careful not to step on one.” The Second Symphony has been called Brahms’s Pastoral Symphony, and it’s easy to hear it as a wonderfully spirited, joyful work. But Brahms biographer Jan Swofford has pointed out that the symphony is filled with shadows and ambiguities, and Swofford tells us that after Brahms finished the piece, he wrote to his publisher saying, “The new symphony is so melancholy that you can’t stand it. I have never written anything so sad, so minorish: the score must appear with a black border.” The Brahms Symphony No. 2: premiered in Vienna, on this date, December 30, in 1877.
A Minute with Miles – a production of South Carolina Public Radio, made possible by the J.M. Smith Corporation.
