Brahms’s Op. 76 cycle: An entangled ending to an entangled story

This cycle is the ultimate anti-programmatic work. Unlike Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt, and even Chopin, many of whose works were accompanied by extramusical ideas, Brahms was somewhat averse to programmatic music, in a century musically defined by works such as Pictures at an Exhibition, Zarathustra, and the New World Symphony. In the midst of all these great programmatic works, Brahms found an almost materialistic oasis of self-describing music. Unhindered by any extramusical ideas, Brahms’s Op. 76 cycle finds its own path, writes its own plot, and declares its own endings. And that is precisely what we love so much about Brahms.

Brahms’s Op. 76 cycle: A study in idleness?

Although we normally don’t associate such writing with Brahms, I actually think that he mastered the concept of music in stasis like no other composer has, and that he made it into a “special corner” of his. The serenity of the music notwithstanding, we hear in it a radical shift in rhetoric, where stasis takes the place of movement. We are used to having the music be defined by where it goes; now it is defined by how it stays.