Brahms: String Quartet No.1, Op.51 No.1

Introduction

Johannes Brahms's String Quartet No. 1 in C minor and String Quartet No. 2 in A minor were completed in Tutzing, Bavaria, during the summer of 1873, and published together that autumn as Op. 51. They are dedicated to his friend Theodor Billroth.

Composition

Brahms was slow in writing his first two string quartets. We know from a letter from Joseph Joachim that a C minor quartet was in progress in 1865, but it may not have been the same work that would become Op. 51 No. 1 in 1873. Four years before publication, however, in 1869, we know for certain that the two quartets were complete enough to be played through. But the composer remained unsatisfied. Years passed. New practice runs then occurred in Munich, probably in June 1873, and Brahms ventured south of the city to the small lakeside town of Tutzing for a summer respite. There, with the Würmsee (as Lake Starnberg was then called) and the Bavarian Prealps as backdrop, he put the finishing touches on the two quartets.

He was 40 years old at the time of publication. Brahms regarded the string quartet as a particularly important genre. He reportedly destroyed some twenty string quartets before allowing the two Op. 51 quartets to be published. At least one of the quartets (No. 1 in C minor) had been complete as early as 1865 but Brahms continued to revise it for nearly a decade.

Explaining his slow progress to a publisher in 1869, Brahms wrote that as Mozart had taken "particular trouble" over the six "beautiful" Haydn Quartets, he intended to do his "very best to turn out one or two passably decent ones." According to his friend Max Kalbeck, Brahms insisted on hearing a secret performance of the Op. 51 quartets before they were published, after which he substantially revised them.

During Brahms's lifetime, the string quartet, like the symphony, was a genre dominated by the compositions of Ludwig van Beethoven. In choosing the key of C minor for the first of his quartets, Brahms may have been seeking to acknowledge as well as break free from Beethoven's paralyzing^{[clarification needed]} influence, since Beethoven composed some of his greatest and most characteristic works in that key. (Brahms likewise chose the key of C minor for his First Symphony.)

Structure

The "terse", "tragic" String Quartet No. 1 in C minor is remarkable for its organic unity and for the harmonically sophisticated, "orchestrally inclined" outer movements that bracket its more intimate inner movements. Structurally and thematically, the first movement shows the influence of Schubert's Quartettsatz, D. 703, also in C minor. The quartet consists of four movements: