Nikolaus Harnoncourt talks to Walter Dobner.

Walter Dabney: Herr Harnancourt, it is striking, is it not, that Brahms completed his four symphonies within the space of barely a decade, a period that, even so, amounts to about a quarter of his entire creative career. If you also include the period of nearly a decade and a half that he needed to complete his First Symphony, you end up with a total of twenty-five years during which the symphony was one of Brahms's main concerns as a composer.
Nikolaus Harnoncourt: It’s a matter of some amazement that there were only four symphonies in the end. There is no doubt that the enormously protracted genesis of the First Symphony was bound up with Brahms’s mental outlook. He must have been very precise as a musician and artist and must have worked with what I am tempted to call “Gothic precision". I am reminded of statues in Gothic churches on which the sculptor has elaborated every last detail even in those areas that you can be absolutely certain will never be seen, A Baroque artist would never do that but would simply nail on a couple of wood mouldings. I see a certain similarity between this Gothic perfection and Brahms's attitude to his work. This meticulousness, this scrupulousness, this sense of "Is that really what I meant?“ - it is this that always strikes me as so North German about him. As a result, it is really not possible to say with ultimate certainty whether what appeared in print under Brahms’s extremely careful supervision was his final word on the subject or whether it was only for some other, more practical reason that he departed from his earlier version.

If we could take a closer look at the genesis of the First Symphony, which finally received its first performance in Karlsruhe on 4 November 1876, it is curious that Brahms had already completed the original version of the symphony's first movement when he told the conductor Hermann Levi: "I'll never write a symphony." Equally remarkable and widely discussed are the numerous references to Beethoven contained in this piece.
We also know that Brahms felt a sense of despair at the thought of Beethoven's spirit standing at his shoulder and shaking his head at every note that he wrote. At the same time, Brahms couldn’t bear to be told by everyone that his First Symphony was "Beethoven’s Tenth". He didn’t like it, even though he had done everything to ensure that people felt like that.

It was the conductor Hans von Bülow who rnade this remark about "Beethovens Tenth", but you’d agree, I think, that it has done more harm than good In the work's reception history.
Undoubtedly. But I do believe that the major influence here was Schumann - not Clara, but Robert. I see very many parallels between them and regard Schumann almost as a mentor here.

One of the first people to get to know the C minor Symphony was Clara Schumann, and it is she who is reported to have said: “I miss the melodic drive, however thoughtful the writing is otherwise." In saying this, she was expressing a belief to which many people would still subscribe today: Brahms - they argue - had few ideas, but the few that he had he invariably developed to rnasterly effect. Do you share this opinion?
The term "idea" always makes one think of melodic ideas. But for a composer with an eye for the past, melodic ideas were not at all important, they could be picked up anywhere. It was only during the compositional process that the real work began, when the initial idea was developed. One of the most radical examples of this is Beethoven. I doubt whether anyone would describe Beethoven’s melodic ideas as anything to get worked up about: presumably even he himself found them of minimal interest. And the same is true, I think, of Brahms. When Brahms was working on his Second Symphony on the Wörthersee, he commented enthusiastically on Carinthian tunes. As all Carinthians know, their country is full of tunes which, however banal, are none the less very moving. Not that I’m suggesting that Brahms had to go to Carinthia in search of his tunes. It would be wrong to look for melodic ideas in Brahms. What matters is that the themes that he finally found and the things that he does with those themes are really quite magnificent. The way in which Brahms constructs and fashions his slow movements out of virtually nothing is incredible!

It's interesting that even in his First Symphony Brahms is already fully developed as a symphonic composers. The main action takes place in the two outer movements, there is no scherzo and the two middle movements are intermezzo-like in character.
The middle movements have always been criticised. Brahms himself finally began to have doubts about their effectiveness and kept changing their order. For my own part, I see in these two inner movements essential aspects of his symphonies in general. The opening movement and the finale obviously both leave a deep impression and were presumably Brahms’s principal concern, but, at the same time, it is impossible not to marvel at the total originality of these middle movements, which do not really reflect the Classical view of the symphony and where it is not at all clear which of them Brahms saw as a substitute scherzo.

You have already alluded to the fact that Brahms had barely sent off his First Symphony to his publisher, Fritz Simrock, at the end of May 1877 before he started work on his Second Symphony, most of which was written in Pörtschach on the Wörthersee. “The Wörthersee is virgin soil, there are melodies everywhere," Brahms told his friend, Eduard Hanslick. But when he sent off the score to his publisher in November 1877, it was with the words: “The new symphony is so melancholy that you won't be able to bear it." How would you yourself characterise the basic mood of this ”Pörtschach Symphony", which is often seen as a serenely relaxed and lyrical counterpart to the C minor Symphony?
I think that, intentionally or by chance, Brahms - like Beethoven - wrote his symphonies in pairs. It’s like a conversation between two intelligent, like-minded friends. One of them says something, and then the other - even if he agrees with it - will begin by expressing his doubts. Only after a lengthy discussion, during which their own positions may not even be represented but may be replaced by something almost amounting to role-playing, do they reach a conclusion. That, in my own view, is the aim of any discussion. And this is very much the situation in which any composer inevitably finds himself whenever he works on a piece since he is always having to take decisions. From this point of view, it seems to me entirely reasonable that a composer setting out to write another symphony should produce a companion piece designed to counterbalance his first. This is the case with all four of Brahms’s symphonies. I believe that they were designed in pairs, as, indeed, were Beethoven's -think of the Fifth and Sixth, on the one hand, and the Seventh and Eighth on the other.

The most interesting section of the Second Symphony is arguably the third movement, a five-part Allegretto grazioso based on a single thematic cell. The German musicologist Constantin Floros has compared it with an early Baroque suite.
This third movement is very similar to a section of a suite. Brahms’s recourse to early Baroque and Renaissance elements is an important aspect of his symphonies and reveals him as the avid library-user that he was. In the Fourth, for example, I can hear Gabrieli - in the second movement. And I sense Henry Purcell in the Haydn Variations. Also, Brahms took an intense interest in French Baroque music and even had special characters cast, since he thought that the signs that Couperin used for the ornaments in his own works could not be realised by any of the other signs in use in Brahms’s day. The third movement of his Second Symphony is a kind of derivative fast minuet. It was clear to Brahms that a minuet could be a very slow, stately dance movement, like the famous minuet in Mozart's Don Giovanni, but that it could also be terrifically fast, like the scherzos in Beethoven's symphonies. (These last-named movements do not, however, come from nowhere, but are modelled on late passepied minuets.) The opening movement of the Second Symphony is likewise a kind of minuet. This similarity between the movements was not unimportant for Brahms. It seems to me that he would write a whole symphony around a single idea.

Another remarkable aspect of this Allegretto grazioso is its instrumentation: Brahms dispenses not only with trumpets, trombones and bass tuba here but also with the timpani.
Even more remarkable, it seems to me, is the fact that Brahms uses a bass tuba at all here, but the reason for this, I think, is the second movement, the theme of which takes off in the third bar with a chorale-like passage that Brahms underscores by means of tuba and trombones. For me, this suggests not only that Brahms wanted to express a sense of awesomeness here but also that he did not have access to what were then the brand-new, large-bore trombones and tubas, since it is impossible to obtain a proper balance with these newer instruments. I may say that I think that the beginning of this Adagio non troppo is always played too loudly, since people no longer understand Brahms’s dynamics: pf means poco forte, which is very close to piano. The presto sections in the third movement are like the trios in a minuet and, as with the Menuetto from the First Brandenburg Concerto, are all in different time-signatures. I do not regard this Allegretto grazioso as a Baroque suite, but as a group of movements or, to put it in more concrete terms, as a minuet with the usual trios, as you often find in French Baroque music - in Marais, for example.

The Third Symphony was completed in Wiesbaden in 1883 - the year in which Wagner died and Bruckner completed his Seventh Symphony - and it encouraged Clara Schumann to wax particularly effusive: "What a work, what poetry, the most harmonious mood runs through it all, all the movements are part of a unified whole, pulsating with life, every movement a jewel." Antonín Dvořák, too, thought very highly of the piece. None the less, the F major Symphony continues - incornprehensibly - to be overshadowed by the composer's other symphonies.
I couldn’t agree with you more. For me, it’s a central work. As for Brahms’s comments to his publisher and friends, I`ll say only that, in my own view, he was a bit of a lad - as both man and artist - and that he enioyed misleading people. When he announced his symphonies and described what they would be like, everyone expected something very specific, but what emerged was always very different. His Italian performance markings in his autograph scores similarly remind me of student jokes - he would invariably write smorzando with schm- for example, suggesting affinities with the German verb "to roast or swelter”.

Brahms was fifty when he wrote his Third Symphony. Fifty is an age when people often take stock of their lives, and this may well have been the case with Brahms, too. Certainly, it is striking that the opening movements central motif consists of the notes F-A flat-E, a motif which writers on Brahms have sometimes seen as a minor-key variant of the young Brahms's motto, F-A-E, "Frei, aber einsam” - "free, but lonely".
To be honest, that had never occurred to me. You’re the first person to tell me that. For a work to begin in F major but for the major tonality to be immediately clouded by the introduction of the minor third is, of course, unusual, but the sequence F-A flat-F really becomes interesting only when the A finally enters. I think Brahms had far more feel for tonality than the vast majority of composers at that time. This was the result not so much of the pitch and state of the instruments as of the purity of the chords. To be banal, F major reminds me of Christmas. It is what we strive for: perfect happiness, purity, beauty. When the very second chord in a symphony in F major introduces a note of pain and does so, moreover, in such a subtle way, then that, for me, is where the heart of that work is to be found. It is the way in which Brahms finally reaches the note A with the F major chord at the end of the final movement that makes this work, for me, one of the most beautiful and overwhelming in all music. No less interesting about Clara Schumann's remark is that the work is "a unified whole". More than in any other symphony, Brahms seems to have taken up Schumann's idea of ensuring that the movements form a single entity. He even goes a stage further in that all four movements are not only closely interrelated in terms of their tonalities but also motivically interconnected. Normally, I would not attach much importance to such considerations, but in this particular case, all the movements are related to F major and to that extent form a unified whole. Moreover, the final note of one movement is always the first note of the next. By way of comparison, it is worth recalling that in the case of the First Symphony the last three movements all begin on the third of the chord with which the previous movement ends.

If we can turn now to the Fourth Symphony which was first performed in Meiningen on 25 October 1885, Brahms once said: "The thing that people call 'invention', in other words, a genuine idea, is, as it were, a farm of higher inspiration, which means that there is nothing I can do about it." A good example of this is his conception of the first movement of this symphony which is based, in essence, on the idea of a descending third, but equally symptomatic in this respect is its final movement, a passacaglia, the theme of which is combined with the final chorus from Bach's cantata BWV 150, Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich.
As before, the Fourth's finale reminds me of French Baroque music. Whatever influence Bach’s cantata may have had on this final movement, the passacaglia’s set of variations, the varied instrumentation and timesignatures and even its dramaturgical structure are closely modelled on opera finales by Rameau and Marais, in other words, on music written during the first half of the l8th century and thoroughly familiar to Brahms. There were presumably various reasons for this: there may have been lots of scores by French composers in the libraries to which Brahms had access; and Eusebius Mandyczewski, the archivist at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, or another of Brahms’s friends may have been very fond of this music. (It is certainly no accident that Brahms was interested in Couperin in particular and later edited some of his works.) This is the music of the great orchestral passacaglias that simply do not exist in German Baroque music. When I first played this symphony with an orchestra - it was with the Vienna Symphony in 1952 -, I was immediately reminded of Forqueray's viol sonatas. Like so much else by Brahms, this movement, too, is made to sound unduly monumental in modern performances. Throughout its performance history, each generation has added new layers to it, so that it is now difficult to get back to the actual piece. Even the orchestral resources and dynamics are affected in this way. Brahms writes by no means as many fortissirnos and triple fortes as tend to be played. He very often writes forte, and in each case one could add: "Only forte, nothing more.” This poco forte that Brahms so often uses to re-establish the simplicity that he was striving for implies a process like that of scratching off lots of the patina from old statues and pieces of furniture.

If you listen to historic recordings by performers who were in contact with Brahms's circle, you find that they sound completely different from the Romantic interpretations of the lost fifty years. To what do you attribute this?
I attribute it to the constant and, arguably, necessary change in fashion. A work is in a state of flux from the moment it leaves the composer's desk. Only very briefly are its composer’s original intentions fully realised - perhaps for ten years, perhaps even less, and often only in the composer's most intimate circle. You can see this quite clearly in the case of Beethoven's symphonies. Within twenty years of Beethoven's death an irreconcilable struggle had already broken out between Mendelssohn and Wagner over the question of tempi - should they be "fast" or “slow"? - and over an interpretative approach that played off the "emotional" against the “unemotional". The same is true of all composers, and I believe it is both natural and necessary. The relationship between one generation of interpreters and the next is like that between two intelligent friends whose discussions inevitably spark off an argument simply because they feel the need to adopt differing views, even though they do not really occupy differing standpoints. If a conductor and orchestra perform a piece in a particular and highly convincing way for one generation, then this interpretation at the same time encourages dissent and begs the question why it has to be played in one way and not another. This is sometimes demonstrated particularly clearly, as with such strikingly different performers as Furtwängler and Toscanini. This kind of dialectic is found both in the creative process itself and in the way in which works are interpreted. While I was teaching at the Salzburg Mozarteum, I would sometimes play the students old gramophone recordings. What interested me most - and sometimes also drove me to despair - was the way in which the taste and aims of one generation (in other words, what one might describe as yesterday's fashion) were always treated with contempt by the next. And yet anyone who listens seriously will recognise approaches which, important and interesting though they undoubtedly are, nowadays tend to be overlooked since today's performers are following another trend. We need to be clear in our own minds that the same will happen to our own readings in twenty or thirty years’ time. Indeed, it is bound to happen, since a work does not have a single fixed form that is valid for all time. Only if it stands up to being illuminated from different sides and challenges us to throw light on it in this way - only then is it great. This is true even of works of art that cannot be changed in performance. Even paintings, sculptures and buildings are viewed and interpreted in very different ways by different generations. It is this that gives them their historical status.

Herr Harnoncourt, what is the starting-point for your current view of Brahms?
The orchestra and I both start out from the wish to rethink each piece. Brahms’s works are a major part of the repertory of all the great orchestras. Simply to play Brahms one more time is not enough for me and is of no interest to rne. That is why I have returned to the autograph scores and to early printed editions with Brahms’s handwritten corrections, all of which speak volumes. And finally I have looked at the old orchestral parts belonging to great orchestras such as the Vienna Philharmonic and the Berlin Philharmonic. Here I have gone back to the earliest orchestral material that I can find. It is highly instructive to see where the string players - under Nikisch, for example - used to change bowstrokes and what they wrote in their parts depending on the conductor's instructions. For me, this virtually produces an aural impression of a symphony, and it is here that I discover my models. I have had some wonderful experiences both as an orchestral musician and as an audience member who has heard the most varied interpretations, but I would not describe these as influences. Today's orchestral players are astonished to discover how many notes used to be played in one bowstroke - nowadays they would use four bowstrokes. This spinning out of the notes, with the bow barely moving at all, and the rich tone that was inevitably produced when the same bowstroke was used for a whole minute at a time - this was then the be-all and end-all of bowing technique. I myself was trained in this technique and had to practise it for at least half an hour a day. Today’s string players have a completely different training. The left hand is what matters and the right hand seems atrophied compared with the string players of sixty or eighty years ago. With the old bowing technique you can produce great melodic paragraphs that sound fantastic but that are also comparatively quiet. In this way I can not only make inferences about the dynamics, I can also try to learn from the earlier maestros whom I much adrnire.

Anyone who performs Brahms in this way will not, I assume, regard hirn as a Romantic.
With Brahms, it is very difficult to give straightforward answers. He had great trouble inventing tunes, and yet, in the final analysis, his melodies are so wonderful that you would think they came easily to him. This is self-contradictory, yet it is also the truth. Also, you could say that Brahms bypasses Romanticism and goes back to much earlier forms. His whole approach seems relatively unromantic. At the same time, he is very close to Schumann, and what I would describe as Romantic atmosphere is so much more developed with Brahms than it is, say, with his contemporary, Bruckner, that I am tempted to describe both him and his "brother", Schumann, as arch-Romantics. I deny that Brahms was a Romantic and, in the sarne breath, I describe him as the greatest Romantic. These are the contradictions that one must be happy to accept if one wants to give an honest answer.

The Idea of a passacaglia is basic not only to the last movement of the Fourth Symphony but also, I think, to the finale of the Haydn Variations, which Brahms wrote in the summer of 1873 and which he conducted for the first time in Vienna in the November of that year.
For me, it’s not a passacaglia at all. Nowadays we call every bass ostinato that is repeated twenty or thirty times a passacaglia. But far more important is the basic principle: as with the sarabande, folia and chaconne, it is a kind of dance that owes its existence to contact between the Spaniards and the Mexicans and that was originally extremely wild in character. In English, “passacaglia" means a popular tune. It was only with Bach’s organ passacaglias that the element of ceremonial solemnity first entered the form, although not even these pieces are as solemn as they are often made to seem nowadays. Fundamental to this form is the heavy accent on the first and second beat. Even in those passacaglias in which Bach does not follow this metre, one none the less expects it or at least senses it in the background. In this respect, Brahms is just as Baroque as his models. In my own view, the final ostinato variation of his Haydn Variations is modelled on Purcell's great ostinatos, in which a short and especially striking group of notes is extracted from a melody or bass line and repeated, sometimes only in the bass, at other times in the other voices, too.
For me, these Haydn Variations also have something restful about them, they are a work in which the listener has, as it were, to listen between the lines. Each of the variations has its own highly sophisticated, subtle dramaturgy. People used to believe that a variation had to mean something and that it had to be accorded its place in some catalogue of the emotions. But it is important to work out in advance exactly where the high points are, where the developments lead and where the musical argument grows more relaxed, so that one does not mix up the tempi and turn the wrong variations into displays of unbridled virtuosity, instead of bringing out these very small subtleties and allowing the listener to hear them. In these Haydn Variations, there are strettos and metrical shifts that are so small and subtle that one does not notice them in most performances.

One could perhaps argue that these Haydn Variations also reflect what I am tempted to call the spirit of the age. When Brahms first began to take an interest in the St Anthony Chorale, not only was the painter Anselm Feuerbach treating the subject of St Anthony's temptations in a life-size canvas, but Gustave Flaubert's novel La Tentation de Saint Antoine was appearing in print in Paris. But you would presumably agree that it is probably a little far-fetched to see in this set of variations a musical illustration of the stations in St Anthony's life.
It may well be possible to do so, but I think it is of no importance whatsoever. Music often draws for its inspiration on literary or pictorial sources. The musicologist Arnold Schering examined this subject in great detail and formulated everything so apodictically that one feels called upon to contradict him, even though much of it is perfectly true. But composers are not interested in conveying this to their listeners. In the case of the Pastoral Symphony, for example, Beethoven was in some doubt as to how much he should initiate the listener into what he thought and felt. With his piano sonatas, too, he argued with his publishers and friends over whether to reveal their sources of inspiration and generally refused to do so. A performer who none the less manages to guess what lies behind a piece may well play it slightly differently. But if the programme is explicitly included in the score, he will try to express it in musical terms. I respect the composer's desire to keep things hidden and do not think that I would conduct the Haydn Variations any differently if I knew that the piece was about the temptations of St Anthony. For me, these variations are in themselves a temptation, I don't need St Anthony as well.

In 1880, seven years after completing the Haydn Variations, Brahms spent the summer at Bad lschl and wrote two overtures, "one of which weeps, while the other one laughs". They are, of course, the Tragic Overture and the Academic Festival Overture. As with the symphonies, these twa pieces again constitute what Spitta called an "imaginative contrast".
These two overtures deserve to be taken far more seriously than they are. Of course, it’s not hard to take the Tragic Overture seriously, but to regard the Academic Festival Overture as no more than a student joke is really selling it a bit short. It is a magnificent work, music with a great deal of cryptic humour. One senses Brahms`s friendly links with academic circles in Vienna, certainly also the gratitude that he wanted to express for the honorary doctorate awarded him by Breslau University. But it's clear that today's musicians and listeners are unfamiliar with these songs. The Academic Festival Overture is not simply music. Whenever I conduct this work, I always sing all these songs to the orchestra - it goes without saying that I know them all and, wherever possible, I sing them in the version current in Brahms's day. Only then does one sense the laughter and the tears. More than any other piece, this overture tells us exactly what people laugh at. The orchestra is actually used here to make people laugh. And as every clown will tell you, the hardest thing of all is to be genuinely funny.