Johannes Brahms / Intermezzo in E-flat Major

A moment of autumnal introspection in which sorrow ushers us to a place of comfort and calm.

Valentin de Boulogne (French, 1591–1632). Four Ages of Man, ca. 1627–29. Oil on canvas. The National Gallery, London

There's one scene in TÁR — Todd Field's heavy-handed 2022 thriller about an orchestral conductor who suffers a career-annihilating downfall of her own design — that frequently floats through my mind. 

Late in the film, after Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett) brutally assaults the conductor chosen to replace her on the Berlin Philharmonic stage, she flees to her hometown in New Jersey. Far from her sleek, glass-walled apartment in Germany's cultural capital, Lydia surveys her childhood bedroom — wood-paneled and dark, adorned with stuffed animals, framed certificates, and field hockey medals. She opens a closet and finds on the top shelf dozens of VHS recordings of the New York Philharmonic's Young People's Concerts, the popular mid-century music education series presented by Lydia's mentor, Leonard Bernstein. 

As she watches one of the tapes on an ancient black-and-white television, we hear the orchestra performing a passage from the blazing final movement of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. Cutting off the musicians, Bernstein turns to the audience for one of his signature statements on the power of music:

"Didn't you feel triumphant? Now we can really understand what the meaning of music is: It's the way it makes you feel when you hear it. ... There's no limit to the different kinds of feelings music can make you have. And some of those feelings are so special and so deep, they can't even be described in words. We can't always name the things we feel."

Tears stream down Lydia's cheeks as she sits transfixed by the screen. This grainy, colorless video, an echo of the innocent love she felt for music as a child, forces Lydia to confront who she's become as an adult. How did someone with a desire to share the beauty of classical music evolve into a power-hungry monster capable of launching into a public fit of vengeance? At what point did ruthlessly succeeding in the business of music become more important than connecting hearts to those oceans of indescribable emotions Bernstein describes?

The act of reconnecting with a time of childlike awe and wonder, when worlds of uncomplicated possibility lay ahead, prompts a quiet moment of redemption and renewal. (Though I'm still not convinced she deserved such a moment.)

Johannes Brahms experienced a moment of reconnection similar to Lydia's late in his life. No — he hadn't hit rock bottom because years of malevolent acts caught up with him, but he faced a similar confrontation with his younger self at the age of 57. Believing he had nothing left to say as a composer — despite tremendous success in a career spanning four decades — Brahms began notifying colleagues of his impending retirement. 

So convinced of this decision to fall silent, he drafted his will and began destroying every sketch and unpublished manuscript. Brahms was notorious for burning scores he deemed unsuitable for publication, including a rumored 20 string quartet drafts and the lion's share of music he wrote before leaving his family home in Hamburg at the age of 20. Tasked with a final purge, he traveled from Vienna to Hamburg, later confirming:

"The stuff has all been burnt. ... I went up into the attic, where the whole room was beautifully wallpapered with my scores, even the ceiling. I only had to lie on my back to admire my sonatas and quartets. It looked very good. So I tore everything down — better for me to do it than someone else — and burnt all the rest with it."

Just imagine: One of Europe's most famous living composers, reclining on the floor of the cramped attic where he drafted his first compositions, taking in years of work fueled by youthful curiosity and determination, choosing to consign those pages to flame. Where had those indescribable feelings that first inspired Brahms to compose gone? Had his deep well of musical ideas — in which he married the passion and sentimentality of Romanticism with the cool, calculated logic of Classical forms like the symphony, the piano sonata, the string quartet — truly run dry?

Three ages of Brahms, à la Valentin. From left: The composer in his early 20s (circa 1853), around the time he left Hamburg; in his mid-30s; and in his late 50s (circa 1890), when Brahms decided to retire from composing.

Brahms was channeling mythology's Cassandra, envisioning a future that no longer craved his singular style of composition. He had long been at odds with avant-garde composers like Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt, who looked to create the music of the future by devising new musical structures and pushing traditional tonality to its breaking point. And now, just a decade away from the dawn of a new century, Brahms found it increasingly difficult to continue working within Classical forms, whose foundations were dependent on exploring the relationships among different keys. 

Although a calculated withdrawal from the world appeared to be Brahms's destiny, the hand of Fate quickly intervened and moved him in a different direction. In 1891, he met the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld, whose burnished tone and effortless musicality inspired the composer to temporarily come out of his short-lived retirement. By the end of the year, Brahms had written a quintet for clarinet and strings and a trio for clarinet, piano, and cello for his new friend. 

With his desire to compose restored, Brahms spent the following summer in the Austrian countryside penning a collection of 20 piano miniatures. Unlike his new clarinet works, which adhered to the traditional large-scale forms he embraced throughout his career, these piano works were highly personal — rhapsodic expressions of the tender sadness and solitude Brahms had felt coursing through his veins all his life. In 1879, he wrote to a colleague: 

"I would have to confess that I am a profoundly melancholy man, that black wings incessantly flap above us."

Those menacing black wings take flight in countless moments of Brahms's orchestral music, where even the sunniest of pastoral passages are dimmed by the momentary passing of a dark storm cloud. But in these confessional moments for solo piano, the transient states between light and dark, between joy and sadness, don't just provide a contrast in musical color — they're the driving emotional force.

Fourteen of the twenty miniatures Brahms composed that summer (cataloged as opus numbers 116–119) bear the title Intermezzo, a musical form that evolved from intermedi, the brief interludes performed between acts or scenes in Italian Renaissance opera. The short, free-form style of the intermezzo proved the perfect vessel for giving voice to Brahms's autumnal introspections.

In the first of three intermezzi published together as Opus 117 — the Intermezzo in E-flat Major — we come closest to hearing the silent conversations that took place in that Hamburg attic between the mature Brahms and the spirited upstart of his youth. In fact, the composer likely extracted the gentle, consoling melody that effortlessly sails through the work from a folk song he arranged in his late teens — one of the many scores affixed to those attic walls. 

Not only is the melody's unadorned shape similar to those found in his early work, but Brahms also included an epigraph from Johann Gottfried Herder's translation of a Scottish lullaby whose German cadences perfectly align with the melody: 

Schlaf sanft mein Kind, 
schlaf sanft und schön!
Mich dauert's sehr, 
dich weinen sehn.

Sleep gently, my child,
Sleep gently and well. 
It grieves me much 
to see thee weep.

Brahms had an affinity for lullabies — you've probably heard his famous Wiegenlied (Cradle Song) in one form or another — and the enchanting first section of the Intermezzo in E-flat carries all the trademark elements of these softhearted songs of slumber: an understated lyricism, and gentle harmonies that cultivate calm throughout body and mind. So why, then, did Brahms tell his publisher this intermezzo could also be titled Cradle Song of My Sorrows?

After the lullaby's first statement comes to a close, the music takes a shadowy turn. In hushed octaves, the line descends into the piano's depths from which the haunting middle section — now in a minor key — emerges. Here, the youthful Brahms passes the pen to his older counterpart, who expertly dices elements of the lullaby into motivic fragments that rise and fall, the push and pull of each languid gesture dissolving time as we listen. Those black wings of melancholy have darkened the scene beyond recognition, and in the descending motion of the right hand, we can imagine the tears of grief evoked in the epigraph.

Like any emotion, however, this sea of sorrow we encounter in the intermezzo's central passage doesn't last forever. Brahms finds his way back to the light in the final section, where the lullaby melody re-establishes the major key that comforted us at the opening. Now the music's surface is further transformed by gleaming, bell-like chords in the piano's upper register, which sparkle like the first rays of summer sunlight to dance across the horizon after a mid-afternoon storm. A profound serenity has returned to guide our way forward.

Brahms takes a form rooted in the space between scenes of a story and transforms it into a meditation on the liminal states we have to cross in life: those countless moments of transition between youth and old age, between love and loss, between life and death. In just five minutes, the music shows us that despite life's impermanence, despite the black wings of melancholy always looming overhead, there is an irrepressible beauty in the world we are called to be a part of. For this intermezzo doesn't abandon us in the sorrowful realm that dominates the heart of the work — it ushers us to a place of comfort and calm so tenderly infused into its final moments.

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Take a listen …

I'd love to hear about your time listening to Brahms's lullaby of light and shadow. Let me know about your experience in the comments, or just reply to this email.

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