Brahms Cello Sonata in E minor, Op. 38

What is Brahms best known for?

His compositions covered every discipline there is to cover—chamber music with strings, with singers, with winds; piano sonatas, piano pieces; concertos, symphonies—but there is no sense of specialisation, like Beethoven’s piano sonatas, that mark him out as a benchmark to compare to.

Perhaps it is this eclectic mode of operation that led to a mental block in his twenties after finishing his early piano works, when he complained to Clara Schumann that he no longer knew how to compose and how to create. To find inspiration, he turned to two disciplines: orchestral music, which resulted in the mammoth-like D minor Piano Concerto; and, the study of old music, which led to the famous story of him exchanging counterpoint exercises (modern-day equivalent of Sudoku puzzles) with the violinist Joseph Joachim to pass time.

This study of counterpoint thus led to the composition of the E minor cello sonata, which is a quasi-homage to Bach’s Art of Fugue. The main themes of the 1^st movement and 3^rd movement are both based on material from the Art of Fugue, and the two movements are both littered with close canonic imitations creating ‘echo’ effects. Yet the imitations are more than mere exercises, and the echoes are not merely novel, but serve an expressive purpose in reinforcing the feeling of angst projected by the themes.

May 2016

布拉姆斯的音樂涉足極廣，除歌劇以外甚麼種類的樂曲都寫過。但正正因為他涉足極廣，每類樂曲都只能寫上兩三首，令他給人的印象不及貝多芬的三十二首鋼琴奏鳴曲那麼鮮明。

似布拉姆斯如此多心的一個作曲家，往往需要不同的事物去啟發自己。當他廿多歲的時候，他已寫夠了鋼琴獨奏的音樂，並跟克拉．舒曼說自己忘記了怎樣作曲，於是便去交響樂及古時代的音樂尋找靈感；前者的研究成果可見於那巨型的第一首鋼琴協奏曲，後者的研究則令他愛上了賦格曲的作曲技巧，他這個時期與小提琴家約金的書信來往都是在互相交換這些賦格曲的寫作練習。

這首Ｅ小調大提琴奏鳴曲的第一及第三樂章取材自巴哈的《賦格曲之技》，並用上了賦格曲的「緊湊法」，做出類似回音的效果。這些音響效果卻並非為了貪玩，而是旨在像疊字一樣去強調音樂裏所表達的東西。