Brahms, Intermezzo in B-flat minor, Op. 117 No. 2

In the summer of 1892, during a stay at Bad Ischl, Brahms wrote the Fantasien Op. 116 and the three intermezzi that Simrock published later that year as Op. 117. He was fifty-nine and had already told friends he was finished with composing. The four late sets of piano pieces, Opp. 116 to 119, are what came instead: short, inward music, written as much for himself and for Clara Schumann as for any audience. Brahms called the Op. 117 intermezzi “lullabies of my sorrows.”

The first of the three is headed by two lines from Herder’s German translation of a Scottish ballad, Lady Anne Bothwell’s Lament, a mother singing over her child. The second has no text at all. It needs none.

What to listen for

A melody no one hand plays. The piece opens with a falling figure that rises and sinks in broken chords, divided between the hands so that each completes what the other began. The marking is Andante non troppo e con molto espressione. The line has to sound like a single, unbroken voice, but it is assembled from two, and any unevenness in the hand-over is audible at once. This is the central difficulty of the piece and much of its character: the melody seems to exist somewhere between the hands rather than in either.

A brief warmth. The music turns to D-flat major, the relative major, and the texture changes from murmuring arpeggios to full chords. It is the one place where the piece seems to settle and breathe, and Brahms doesn’t let it stay there.

Return and reworking. The opening material comes back, but not simply repeated. It is broken into fragments, carried through different registers and keys, and pressed harder than a simple song form would allow. The design is closer to a compressed sonata movement than to the ABA shape of many character pieces, which is typical of late Brahms. Even his smallest pieces are built.

The ending. The last page thins out to the opening figure alone, sinking lower and slowing. The piece ends in the minor, quietly, without resolving its sadness into comfort.

Five editions on one shelf

This library holds Op. 117 in at least five editions. Read side by side, they make a short history of how Brahms has been edited for a century.

Edition	Editor	What to expect
G. Schirmer, Library of Musical Classics Vol. 1500	Carl Deis	An American teaching edition. “Revised and edited,” with added fingering and editorial markings. Two copies in the library.
C.F. Peters, Edition Peters Nr. 3300b, Klavier-Werke Band II	Emil von Sauer	A performer’s edition by a pupil of Liszt and one of the great virtuosos of his day. Sauer’s Brahms carries a pianist’s suggestions about how the music should go.
Breitkopf & Härtel, Sämtliche Werke, Band 14, Kleinere Klavierwerke	Eusebius Mandyczewski	The complete-works edition issued with the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien, whose archive holds Brahms’s own papers. Mandyczewski was the society’s archivist and a friend of Brahms.
G. Schirmer, Library Vols. 1728–1730 (1949)	Eusebius Mandyczewski	The same editor’s text, brought to American players by Schirmer, “with introductory notes.”
G. Henle Verlag, Klavierstücke	Katrin Eich (text), Andreas Boyde (fingering)	A modern Urtext. The text is established from the sources and editorial fingering is kept clearly separate from what Brahms wrote.

The library also has Sauer’s text again in a Kalmus reprint, the International Music Company “Authentic Edition,” and Maurice Hinson’s Alfred edition of The Shorter Piano Pieces.

The contrast is between two ideas of what an edition is for. Deis and Sauer are teachers and performers telling the player how to play. Mandyczewski and Henle are scholars trying to step out of the way so that only Brahms remains. The first kind is a record of how this music was heard in its time, and the second is the best guess at what Brahms wrote.

Further reading from the library

• Malcolm MacDonald, Brahms (Master Musicians series, Schirmer Books, 1990)
• Walter Niemann, Brahms (Tudor, 1937)
• Letters of Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms, 1853–1896, ed. Berthold Litzmann, 2 vols. (Vienna House, 1973)
• Maurice Hinson, Guide to the Pianist’s Repertoire, 3rd ed. (Indiana University Press, 2000)

The score is in the public domain and available at IMSLP.