LDV64.5

24 BRAHMS_TRIOS OP.8, 87, 101 & 114 Written in 1891, the Trio for clarinet, cello and piano in A minor op.114 testifies to Brahms’ late-flowering love for the clarinet, to which he devoted two sonatas and a sublime quintet, probably his last great masterpiece, which came immediately after the trio. It also reflects his innate taste for twilit moods, denoting a higher form of resignation – for the clarinet is better able than any other instrument to represent the dying light, the golden aspect things take on at that moment in the day. If Brahms’ music always unfolds somewhere between blazing ardour and intimate avowal, it is the latter that prevails in the works of the end of his life; the passion is now more than ever contained, restrained, as if absorbed by an unswerving melancholy. This is the tone that will be heard in the trio, as it is in the piano cycles opp.116, 117, 118 and 119, composed in 1892-93. Even if Nietzsche pretended not to like Brahms (to avoid offending Wagner), one of his deepest insights might apply perfectly to some of the composer’s final works: ‘The foremost musician for me would be one who knew only the sadness of the profoundest happiness.’ 4 A ‘happiness’ that can be considered as that of the ultimate fulfilment, beyond all longing, an ‘iridescent happiness’, the fruit of a kind of superior ‘resignation’ (what the philosopher termed amor fati , love of Fate) as he expressed it in his poem ‘Venice’, written in 1888, just before his mental collapse: At the bridge I stood Lately in the brown night. From afar came a song: As a golden drop it welled Over the quivering surface. 5 4. Die fröhlicheWissenschaft (The Gay Science) , Book Three, §183. 5. Ecce Homo II, 7 (tr. R. J. Hollingdale).