In the musical life of Brahms, before the clarinet, there was the horn. Two dissimilar instruments, two dissimilar loves, which evoke different narratives; legend and nature for one, the most marked intimacy for the other. And also two different eras: that of glorious youth, with its strength and its ample resources of breath, then that of age, with its renunciation, its inwardness too, common to both times of life, but which now takes up all the space that remains. Youth directs its song towards the exterior – the horn is all openness and seduction, while the clarinet expresses, without éclat, the twilight of things and of beings. Two visions of the glow of life, as one would say of the sun: its royal magnificence on the one hand, its russet, declining aspect on the other; from its high noon to its setting. Far from the inherent nobility of the horn, there is a resigned yet meditative tone in the clarinet’s timbre that is wonderfully suited to Brahms’s final outpourings. So much so, indeed, that he (unconsciously?) transposes it to the keyboard in what is probably his finest late piano piece, the Intermezzo op.118 no.6, whose opening theme closely imitates the melodic contour and timbre of the clarinet: wind as breath, which grows rarer with the passing of the years, so that words, rarer still, become all the more precious – and profound. These late works for clarinet exude an astonishing serenity, perfectly illustrating the ‘sadness of the deepest happiness’ evoked by Nietzsche in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science). GEOFFROY COUTEAU, NICOLAS BALDEYROU ∙ AMAURY COEYTAUX, ANTOINE DREYFUSS 17
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