22 BRAHMS | CLARINET SONATAS ∙ HORN TRIO After the luxuriance and ‘natural’ poetry of the horn, Brahms’s passion for the sober clarinet is of a very different and, one might say, more essential nature. It was to haunt four major works from the twilight of his life, representing the ‘pure interiority’ already characteristic of the young composer in the Ballades, which would come full circle almost forty years later with his late intermezzi for piano, the Clarinet Quintet op.115 and the two Clarinet Sonatas op.120. It is symbolic that these sonatas are Brahms’s final chamber works. One is reminded of Mozart, who expressed the same meditative characteristics of the instrument in his Quintet and his valedictory Clarinet Concerto. The clarinet is also the instrument of a certain solitude, a sentiment that faithfully accompanied Brahms throughout his life. We know that the two sonatas, along with the Trio op.114 and the Quintet op.115 (both composed in 1891), were ‘inspired’ by the clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld, whom he had heard shortly before in Meiningen. This meeting coincided with a rather bleak period for Brahms. The clarinet, and Mühlfeld’s interpretative artistry, reawakened his creativity; the result was four compositions for the instrument, two of them, the Trio and the Quintet, written straight away. The two sonatas had to wait until the summer of 1894, when they were conceived during a stay at his favourite spa, Bad Ischl. He and Mühlfeld gave the pieces their private premiere in September 1894, followed by a further private hearing in Clara’s presence in November. Here was a spectacular and unprecedented flowering of music that is the opposite of extravert. There is no audience in view, only music as a pure echo of himself. Contemporary with the last three cycles for solo piano, opp.117, 118 and 119, the clarinet sonatas possess a melancholy tone, already present in the Trio and Quintet; but there is also a sense of detachment, a gaze lost in the distance, looking beyond all nostalgia, which they share with those late piano pieces.
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