Brahms’s most important contributions to the repertoire of the viola came about as a by-product of his most important contributions to the repertoire of the clarinet. In the same way that the world owes Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto and Quintet to the virtuosity of Anton Stadler, so the creation of Brahms’s last four chamber works was sparked by the artistry of Richard Mühlfeld (1856–1907), the principal clarinettist of the Meiningen Orchestra. Brahms had established a particularly close relationship with this orchestra since their then conductor, Hans von Bülow, had offered him the chance to try out his orchestral works before their official premieres. In March 1891 Brahms visited Meiningen to hear the orchestra under its new conductor Fritz Steinbach, and was struck by the polish and almost feminine sensitivity of Mühlfeld’s playing. He had apparently bidden farewell to composition the previous year with the completion of his G major String Quintet Op 111, but his admiration for the clarinettist’s artistry suddenly re-awakened the creative urge and he started composing again. Not only do the four works he wrote for Mühlfeld rank among the supreme masterpieces of the clarinet’s repertoire, but they represent the purest distillation of Brahms’s thought in the chamber music medium. They also reflect, in their innate expressive character, something of the personal isolation he was beginning to feel as many of his closest friends died off, in an increasingly frequent punctuation of his last years. When sheer beauty is evoked in them, it is as a consolation; nostalgia and melancholy often seem to underlie the most rhythmically assertive ideas. These works, in short, have established themselves as repertoire cornerstones not merely through their magnificent craftsmanship and powers of invention, but because they convey a particularly potent and complex nexus of feeling.
Having produced a Clarinet Quintet and Clarinet Trio in 1891, the sixty-one-year-old Brahms presented Mühlfeld with two further works in 1894—a pair of sonatas for clarinet and piano, his very last pieces of chamber music, composed that summer at Bad Ischl. Mühlfeld and Brahms introduced them first at a private concert in Berchtesgaden for the Duke and Duchess of Meiningen on 19 September of that year, and in January 1895 they gave the public premieres in Vienna. Brahms lavished particular care and affection on these works, and he clearly wished them to have the widest possible circulation, for he adapted them—with a certain amount of recomposition in each case—in two parallel forms: as sonatas for viola and piano, and for violin and piano.
The violin versions are rarely heard, but the viola sonatas have become cornerstones of that instrument’s repertoire, just as the original forms have for the repertoire of the clarinet. Brahms was effectively establishing a new genre, since before they appeared there were virtually no important duo sonatas for viola and piano (there is an unfinished sonata by Glinka), though Schumann and Joachim had used the viola for a number of lyric pieces. While in the op. 114 Trio his viola part was virtually the same as its clarinet original, merely transposing some passages downward to come within the viola’s compass, in the op. 120 sonatas the recasting of the part went a good deal further. Brahms entirely rewrote some figurations, added double-stopping, and sometimes extended the melodic line at places where the clarinet part was silent. Subtly and unobtrusively, he accommodated the music to the different expressive character of the viola.
The glorious second movement of the second clarinet/viola sonata is equally wonderful in either version. Sometimes I prefer the clarinet; other times, the viola — I guess it depends on which I'm listening to. I've chosen the viola sonata in this case because I recently downloaded this 1982 recording by Michael Tree and Richard Goode (admittedly because I'm a big fan of Richard Goode's playing).
