After completing the second of his two quintets for strings in 1890, Brahms hinted at a slowing down, that perhaps it was time for him to put composing aside. The following May 7^th, his fifty-eighth birthday, he wrote out his will, a task he felt he had put off too long. Nonetheless, thirteen more years of composition would bring some of his greatest music, including the Second Piano Concerto (written that same year, 1891), the Fourth Symphony, and some of his finest piano pieces.

It is hard to say just what triggered Brahms back into compositional activity – the thought that once a composer, always a composer might apply - but one impetus seems to have been his hearing, for the first time, the playing of Richard Mühlfeld, first clarinetist of the Meiningen Orchestra. Up to that time, Brahms had written no chamber music involving a clarinet, but he was so impressed with the sweetness and beauty of Mühlfeld’s tone, that same year he wrote the piece we hear today and the quintet for clarinet and strings (one of the finest of his chamber works). Three years later he composed two sonatas for clarinet (or viola) and piano. All four works were written with Mühlfeld in mind (Brahms referred to Mühlfeld as his “dear nightingale”), and that musician performed in the premières of all of them.

(By the way, Mühlfeld began as a violinist in the Meiningen Orchestra, taught himself the clarinet and became so proficient on the instrument he assumed the first chair clarinet post in the Meiningen Orchestra when he was 20. From 1890 he was also music director of the Meiningen Court Theatre, and he was first clarinetist in the Bayreuth Festivals from 1884 to 1896.)

While feeling the composer’s clarinet trio holds themes not quite as inspired as those in some of his other works, Brahms biographer Karl Geiringer notes, “The inventive conception of the themes, born of the spirit of the wind instrument, and more especially, the harmonious blending of the tones of the clarinet and the ‘cello, are magnificent.” On that latter point, Brahms’ young disciple and friend Eusebius Mandyczewski said “It is as though the instruments were in love with one another.”

Brahms, ever the craftsman, became almost notorious for constantly reworking a new composition until he felt it was the best he could do with it, before he allowed it to be released to the public. Shortly before his death he made certain that all musical ideas he had jotted down, and partially written works - in short anything which had not been published – had been destroyed. He was once quoted as saying, “It is not hard to compose, but it is wonderfully hard to let the superfluous notes fall under the table.”

During his lifetime, and to this day, the music of Brahms has been both revered and damned, usually for nobility, beauty, and craft on the one hand, turgidity on the other.

In 1863 a writer for the Viennese publication Rezensionen (in effect, Criticism) noted, “It is the awful dignity, the profound and, at the same time, honest seriousness with which Brahms devotes himself to all he undertakes that raises him above the ordinary level.”

Tchaikovsky, on the other hand, referred to Brahms as “that talentless bastard,” and George Bernard Shaw called him “The Leviathan Maunderer.”

When Symphony Hall in Boston was being constructed, critic Philip Hale suggested there be an exit marked “THIS WAY OUT IN CASE OF BRAHMS.”

Harold C. Schonberg, in his excellent book The Lives of the Great Composers (published by Norton), concludes his chapter on Brahms with the words, “In a day when the gigantic operas of Wagner dominated the opera house, when the shocking symphonic poems of Richard Strauss were the talk of Europe, the music of Brahms continued to represent in an intensified way what it had always represented – integrity, the spirit of Beethoven and Schumann, the attitude of the pure and serious musician interested only in creating a series of abstract sounds in forms best realized to enhance those sounds.”