Bored by Brahms

Brahms’s Clarinet Quintet begins, writes his biographer Jan Swafford, with ‘a gentle, dying-away roulade that raises a veil of autumnal melancholy over the whole piece: the evanescent sweet-sadness of autumn, beautiful in its dying’.

This being late autumn, I listened to the quintet on Sunday to see if its ‘distillation of Brahmsian yearning’ still made an overwhelming impression on me. It did. I swear these are the most miserable 35 minutes in classical music.

One critic refers admiringly to the display of ‘every super-refined shade of silver-grey regret’. But that’s the problem. The ageing Brahms — obese, cantankerous, his spirits lowered by the deaths of friends and undiagnosed cancer — sets about depressing his audience with the precision of a genius (which he was). No sooner has the clarinet soared than it finds a clever way to snake down the stave, slithering through the elegant droopy twiddling of the strings. Every movement sounds much the same to me, but that’s a heresy that lovers of the work — and they are countless — think they can refute just by pointing at the score, where Brahms tweaks the counterpoint and crops the phrases so that there’s always something new happening.