The Last Act of Brahms's Late Turn to F Major

Abstract

The Second Cello Sonata, Op. 99, was the third multi‐movement composition that Brahms produced in F major during the mid‐1880s, when he turned to F major in that capacity for the first time. One of the works of summer 1886 that elevated Brahms's opus numbers to three digits and occasioned Simrock's first Thematisches Verzeichniss, the Sonata was written just as followers of his music were becoming equipped to chart connections between thematic incipits and as he became more attuned to presenting an oeuvre. It richly rewards an intertextual reading of its musical fabric, especially relative to the First String Quintet and the Third Symphony. This essay explores Op. 99's debt to its older F major kin – which previous scholarship has grasped incompletely – and argues that Brahms's ‘late turn’ to F major offers the most compelling illustration, in his music, of a key as a kind of resource. Three main observations about Op. 99 are developed here: (1) its first movement is modelled on the Quintet and Symphony as a repeat of their tonal structure but a reversal of their approach to the second group; (2) its last movement inflects major‐mode tonality with an emphasis on the diatonic mediant that is a salient characteristic of several of Brahms's F major compositions; and (3) it has musical ideas in common with various F‐centred pieces or passages before and after the multi‐movement works of the mid‐1880s, including the middle section of the third movement of the String Quartet Op. 51 No. 1 and the final chorus of Rinaldo.