Brahms composed his third and last quartet, op. 67, in 1875 at Ziegelhausen, near Heidelberg, on one of his extended summer holidays. Completed and published the following year, it received its first public performance by the celebrated quartet led by his friend Joseph Joachim at the Berlin Singakademie on October 30, 1876. Brahms dedicated the work to his musical friend Professor Theodor Wilhelm Engelmann, a physiologist in Utrecht.

The B-flat major Quartet differs greatly in character from its two preceding quartets, op. 51, nos. 1 and 2, both minor key works of a more serious nature. Brahms’s last quartet, a predominantly sunny work, may have served as a kind of release after the completion of his weighty First Symphony, and the piece abounds in unusual touches. The Vivace has a dance-like character more often reserved for last movements. The opening hunting call in 6/8 meter is frequently likened to Mozart’s Hunt Quartet (K. 458) but may also recall the Scherzo of Brahms’s own B-flat Sextet (op. 18). In the second theme area Brahms ingeniously juxtaposes and combines another dance type in 2/4 with the preceding 6/8 rhythms.

The Andante contains another unusual rhythmic feature in its middle section: two bars of 5/4 interrupting the 4/4 meter reflect the improvisatory character of the phrase development. Another striking feature is the return of the opening theme, disguised in an elaborate variation on itself and beginning in the third-related “wrong” key of D major.

The third movement shows the composer’s fondness for “scherzo alternatives,” since a scherzo would have seemed redundant after the first movement. Brahms’s innovative color scheme of unmuted viola in combination with the three other muted instruments has often been noted; equally memorable is the viola’s absence when the Trio (so marked) begins as a true trio of violins and cello, which then become the background for another viola melody.

The finale, one of Brahms’s great achievements in variation form, provides the weight one might have expected from the opening movement. The crowning glory of the movement, and indeed of the work, is the recall of two themes from the first movement in the last two variations, not as mere cyclic reminiscence, but exhibiting their close ties with the variation theme itself.

—©Jane Vial Jaffe