This week's selection for The Gaggle Music Club is Brahms’s Piano Quartet in G minor, Op. 25, as orchestrated by Arnold Schoenberg.

Johannes Brahms composed his Piano Quartet in G minor, Op. 25, between 1856 and 1861. It is understandable why Schoenberg was eager to orchestrate it. The quartet is a dramatic and expansive chamber work. It is made up of four movements, culminating in the famous “Rondo alla Zingarese.” Clara Schumann, Brahms’s lifelong friend and confidante, had described the piano quartet as “symphonic in breadth and power.” According to her, the quartet’s length (almost 50 minutes), the weight of its four movements and the sheer intensity of the piano part went beyond the intimate scope of chamber music.

The quartet premiered in Hamburg in 1861, with Clara herself playing the piano part in subsequent performances. Even before Schoenberg, musicians had made attempts to turn the quartet into a symphonic work. Friedrich Hermann (a Leipzig violinist and arranger) made an orchestral version of the “Rondo alla Zingarese.” It became a popular orchestral encore piece in the late 19th century.

Schoenberg admired Brahms's music, and indeed took inspiration from it. Schoenberg in particular heaped praise on what he termed Brahms’s “developing variation” technique. In his 1933 essay "Brahms the Progressive," Schoenberg identified this technique as one that allows new musical material to be continuously generated by way of variation on an initial idea, rather than by way of introduction of unrelated new themes. So instead of writing a melody, then contrasting it with something brand new, Brahms takes a small motif and spins the whole piece out of its transformation. Somewhat unexpectedly, Schoenberg considered Brahms to be a “progressive” composer, a kind of spiritual forefather of modernism.

Schoenberg orchestrated the quartet in 1937. At the time, he was living as an exile in the United States, teaching at University of California, Los Angeles, and conducting orchestras. He had limited access to string quartets or piano quartet ensembles, and wanted to find a way to present the Brahms work to orchestral audiences.

Following the premiere, some critics accused Schoenberg of “modernizing” Brahms against his will. Others argued that the orchestration was entirely in sympathy with Brahms’s spirit, revealing textures that the piano part could only suggest. Schoenberg gave Brahms a full woodwind section, brass and percussion. The orchestration is especially vivid in the last movement (Rondo alla Zingarese), which becomes a kind of orchestral showpiece with Hungarian-gypsy color, in the style of Kodály or Bartók.

Today, Brahms’s Piano Quartet in G minor, Op. 25, as orchestrated by Arnold Schoenberg, is considered one of the finest examples of “reimagining” chamber music for orchestra, alongside Mahler’s re-orchestrations of Beethoven and Schumann. It has entered the symphonic repertoire, often played by orchestras that want both Brahms’s passion and Schoenberg’s orchestral brilliance.

In this performance from 2017, the Frankfurt Radio Symphony is conducted by Christoph Eschenbach.