4 Pieces

Brahms composed his Op. 119 pieces while he was on holiday in the summer resort of Bad Ischl, Austria. They are the last four piano works of the 20 he wrote between 1892 and 1893 (opp. 116-119), and they are imbued with the reflective emotions of a composer in his winter years. Listen to how the arpeggios that gently unfurl beneath the opening melody of the first Intermezzo are filled with an air of melancholy, and how the second Intermezzo, with its agitated motifs, suggests a sense of yearning. But there is jollity here, too: The C Major Intermezzo is the lightest of Brahms’ late piano works—its playful, syncopated, staccato theme providing the perfect preparation for the brilliant burst of robust chords in the Rhapsody (“Allegro risoluto”) that follows. This was Brahms’ last piano work; it’s surely no coincidence that he ended it in the key of E-flat Minor—the very same key in which he wrote his earliest published piano piece, the Op. 4 Scherzo, more than 40 years before.