Variations and Fugue On A Theme By Handel - Reception and Aftermath

Reception and Aftermath

An entry in Clara Schumann's diary about the Handel Variations gives an idea of how close the relationship between her and Brahms was, as well as Brahms's sometimes extraordinary insensitivity: "On Dec 7th I gave another soirée, at which I played Johannes' Handel Variations. I was in agonies of nervousness, but I played them well all the same, and they were much applauded. Johannes, however, hurt me very much by his indifference. He declared that he could no longer bear to hear the variations, it was altogether too dreadful for him to listen to anything of his own and to have to sit by and do nothing. Although I can well understand this feeling, I cannot help finding it hard when one has devoted all one's powers to a work, and the composer himself has not a kind word for it." Yet in the following spring (April 1862) Brahms wrote, in a note to a critic to whom he was sending a copy of the work, "I am fond of it and value it particularly in relation to my other works".

Clara Schumann premiered the work in Hamburg on December 7, when she visited Brahms's home town to give a series of performances, which also included the Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor—which had not been well received when Brahms introduced it to Leipzig in the Gewandhaus in January 1858—and the premiere of the G minor Quartet. Clara's performance of the Handel Variations in Hamburg was a triumph, which she repeated soon afterward in Leipzig. During that winter, Brahms also gave performances of the Handel Variations, as a result of which he made minor alterations to the score. Publication came in July 1862 by Breitkopf & Härtel.

With the "complete failure," as he described it to Clara, of his first large-scale orchestral work, the First Piano Concerto, the Handel Variations became an important landmark in the developing career of Brahms. Another seven years passed before his reputation was firmly established by A German Requiem in Bremen in 1868, and it took a full fifteen years before he made his mark as a symphonist with his first symphony (1876).

During what was probably the first meeting of Brahms and Richard Wagner in January 1863, Brahms performed his Handel Variations. Despite the great differences between the two men in musical style and an underlying tension based on musical politics—Brahms championing a more conservative approach to music while Wagner, along with Franz Liszt, called for "the music of the future" with new forms and new tonalities—Wagner complimented the work graciously, if not wholeheartedly, saying, "One sees what still may be done in the old forms when someone comes along who knows how to use them".