String Sextet No. 2 in G, Opus 36, orchestrated by Kurt Atterberg
Composition and premiere: Brahms wrote his String Sextet No. 2 in late 1864/early 1865. Brahms’s publisher Simrock published the piece in early 1866, and remarkably the first public performance took place in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 11 of that year, given by members of the Mendelssohn Quintette Club at Boston Music Hall. The European premiere took place in Zurich the following month, and the Viennese public premiere in February 1867. This was apparently the first Brahms work premiered in the U.S.
Kurt Atterberg created the string orchestra version of the sextet in 1939. Atterberg was a Swedish cellist, composer, and arranger whose works include nine symphonies, several concertos, suites, ballets, and operas. Trained as a civil engineer, he had a long career in the patent office in Stockholm, retiring in 1968. Concurrently, he also held many musical administrative positions, founding the Swedish Performing Rights Society (analogous to ASCAP and BMI) as well as the Society of Swedish Composers.
The shadow of Beethoven as symphonist loomed large over Johannes Brahms, who did not complete a first symphony of his own until 1876, when he was 43. Doubtless Beethoven’s specter also influenced Brahms in the realm of the string quartet; though he began working on them around 1865, the first two of his three quartets appeared only in 1873. But his first important chamber work for strings appeared well before that; this was his String Sextet No. 1 in B-flat, Opus 18, published in 1862. Beethoven never wrote for this particular combination of instruments (two violins, two violas, and two cellos), which allows for an extraordinary range of contrapuntal variation and textural ingenuity on the composer’s part, as well as a particularly rich sound in the ensemble’s lower range, given the presence of two cellos. Brahms’s G major sextet, his second (and last) in the genre, was composed 1864-65 and published in 1866, by which time he had also completed his first two piano quartets (Opus 25 in G minor and Opus 26 in A).
The public world premiere of the G major sextet took place in Boston on October 11, 1866, and the first Vienna public performance not until several months later, on February 3, 1867. Brahms typically destroyed his compositional sketches and was also typically closed-mouthed about works-in-progress. We at least have a New Year’s Day letter from Clara Schumann to Brahms expressing her joy at seeing parts of this sextet during the 1864 Christmas season, as well as some later correspondence pertaining to some early readings involving Clara, Joachim, and others. (“I hear that you are playing in Prague with Fräulein Asten on Saturday next. If this is so, kindly give her my Sextet in a sealed packet if you can, or else burn the trash,” wrote Brahms to Clara on March 6, 1865, with a not uncharacteristic cynicism.) We also know that Brahms had a hard time selling this music for publication. Ultimately it was printed by Fritz Simrock (who had published the Sextet No. 1), but Breitkopf & Härtel’s refusal to publish it so insulted the composer that he never again offered that firm another of his works.
Some words about the music. In the first movement, a striking motive in the second thematic group recalls Brahms’s passion for Agathe von Siebold, with whom he fell in love in the summer of 1858. The daughter of a Göttingen professor, Agathe provided the inspiration for a number of Brahms’s works, including three sets of songs. Their affair was over by the time he wrote the G major sextet, but Brahms sets Agathe’s name to music (omitting the “t”) using the notes A-G-A-H-E (“H” is B-natural in German musical notation), producing a striking motive consisting of an upbeat on the A, an emphatic three-note ascent (G, A, B), and a downward fifth (the B dropping to E). This five-note motive is first heard several times over as a sort of tailpiece to the second theme, which begins a bit more than two minutes into the piece with a lilting, catchy melody introduced in the cello (but later in viola at the corresponding point in the recapitulation).
The second movement is a moderately paced G minor scherzo in 2/4 rather than the usual triple meter—a foreshadowing of Brahms’s tendency to treat this kind of movement as an intermezzo rather than a more typically quick-moving scherzo per se. On the other hand, the contrasting G major Trio section, marked “Presto giocoso” (“giocoso” means “playful”), in a quick 3/4, really is scherzo-like (“scherzo” from the Italian for “joke”). For his slow movement—here the third movement, rather than in the more usual second position—Brahms writes a multi-faceted, intriguingly complex set of variations. His finale he begins in medias res; the music seems immediately to be coming from somewhere, a sense of harmonic exploration being instantly established. The time signature here is a broad 9/8, allowing for a great deal of rhythmic variety within the basic pulse, and facilitating the convincing juxtaposition of rhythmically energized and more lyric elements as the music proceeds.
Marc Mandel
Marc Mandel, former Director of Program Publications for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, joined the staff of the BSO in November 1978 and managed the orchestra’s program book from 1979 until his retirement in July 2020. He is co-editor of Defending the Music: Michael Steinberg at the Boston Globe, 1964–1976, published in May 2026 by Oxford University Press.