For the first time, I truly listened to the slow movement of Brahms's First Serenade. An obvious precursor to his Third Symphony, the adagio sounds like an homage to nature, translated through a sense of noblesse oblige..
Brahma's Serenade, I argue, takes a place next to Beethoven's "Pastoral" in its voluminous treatment of nature's raw material: it inspires the 'natural sense', a Hymn to Wonderment.
Nature emits to us, our emissions cause her grief. Perhaps we all should listen closer?
(Curiously, there is a like moment in the final movement of Hindemith's Violin Concerto as an upward swell leads to a clean tonic resolution putting one in mind of the God of the Quran:
'Have We not made
The earth (as a place)
To draw together..
And made therein
Mountains standing firm,
Lofty (in stature);
And provided for you
Water sweet (and wholesome)?'
Indeed, one anticipates, in the rising sevenths of the flute to Brahms's adagio, the closing bars in the first movement of Mahler's Ninth).
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