Brahms Intermezzo in A major Op. 118 no. 2 - Analysis: All is forgiven 

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Very nice video. This intermezzo has so much: late romantic chromaticism, Mozartean phrase construction, Bachian counterpoint, Renaissance attitude to meter. Yet if you don’t know any of this, it just sounds good and draws the listener in. A true masterpiece.

Thank you. One of the best pieces of music of all-time, certainly deserves analysis

When I first heard this in theory class I cried -- Radu Lupu was playing it. And it made everyone else cry when I pointed out the beautiful lines because I am a Bach-hardcore fan and he did the same thing but in Brahms, it was so sweet and sentimental.

I first heard this piece, long ago, after a breakup, and it captured my deep sadness-it proved to be cathartic. I think only Brahms can be this sentimental and tender.👌

I’ve played this piece my entire life and this is the finest interpretation and explanation I’ve ever seen. Just superb.

The video is littered with examples of this but I love how easy it is to see the joy and enthusiasm in your face as you walk us through this beautiful piece. I've only been learning for 10 months and I don't know anything about music theory but I just love this music.

I know virtually nothing about Brahms. This piece of music was used in Tom Selleck movie series called Jesse Stone. It moved me, I did some research, and now I am here. I will, hopefully, learn how to play this sometime. Thanks for these analyses.

My favourite Intermezzo! This piece means quite a lot to me, since I first heared it in times I really needed such a beautiful masterpiece... it is one of the only pieces that are capable of making me cry... amazing work of Brahms... Also just about the right Time you posted this, since I will start practicing it soon. Thank you for posting this!

Thank you so much, what a nice story in the beginning about you hearing it for the first time. The analysis is as beautiful as the piece:) It helps understand and enjoy it even more.

Splendid tutorial on perhaps Brahm’s most beautiful Intermezzo.

Amazing video, thank you so much! This intermezzo has been one of my best favorites all the time. Everytime I listen to this I somehow feel very nostalgic about something that I am missing - which I do not even know. I have been keeping this piece away from my repertoire as I did not want to butcher it with my hobby-level piano skills, then this April I started to work on it for the first time. Your video helped me a lot to understand the structure of this piece, and I love your rendition and how you appreciate this music. Keep up your amazing work! ❤️

Brahms wrote some of the most tender, sentimental and poetic piano music in the entire repertoire - what he did with the lower tenor range of the keyboard is one of his defining traits. No other composer comes close for me.

I have been hoping you would do this piece! I have played this for 18 years and always find something new in it. I appreciate the theoretical analysis.

Underbart inspirerande! Tack!

What a joy! I love all you bring to us - thank you so much for sharing in the beautiful way you draw us into the music you choose.

I was looking forward to this video. The wait was worth it. Thanks for the review and keep up the good work! 👏🏻❤️

I've played this piece for many years and loved how you broke it down and talked of its construction. The love you have for this piece shines through. It really is an extraordinary masterpiece of music. You've inspired me to go back and revisit it to fall in love with it all over again. Regards.

Thanks a lot. I agree. I am playing this intermezzo and it makes me feel so well. It’s maybe the most beautiful and rich piano work I have ever heard. It speaks directly to our soul. Your analysis is great, clear, complete, inspiring…and it’s very kind from you to share this great work you make with us. Thanks a lot ✨

I can fully understand you. This piece is truly pure genius, with all the sweet melodies and their clean transitions. "wow"

I'm learning this piece very soon. This incredible analysis video will defo help me to study it quicker and more efficiently. Thanks a lot!

I play the piano, love classical music and am trying to get better at understanding and analysing it so I really appreciate your videos. They are extremely helpful, insightful and interesting and I learn a lot from them. Thank you for sharing them with us.

I can see why this piece would inspire you. It's very beautiful!

Iyt's amazing the way you explain,looking for the feelings instead of just notes and chords. I love it,thank you so much!!!!

Bravo on your analysis!!!

Well done. Informative and beautifully played. Tack !!

“Thank you” feels inadequate to express my gratitude, sir. I don’t know how you do it-somehow you connect with some very deep emotional material -“all is forgiven”-here along with the technical analysis, so that I was actually tearing up, profusely at times, for almost the whole thing. That was wonderful and totally unexpected! I have loved this piece for much of my life at the piano, I love it even more now. I am deeply grateful and I wish you all the best

Just so thoroughly immersed in your video analysis. So interesting and helpful. Thank you!🙂

Thank you for posting this beauty! This piece has a special place in my heart. I performed it for a piano exam at Foothill College long, long time ago. Brings good memories.

Just in time for my morning coffee! I enjoyed it tremendously

Lovely analysis of this treasured Brahms composition. ❤

Beautiful. I played this piece during my second year at a conservatory in Belgium. I consider the part in F# major to be a religious chorale. A moment of reflection between the painful minor episodes.

i'm stunned--wonderful lecture-demo on the a major intermezzo: he plays it, he tells us about it, he plays it, he tells us more...--for me: he can play and keep talking in lecture mode and full-out playing-interpretive mode at same time: that's something rare--students: if you're working on this piece keep this youtube video close and pay attntion

thank you for this, i think i start to appreciate more brahms

I love that I'm learning this through you book!

I woke up hearing this Intermezzo in my mind this AM. 😊

Yes, this is truly beautiful. Hard to play well, without over doing the pathos. Needs restraint and felt deep insight. Which is why your vid is much appreciated.

I just started playing about a year ago, at 24. I love playing and I enjoy practicing, currently trying to study the first Arabesque by Debussy, which is obviously very difficult for me but I am making it work. I think your "Easy Arrangements" are perfect for somebody like me, and I'm gonna buy it when I am looking for my next piece. Thanks for these videos, they are an absolute pleasure to watch, also - needless to say - lovely playing.

"Everything will be alright.." Think of Jessie Stone movies and books. Disabled baseball player, fired LA detective, now trying to survive without drinking. A kindly woman who heard the rumors of his drinking recommends Brahms. Jessie buys a record with this piece.

Absolutely beautiful❤👏👏👏

Love the faces with expressions along the way.

I started working on this piece 2 or 3 weeks ago, and I really enjoyed this analysis. At the end of the "A" section (and again at the very end of the piece), you said the melody finally steps down to A, instead of leaping the seventh; my first impression was that it DOES leap the seventh, to the higher A, and I hadn't considered your perspective. For me, there is a newfound beauty in the ambiguity of this ending, knowing that the resolution can be found in one voice or the other, or even both. My appreciation for Brahms can only ever grow.

Thank you Maestro. A very useful video to reach awareness in a correct interpretation.

Beautiful and well explained

Great post thanks!

Fantastiskt stycke! 😊

So so beautiful ❤️

It's interesting that Henrik begins by recounting his reaction to his first hearing of this piece. For me the piece is also forever tied with the first time I heard it. I had just tuned the piano for a client, a pretty young woman. She sat down to try it out as clients sometimes did by playing in a more or less perfunctory way, but she played the A Major Intermezzo. It was completely unexpected and stunned me. I was then a young man myself. Now as an old man I appreciate the autumnal aspects all the more. Wonderful analysis. I can see that the density of the music poses challenges for the pianist. And yet the piece always seems to work. I have never heard a performance that was not full of feeling. The Intermezzo evokes deeply personal emotions directly in a way that I find more often in pop music than classic. For instance, the Cream's piece "Layla" has a bi-partite structure the first section of which is an expression of strong sexual desire, but then the second section with entirely different musical material, full of unforeseen tenderness, resolves the earlier tension in a way that reminds me of the emotional arc of the Brahms.

The little emojis in the music are a nice touch and very funny

Thank you very much

Beautiful explanation!

Fantastic!

thank you so much

Great explanation

i love classical music

thank you so much for this analysis of this lovely piece I am learning it for a while now as a very mature piano student .I have also got your easier arrangement and find that very helpful too.

Beautiful

Wonderful analysis Henrik - you've really deepened my appreciation for this piece. I hope one day you do an analysis of Op. 117 No. 1. That is my favorite of the Intermezzi.

Thanks!

Excellent.

Excelente a explicação.

Thank you for bringing out the multiple interlocking components and nuances of this densely rich and gorgeous work. Would you consider also doing a video on how to pedal this piece? Given the rich and dense harmonies, multiple voices, frequent resolutions and abundant use of chromaticism, pedalling seems as challenging as it is necessary and your advice on how to do it artfully would be appreciated!

Just the stuff I’m studying right now. How structure and development relate to emotion and storyline.

Thank you for making this video! I first heard this piece in the Chinese movie Lust, Caution and fell in love with it. My appreciation for this piece is exponentially heightened after your analysis!

It’s funny you mention a lounge piano, since that’s the association I made with the opening bars. There is a bit of sentimentalism to the music, but in the hands of a master like Brahms, it's an _earned_ sentimentalism.

I'd never heard that one before. Really nice I'd love to hear the Dies Irae Intermezzo, no 6., next.

I played that too! Loved it then & now…,

Thanks, thanks, thanks...

I found Brahms later in life - perhaps as needed to capture the full breadth of its beauty - what an exceptional presentation - many thanks for the inspiration, truly, truly !!!!!!!!!!!!!

Channel subscribed ❤Brahms ....know him so long......thanks for sharing Your explanation ❤

It means a lot to a lot of people.

Tack så mycket för analysen den var mycket intressant! Hälsningar från musikhögskolan i Örebro. ☺️☺️

Excelent video! I’d like you to analyze Brahms ballade op.10 no.2 in D major

plz do a op 116! it doesn't get enough love :((

@sonatasecrets Could you please do an analysis video on Scriabin Op12 No2? I watched your shorts the other day and decided to learn it cuz it's simply amazing. It'd be very much appreciated if you can make that happen!

Great analysis even though I don’t understand most of it

❤❤❤❤❤!!!!!!!

15:55 No, I think it goes up !

To me this piece expresses longing for redemption and achieving it. Btw: It sounds very "modern" in sense of an elaborated Rock/Pop-Ballad in a Billy Joel/Bruce Hornsby-Style.

I wonder why he didn't put an octave in the left hand at 22:17. You think it would add to the sonority and finality of that section

@Sonata Secrets - I think that chord at bar 5 is more A7 than Em6. A7 leads to D in bar 6, like V7 - I.

It's funny how he writes tre chorde later on. I guess he forgot to write una corda on the f sharp major section. Brahms was a huge fan of the una corda pedal.

Great video as always :) You’re tall 👀

Where is your complete performance????

খুব সুন্দর, হেনরিক মশাই! আপনার বাজনা ও তার বিশ্লেষণের তুলনা হয় না। দয়া করে এই কাজটি থামাবেন না! Your analysis was so nice that I could not help but write in my mother tongue, Bengali (also called Bangla). If you reply me back in Bengali, it will mean a lot to me.

The challenge I find with this piece is it really has to stand up. It comes so dangerously close to being too pretty. Brahms writes in plenty of rubato so I try to not add any more.

Reminiscent of Beethoven's Op 101

F,ck YT! I was finishing a long c0mment on my phone and it decided to cut me off and erase it all.

Is there a Pay Pal option?

Is this piece hard? I didn't think it was hard. I mean, there's a lot going on. My senior year in college I audited a master class where I played this. On the second week, I imitated Glenn Gould's interpretation to the utmost. The professor said she'd never seen such an improvement in one week's time! LOL. As I lack a music theory background, it's nice to learn the dynamics of music.

Here Brahms is better than Chopin. Also the quality of the composition usually shows when it lingers in your mind after the music stops... for days. and everytime your recall it.

One thing i want to say about romantism and those highest emotional feeling. They are really the domain of the male gender. Women are much more pragmatic, blunt and materialistic by evolution. Even if you listen some female romantic composers like Fanny Mendelssohn or Clara Schumann they do not go into this amount of pain and melancholy, and quest for the poetry (also there are next to no female poets). Again this is a biological result of female being driving differently in the reproduction process than men who have to do all the courting and be rejected while women have materialistic considerations. The softness in women is not romantic it's a motherly gentleness to the child a very different emotion and you sure get that in the above female composers. But romantic love poetry that is found in men only.

Excellent English ! BUT a motive is not a motif, the accent is on the second syllable.

i really do not know how to enjoy this piece...

israel is not a country, Palestine is. israel usurped Palestine, and continues to. However, Brahm's music is sublime, and your analysis is just as always, great.