The opening theme is strikingly Brahms-like! That initial impression doesn’t hold up well, however, especially as regards the consistent use of far-out harmonics not as new areas to explore at length, but almost as neighbor notes. I believe Brahms would have made much more of them. Thuille was something of a musical chameleon.
For me this sounds so Schubertian with all those melodies and especially the move to Gb major! The playing between major and minor chords sounds Schubertian too. B. 134 indeed sounds Brahmsian with the interplay of motives between winds and piano, but it’s less thick and manipulating like Brahms. The piano part definitely looks easier than many of the chamber music involving piano as the left hand often play octaves and chords! Henry
Ludwig Wilhelm Andreas Maria Thuille (Bozen, 30 November 1861 - 5 February 1907) was an Austrian composer and teacher, numbered for a while among the leading operatic composers of the so-called Munich School of composers, whose most famous representative was Richard Strauss. He lost both his parents in 1872 when he was 11, and moved in with his step-uncle in Kremsmünster, Austria. There he sang in the Benedictine choir and studied organ, piano, and violin. His musical abilities were exceptional, so in 1876 the widow of a composer/ conductor, Matthaus Nagiller, took him to Innsbruck for more advanced musical training. There, in the summer of 1877, he met the young Richard Strauss, whose family was visiting the town; the two became lifelong friends. His Innsbruck teacher of organ and theory recommended him to the distinguished composer Josef Rheinberger in Munich, who took him as a pupil in the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München, from where he graduated with honors in 1882. A year later he became a teacher, and few years thereafter a professor of theory and composition. His many pupils included Hermann Abendroth, Ernest Bloch, Ernst Boehe [de], Richard Wetz, Paul von Klenau, Rudi Stephan, Walter Braunfels, Mabel Wheeler Daniels, Henry Kimball Hadley and Walter R. Spalding, who became the head of the Division of Music at Harvard University, and later taught Leroy Anderson. Despite his friendship with Strauss (which extended to making a 2-piano arrangement of the latter's tone poem Don Juan), and despite his devotion to music-drama, Thuille remained a fairly conservative composer during his brief life. He died at the age of 45 in 1907 in Munich of heart failure. The voice? To me, Johannes Brahms. Thanks for sharing!
