ABSTRACT
After completing the Suite in A minor, Johannes Brahms clearly felt that, for the time being, he had acquired enough understanding of baroque dances. Their relevance to his developing creative voice, and he turned his attention to investigating other historical styles and forms, being principally those of renaissance vocal music and Bachian preludes and fugues for organ. The subject in the opening movement of the First String Sextet, has four rounded lyrical themes, each repeated, and the first begins out of key in the mediant major of the dominant. The second movement thus enacts the trans-generic cross from keyboard suite to chamber-music work, a cross which Brahms retained for the subsequent two re-uses of his suite materials. Thus the formal expectation-horizons and expressive codes of the new genre received a thorough-going stylistic supplementation from the neo-baroque dance, serving purposes of renewal and of deepening originality.
