Canons and Contestable Cadences in Brahms′s Op. 118 No. 4

Brahms’s F minor Intermezzo, Op. 118, No. 4 prominently employs the fusty compositional technique of strict canon at the octave. Yet Brahms embeds this canon in music that is anything but fusty: as I demonstrate, unexpected features abound in the textures, dissonance treatment, modulatory schemes, and motives with which Brahms girds the canon. The movement’s approach to cadences is also remarkable. The presence of a continuous canon automatically precludes all voices coming to rest simultaneously, but Brahms further attenuates the piece’s cadences. Most notably, in this movement Brahms avoids traditional authentic-cadence closure entirely, writing not a single cadential progression from a root-position C major chord to a root-position F chord. Instead, I argue that Brahms effects tonal closure by using the augmented-sixth chord, which supplants the dominant’s usual function. He does this most obviously by repeating the augmented-sixth sonority in prominent positions within the ternary form’s final A section. I also show that Brahms artfully foreshadows this chord’s importance in the initial A section, where he successively tonicizes each member of that harmony.