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A Most Beautiful and Creative Way to Keep a Secret

“Johannes Brahms … was tormented by his frustrated relationship with Agathe von Siebold to whom he was on the point of marrying in the summer of 1858. He was 25 years of age and she was 23. Ten years later, Brahms composed a string sextet in which he included the name of his old fiancée in the lyrics (except for the T, for which there is no equivalent in the German musical notation, and with the particularity that, in this composition, H corresponds to the note E).”

“Critics point out that the cryptogram A-G-A-H-E, during the first movement, is perhaps the greatest moment of relief from sorrow. ‘With this work, I’ve freed myself, at last, from love,’ Brahms wrote to his friend Josef Gänsbacher on the piece, which entered his catalog as the Sextet for Strings No. 2 in G major, Op. 36.”