The Three Intermezzi for piano, Op. 117, are compositions that
Johannes Brahms created for solo piano. The intermezzi were described by the critic
Eduard Hanslick as "monologues"... pieces of a "thoroughly personal and subjective character" striking a "pensive, graceful, dreamy, resigned, and elegiac note."
The Intermezzi of Opus 117 were composed in 1892.
The first intermezzo, in E♭ major, is prefaced in the score by two lines from an old Scottish ballad, Lady Anne Bothwell's Lament:
Balow, my babe, lie still and sleep! It grieves me sore to see thee weep.
The middle section of the second intermezzo, in B♭ minor, seems to Brahms’ biographer
Walter Niemann to portray a "man as he stands with the bleak, gusty autumn wind eddying round him."
The final intermezzo, in C♯ minor, has an autumnal quality also, suggesting the cold wind sighing through the trees as leaves are falling.