Brahms in perspective
The last decades of the twentieth century have seen a striking increase in scholarly interest in the music of the nineteenth century. As this era moves yet further into the distance, it has been a fresh experience to find its repertory – long better known to concert audiences than that of any other period – viewed in a new setting, now that its social, political and creative backgrounds have been more fully revealed. In this new perspective, few images of composers have changed as much as that of Brahms. It has not been merely a matter of filling in the gaps of knowledge, or even of exploding certain myths. New examinations of his music have revealed just how much the received view of its significance was based on what it was taken to represent in the historical picture of the nineteenth century, rather than on its actual substance. With changing fashion after Brahms’s death, an image full of stereotypes became even more firmly entrenched by neglect. For example, that of Brahms ‘The Absolutist Composer’, the implacable opponent of Wagner, whose own failure to write an opera indicated a lack of interest in drama and literature. And, growing from this, the all-encompassing view of Brahms ‘The Conservative’, in the light of his preference for instrumental forms in an age of increasing programmaticism. In few cases can the perception and evaluation of a composer’s achievement have been so inadequate to the reality as with Brahms; in few cases can such oversimplified epithets – first the ‘epigone’ of Schumann; later, more durably, of Beethoven – have been so glibly applied.
There were of course good reasons for this failure to gain his measure. Brahms cultivated a classical profile in a romantic era, systematically mastering genre after genre in an age where specialism was the tendency. He commands an extraordinary historical position in the sheer range of the music he produced (though it does not extend to opera, it includes some highly dramatic vocal music). Few composers can be represented as typically in such accessible pieces as the ‘Wiegenlied’, the Hungarian Dances or the Liebeslieder waltzes, and yet also in complex fugues and variations, types of works which generally appeal to completely different audiences. And even to critics surveying the whole output, Brahms gives a different message – appearing to some as a sonorous Romantic, to others, a musical ascetic out of his historical time. Of course, Brahms sought to synthesise the many dimensions of his music and did so magnificently. But that very integration, the richness arising from – for example – the fusion of lyricism and complex counterpoint, has remained a problem for many listeners. For all the revision in attitudes towards his contemporaries, Brahms has continued to be difficult to categorise – hence the convenience of the catch-all label ‘Conservative’, which avoids the issue. And as with the music, so with the life: inherited images of a deprived childhood have continued to colour our views of Brahms’s mature personality, to leave him as something of a mystery as a social being.
The sense of distance is perhaps the more remarkable in the light of Brahms’s actual closeness to us in historical time and personal circumstance. Had he lived just a few years longer into the twentieth century (he was only sixty-three at his death), we would surely view him differently. As it is, those who remember him personally were still broadcasting their memories in the early years of the LP record after the Second World War. As a self-made man in an age of bourgeois culture, with all his lack of sentimentality about music and his religious scepticism, he seems much closer to our world than to those (only twenty years or so older) to whom he is so often related: Wagner, Liszt, Schumann, Mendelssohn.
Of course, there was always a narrow line of professional knowledge and admiration on the part of younger composers in the Austro-German tradition that kept alive a respect for Brahms’s technical achievements as a composer. This manifested itself most openly in Schoenberg’s famous essay ‘Brahms the Progressive’ (first broadcast in the centenary year of 1933, then published in revised form in 1950), which did more than any other text to place Brahms in a position of historical continuity. But Schoenberg saw Brahms as a ‘progressive’ essentially because of the Brahmsian principles he made his own: he was legitimising his often problematic music in claiming Brahms as his mentor. From the technical standpoint, Schoenberg’s was always a one-sided view of Brahms, as was his view of the future. And Schoenberg’ s successors would essentially grant Brahms’s greatness despite rather than because of the full character of his musical personality: acknowledging the technical dimension, whilst passing with reserve over the expressive substance.
The situation is very different now. It is Brahms’s place as a pioneer in reclaiming the past – a past much more distant than that explored by any other composer-contemporaries in this historicising era – that is now of interest. Of all composers of the nineteenth century, he seems central to modern outlooks in his lifelong concerns with the performance and editing of earlier music and its absorption into his own. Historical reference has become a new index of ‘meaning’ in modern composition, just as notions of abstract ‘unity’ and ‘structure’ were the shibboleths of Modernism. In tracing the continuity, Brahms now seems the most tangible link between the musical past and present. No longer an ‘anti-Pope’ (as he himself ruefully put it) to the great aesthetic innovator and ‘progressive’ of the century, Wagner, he now stands on an equal footing, relevant to late twentieth-century listeners as one of music’s most powerful intelligences.
The aim of this book is to reflect changing attitudes in a range of essays written partly by established Brahms specialists and partly (especially in discussion of the music) by scholars coming to the music from different backgrounds. The book’s three sections deal with his life, with his works and finally with the personal views offered by musicians with some special involvement with the music.
In Part I , Kurt Hofmann places Brahms’s difficult early years in Hamburg in a completely fresh perspective with the help of new documentation. Here the familiar picture of the abused young prodigy forced to work in a low-life setting is significantly revised in the light of his family background and the life of the professional musician. Brahms’s gradual estrangement from Hamburg and his earlier years of association with Vienna are the subject of my own essay, which sees this as a period of slow and difficult transition as he continued to attempt to establish himself as an independent composer from 1862 to 1875. Once established, however, Brahms became the most important musical figure in the city and released the major orchestral works by which he is best known to concert audiences. Viewing these compositions from a sociological rather than a purely musical standpoint, Leon Botstein offers new views of both Brahms’s motivation for composing them and the political dimension of their performance and reception (so prominent a feature of Brahms’s mature years in the city).
Part II covers the full range of Brahms’s output. John Rink explores the three distinctive chronological and stylistic phases of Brahms’s piano music in the light of the integrity of musical thought and technique which characterises his output, to reveal the brilliant resolution of striking tensions and dichotomies of style. Kofi Agawu shares an interest in the dynamic process which interacts with the larger form, pursuing the creative tensions between ‘architectural’ and ‘logical’ form at the heart of Brahms’s style through identifying strategic moments in the symphonies. For all the familiarity of Brahms’s orchestral work in the concert hall, his instrumental output was overwhelmingly devoted to chamber music, which exercised great influence on the younger generation. Its deep relationship with the past on the one hand and its profound originality on the other are explored in David Brodbeck’s discussion of representative works from the entire output. A major additional theme, however, is their extra-musical dimension: reflecting recent emphases of scholarship, he seeks to uncover unsuspected biographical connections that help to erode the absolutist view of Brahms the composer. Malcolm MacDonald’s discussion of the four concertos also blends the structural dimension – here the symphonic element as feeding the complex individuality of the works – while also emphasising the poetic and extra-musical aspect more than tradition has generally allowed. With the discussion of texted works, the issue of meaning in relation to form can be seen from the opposite position: that of the role of structure in communicating expression. Brahms’s large and varied output of choral music, of both small and large proportions, accompanied and unaccompanied, is the least known part of his oeuvre. Yet, as Daniel Beller-McKenna reveals, the works inter-relate closely with those of other genres and have the added dimension of a frequently overt link to musical history or social context. Form and expression interact at a more intimate level in the vast output of solo songs with piano; my own discussion of them argues for a higher esteem of Brahms’s ambitions and achievements through formal and stylistic subtleties in a wide range of examples.
In Part III , the discourse of biography and analysis is set aside for more personal responses to Brahms today. Roger Norrington approaches the music from the standpoint of a conductor seeking to realise the score in an historically informed light, using instruments and performing styles of the period. Facing similar issues from another perspective, Robert Pascall draws on the experience of editing the scores themselves for the new Johannes Brahms Gesamtausgabe , with the fullest reference to all the now available evidence, to clarify how Brahms produced them and the kinds of problems which attend their realisation. Finally, Hugh Wood places Brahms in the ultimate perspective for the present day, in responding as a composer himself, providing a further context for many of the preceding themes in the book: Brahms’s personality, the nature of his achievement, how we relate to him in historical time, the values he enshrines and what they mean today.