As an example of Wagner’s misunderstanding of his own expressivist genius, take his most self-conscious effort at a classicist work, Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg. Here is a — wonderful and energetic! — performance of the Prelude. Wagner pitches it in a faux-Baroque register and dials back the adventurous harmonies a few ticks, such that it sounds by far the most conventional of his operas (compare even the earlier Prelude to Lohengrin, which is hardly Tristan und Isolde in its adventurousness.) It is an intriguing experiment for the expressivist-in-chief. And it is hard to deny that this piece is a lot of fun!

But aesthetically speaking, the experiment is a failure. Even when writing in a self-consciously restrained idiom, Wagner is unable to actually exercise any classicist restraint. (One hears a voice from Delphi intoning sternly: “Nothing in excess!") There is hardly a passage that does not have at least one too many things going on at once, and often two or three.

The problems are signaled from the very beginning. It begins in classical style, with a four-bar subphrase, and then a two-bar gesture that follows the first two bars rhythmically while moving toward a different part of the harmonic map. So far, so promising. (Though even in the first bar, Wagner hints that he wants to escape the mold harmonically with an undeniably tasty passing whole-tone triad over VI — A•C#•F.) But then the theme goes off in a new direction: a three-bar descending sequence that helps establish (in its second bar) a dominant pedal tone, followed by four bars of intense string noodling over the dominant pedal tone, resolving to a… restatement of the main theme that begins in the subdominant! Because of this irregular phrase structure of 4+2+3+4, with no harmonic movement of any kind in the last subphrase (indeed much of it is exact repetition), the restatement of the theme arrives — somehow — aurally both too late and too early. And after that restatement begins, Wagner gives us an exhaustingly thick texture, in which for eleven consecutive bars (note that we have another 13-bar chunk here) there is not a single eighth-value without movement somewhere in the orchestra. The lines seem to climb indefinitely to the secondary dominant, ratcheting the musical tension up and up (and up and up and up)… until we finally get the first major resolution. Then follows an actually quite lovely passage that introduces the lyrical second theme (whatever else one wants to say about him, Wagner is good for a lyrical second theme), twice in full, then twice fragmenting, and it is all feeling very proportionate and balanced… until the strings start buzzing around while the winds are still unspooling the theme, with an irregularly beaten scalar figure that causes one to completely lose track of the meter. The opening texture returns with the bold third theme, which is actually set in nice, symmetrical four-bar phrases most of the way to the next subject (only one random five-bar phrase thrown in there)… but it is thick and loud the whole way, without much real development, and with so much activity everywhere in the orchestra that it is hard to attend to any one line. Wagner gives us a great deal of sound and fury (cheerful fury, at least), but signifying really very little.

For another example of this aesthetic dynamic, listen to the short quasi-fugal passage starting at 6:07 (p. 22 in the unfortunately unmeasured score). There are three different fugal subjects or motives — the main subject, which is taken from the third theme, starts in the winds; the accompanying subject, which seems to be new in this section, begins in the celli; and the repeated trill motif, which appears to be drawn from the preceding lyrical passage. It is not illegitimate to have three elements in your contrapuntal texture. But Wagner cannot stop himself from using all three right from the beginning, rather than introducing them one at a time. From the start of the passage it is impossible to tell by ear which of the two subjects Wagner intends to be primary. I find it telling that, in the video linked above, the video editing cuts from string section to string section with each statement of the accompanying subject, even though at the beginning of the passage Alain Altinoglu actually cues the winds for their primary (and more melodic!) subject, and only gives the celli a secondary cue. Altinoglu makes the correct choice — but can you blame the video editor for not following him? The most egregious choice is that the trill motif, after being quietly introduced in the bassoons in the first measure, is given to the second violins in the second measure and marked sforzando. It is an orchestra-wide sforzando, to be sure, but Wagner has not given us a chance to hear the main subject(s) in this setting before making the second violins rudely interrupt the (quieter) winds and celli! It sounds like someone has come in too early — and not in the way of the famous horn entrance at the recapitulation in Beethoven’s Third Symphony. Either it is aesthetic incompetence, or it is a deliberate thumbing of the nose at the fugue (which might count as aesthetic incompetence).

For ten minutes, it is practically all like this: nearly constant (almost frenetic) activity in the subsidiary voices, lines that go on just a bit too long, elements that are repeated too many times, such that it is almost impossible to actually attend to any individual element as it belongs to the whole. Instead, the listener must instead accept the whole, lean back in his or her chair, and be sucked under by the aesthetic tsunami. None of this makes, as I said above, the piece any less fun (for the audience; it is rather a pain to perform, at least as a string player). And indeed it has a kind of showiness that is characteristic of the whole Wagnerian Schule, independent of style. But it is one thing to embrace (or at least tolerate) the showiness and the excess when the work in question is chiefly expressivist. It is another when the work aspires, or at least appears to aspire, to meet and embody certain classical standards of excellence. Nobody forced Wagner to write in this idiom; he composed it in 1862, when he was comfortably established and internationally famous. The showiness and the excess indicates that its composer does not understand the real value and spirit of classicism, and its link with expressivism.

The great works of European art music exist in an aesthetic field defined by the dipole of classicism and expressivism, the two generative sensibilities that drive (or drove) developments in musical style between about 1700 and 1950. By “dipole” I am not picturing a Venn diagram but something more like a magnet:

As in the magnetic field, classicism and expressivism are dialectical and interpenetrating, not antithetical and opposing. There is no “pure” specimen of either. No one work, or composer, ever exemplifies one sensibility to the total exclusion of the other. In one period a work may be predominantly classicist despite its composer utilizing musical language and form that were originally developed from expressivist impulses. (Note: I use these two terms here in largely ahistorical ways — small-c and small-e, not the capitalized historical movements Classicism and Expressivism — for lack of better terms occurring to me at the moment.)

The mark of classicism is the aspiration to balance and perfection in musical presentation. The classical sensibility yields the sort of work about which one thinks: “There was not a single note out of place” — even if, as the Emperor is supposed to have told Mozart, there may have been “too many notes.” Stereotypically, Western music loves four-bar phrases, clean chord progressions with well-prepared resolutions, standard accompaniment figures and phrases (the Alberti bass being the most famous), and the like: these are hallmarks of the classical. There is a self-conscious inhabiting of traditional forms, even as they may be innovated or subverted in various ways. To be sure, there may be musical surprises, but they do not feel experimental. To the listener there is little or no sense of struggle in the act of composition, no matter how dramatic the music itself may be. To the performer the chief difficulty is making the music seem effortless, regardless of the technical challenge it may pose. The overriding impression in the greatest of these works is of exquisite craftsmanship, occasionally of an almost unearthly or inhuman perfection.

The mark of expressivism is the aspiration to communicate the hitherto incommunicable, to somehow reach across the gulf between composer, performer(s), and audience. (Note the asymmetry between the two core aspirations.) The expressive sensibility yields the sort of work about which one thinks: “That was so powerful!” — even if, in places, it seemed overwrought or difficult to follow. (Bertrand Russell’s remark about Wagner’s opera is apposite: “marvelous moments, and dreadful quarters of an hour.") Traditional forms and stereotyped devices are used, but not loved; they are the composer’s vehicle, not his or her habitation. Every aspect of the music is, if not actually experimental, a potential site for experimentation; there are not so much musical “surprises” as a more or less steady experience of “surprise.” The listener is expected to not just hear but feel the sense of personal exertion that has gone into the composition; even the less dramatic moments reveal the struggle for expression by temporarily concealing it. To the performer the chief difficulty is summoning the emotional vigor to make the music seem sufficiently effortful. The overriding impression in the greatest of these works is of overwhelming genius, that the composer has somehow expressed the previously inexpressible.

The greatest of classicists is, of course, Mozart. There is nobody to match him — except perhaps Schubert, who stands after him but in the same rank. The second rank of classicists includes Mendelssohn, Chopin, Fauré, Tchaikovsky (yes, a classicist by temperament, except perhaps revealing his expressivist side in the Sixth Symphony!), Rachmaninoff, and the late Stravinsky (there’s something about those Francophile Russians). I am unsure whether to say Haydn is a classicist or an expressivist at heart; probably a classicist, albeit one who was toying with expressivism before it had come to full flower. Richard Strauss had the fullness of classicism within him — especially present, perhaps, in his Eine Alpensinfonie, in his Violin Sonata, and in some passages of the early tone poems. Mahler, too, wrote some marvelous classical passages, though mostly integrated into overall expressivist works — especially the waltz movements in his earlier symphonies; in his later period, the Sixth and Eighth Symphonies are remarkably classicist works despite the force of their expression.

The greatest of expressivists, who ushered this sensibility into maturity after Haydn had disclosed a new measure of its potential, is Beethoven. In his earliest works, one can hear him toying brilliantly (if sometimes unimpressively) with the classicism of his teachers, at times sounding impatient to get on to writing in his own way. His Third Symphony is still the touchstone expressivist (and Romantic) work, often imitated but never bettered, with its astonishing self-confidence, its total mastery of and almost equally total disregard for musical convention. More subtle in this regard, but no less masterful, are his late string quartets, especially Opp. 130 and 131. (But in the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies especially Beethoven showed that his embrace of expressivism did not indicate a total repudiation of classicism.) Wagner undoubtedly aspired to be, and maybe imagined himself to be, the greatest of expressivists, but he did not understand its hidden and tragic secret: that it depends irreducibly on the dialectical tension with the classicist pole for its power. Among Beethoven’s successors, the greatest expressivist accomplishments are those of Schumann (in the solo piano works), Mahler (in the Second and Ninth Symphonies), and Strauss (Ein Heldenleben), though they also at times exhibit the tragic tendency of expressivism to cut loose from classicism and thus lose itself. Also deserving mention are the French luminaries of expressivism, Debussy and Ravel. The early Schoenberg (cf. Verklärte Nacht and the first string quartet) had the promise of greatness, but his turn to anti-tonality was his undoing. Dmitri Shostakovich, long after much of European music had followed Schoenberg down his disastrous path, continued cultivating the genius of expressivism, as did his Soviet colleague Sergei Prokofiev.

In the middle zone of the dipole, offering remarkable and singular syntheses of these two sensibilities, stand J. S. Bach and Brahms. Perhaps less brilliant than those two, but great nevertheless, is Anton Bruckner, who offers his great expressiveness with remarkable musical economy and in a (yet more remarkable) spirit of humility. And the Vier letzte Lieder of Strauss dwell in the same extraordinary territory.

Next I need to read Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy — whose title, I just learned, originally continued … Out of the Spirit of Music — to see how closely my intuition here maps to his famous juxtaposition of Apollo and Dionysos.

I have written suspiciously little about music for a blog entitled “Program Notes”. Well, last week — May 7, to be exact — was Johannes Brahms’s birthday (happy 192nd, Johannes!), so it seems a fitting moment to write down some thoughts I have had floating around for a while.

Brahms occupies a curious place in Western musical history. Among the pantheon of “great composers,” he is perhaps the first who was not self-consciously an innovator. (Perhaps Mozart is a counter-example? But if in his youthful period one hears nothing but an almost uncanny perfecting of the Classical style, the mature works of his final decade disclose a latent genius for musical innovation that at times nearly shatters the mold; as with Schubert, one can only imagine how different music would have been had he been given more time.) During his own lifetime Brahms was known as a notable musical conservative, a protégé of the Schumanns and an inheritor of the Beethoven legacy, in contrast to the self-consciously progressive and experimental followers of Liszt (especially Wagner) — the (hyperbolically) so-called “War of the Romantics.” There is no single genre with which he is singularly identified, which he can be said to have (re)invented, transformed, or redefined — unlike Mozart with the opera, Schubert with the song cycle, Liszt with the tone poem, Mahler with the symphony, or Beethoven with pretty much everything (but especially the symphony and the string quartet). Nor is there an instrument whose technique is distinctively and permanently marked by his influence — unlike Bach for the violin and the keyboard, Beethoven and Chopin and Liszt for the modern piano, or Mendelssohn and Wagner (quite differently from one another) for orchestration. His style pays constant homage to Bach’s finely tuned counterpoint, Haydn’s sense of proportion, Beethoven’s ear for the dramatic flair, and Schumann’s expressive melody; but it is hard to say, whatever it might mean to say it, that in any of these areas he “improves” upon his forebears.

Part of all this, no doubt, is that Brahms was a notorious perfectionist — spending nearly twenty years writing and rewriting his First Symphony, and burning the manuscripts of more than a dozen string quartets he considered inadequate. But one can equally say of “perfectionism” that it is an unwillingness to measure oneself by any standards that transcend or relativize those one is given. The First Symphony, after all, took twenty years because it had to be worthy to publish after Beethoven’s Ninth (a burden which Schumann and Mendelssohn had notably not felt). Beethoven’s sheer artistic self-belief (and self-regard) was what permitted him to dispense with the artistic conventions he inherited from Haydn and Mozart, and every great composer after Beethoven considered that to be truly great one must at least try to be like Beethoven in this respect. Every great composer, that is, except for Brahms. He alone seemed to think it worthy to simply and creatively conserve the traditions he inherited, offering to posterity a handful of finely polished gems in which, like the Silmarils of Fëanor, the light of now-past ages is caught and distinctively refracted. And a small handful indeed: in the genres which his great forebears had seen, or had come to be seen, as offering special artistic statements — the string quartet, the piano trio, the piano sonata, and above all the symphony — he left just a few pieces each: string quartets three, piano trios three, piano sonatas three, and symphonies four. If there is a genre in which he was, perhaps, the greatest “innovator” of his day, it is that genre which most self-consciously honors the past: the theme and variations.

All this may sound curiously negative, as though I am suggesting (as Richard Strauss said about himself) that Brahms is “not a first-rate composer, but a first-class second-rate composer.” Not so. Brahms, in his totality, is certainly greater than Strauss (who, as the Brits say, routinely over-eggs the pudding a bit — though that masterpiece of his twilight years, the Vier letzte Lieder, deserves to stand in the first rank). The best passages in Brahms are as transcendently great as anything in Beethoven or Mozart. I am thinking, specifically, of the last five minutes (102 bars) in the first movement of the First Piano Concerto, though there is any number of passages I could spotlight. This movement, and this passage in particular, exemplifies all the best qualities of his writing: the organic expansion of just one or two simple musical cells into a vast whole; a remarkable economy of both counterpoint (there are rarely more than two separate lines moving simultaneously) and orchestration (somehow creating a full, sustained sound without Wagnerian orchestral busy-work); judicious exploitation of the flexible, propulsive rhythms available in his long triple meter, keeping the energy flowing through long yet elegantly balanced melodic lines; and the perfectly seamless, almost invisibly prepared transition from the calm light of the second theme to the darkness of the coda (at bar 438, 22:03 in the above linked recording), like a great cloud slowly obscuring the face of the Sun. There is nothing pretentious, nothing self-serious, nothing indulgent in Brahms. Everything is heartfelt, often even passionate, but utterly sincere. Where Mozart’s music sounds effortless, almost too perfect to be real, and Beethoven’s music sounds immensely effortful, every note as if written with blood — well, Brahms’s music sounds, simply, human: the music of human life, life as really lived, not as larger than life.

Now indulge me as I offer some speculation. In his masterpiece of criticism Real Presences (1989), George Steiner draws attention to the “broken contract” between logos and kosmos, immanent language and transcendent reality: the gulf (so he argues) at the heart of modern humanity’s sense of alienation. If there is no God, there is no “real presence” in anything we say: our words are meaningless. (Steiner himself was, notably, unable to believe in God: throughout Real Presences he writes of God and the transcendent as one who longs for but cannot himself have them.) And it was in the 1870s, Steiner suggests, that European critics and scholars began to advocate for detaching logos and kosmos. I am not even one-thousandth the expert on European arts and letters that Steiner was, but I cannot help noting that in the realm of music, this is precisely the period when tonality and tradition — the so-called “Common Practice” — begins to break down. Wagner’s “Tristan chord” (premiered 1865) is often seen as the touchstone for this development: the first public statement by a leading composer in a major work that the boundaries of tonality and the “rules” of voice-leading could be breached for the sake of expression. Of course, one is not terribly hard pressed to find Tristan-chord-like harmonies and resolutions in earlier composers (Schumann!), but it is hard to deny that there is something… flagrant? iconoclastic? Promethean? in the use Wagner there makes of it. And in any case, the floodgates opened in the 1870s and onward — with Verdi, Franck, Saint-Saëns, and Mussorgsky (all born before 1850) following Wagner in preparing the ground for really major innovations by Puccini, Mahler, Debussy, and Strauss (born after 1850) within a just-barely-tonal paradigm. By the beginning of the 20th century, Ravel and Scriabin were conjuring essentially non-tonal landscapes, and Schoenberg was developing the twelve-tone paradigm by which he sought to banish the concept of a single tonal center from his music — a deliberate repudiation of kosmos in favor of (a highly mathematical and schematized notion of) logos. All that was (apparently) solid melted, in the course of a few decades, into air.

And it is in precisely those decades, in the midst of so much musical chaos, that we find Brahms at work. He is a son of his age, not of some other age; he is not, and cannot be, a mere repristinator. But he is that son not as an innovator, but as a creative conserver, aware of how rich is his inheritance and seeking to make good use of it. What we hear in Brahms is always something new, but never something novel. Perhaps this is the way — the only way? — to flourish in modernity.

Here I would like to advance the admittedly speculative hypothesis that the peculiar quality of music lies in its ability to produce a highly specific form of relating to the world, one in which our relationship to the world as a whole becomes tangible and thus can be both modulated and modified. Music in a way negotiates the quality of relation itself, whereas languages and sign systems can only ever thematize one particular relationship to or segment of the world at a time… [Listening] to music has a different orientation than seeing, grasping, or feeling. The experience of music suspends the division between self and world, transforming it in a way into a pure relationship. Music is the rhythms, sounds, melodies, and tones between self and world, even if these of course have their source in the social world and the world of things. The universe of sound consists in its ability to express or generate all manner of different and differently nuanced relationships: strife, loneliness, desolation, resentment, alienation, and tension, as well as yearning, refuge, security, love, responsivity. This pure relational quality adheres to music in all of its manifestations, high culture as well as pop culture, and allows us to comprehend how it is that music and dance have always been so closely linked. …

[95] Only from this perspective can we understand how, on the one hand, music possesses the power to change the way we are situated in the world (our “attunement”), while, on the other hand, we crave different kinds of music depending on our relationship to the world at a certain moment. Even (and especially) music that expresses sadness, melancholy, hopelessness, or strife is capable of moving us, because we are able to experience it as resonating with our own sadness, melancholy, or strife, i.e. with our own relationships to the world. We experience being moved by such sounds as something positive (even and especially when we are brought to tears) and not at all as something that itself makes us depressed. To the contrary, it is when we are no longer touched, moved, or gripped by music that we experience alienation or, in extreme cases, depression, as it is then that we experience the world as mute, even as it is still so loud. …

If my contention is correct that music negotiates the quality of relation (to the world) itself, then we can begin to understand the eminently important function that it is capable of fulfilling in modern society. Music affirms and potentially corrects, moderates, and modifies our relation to the world, repeatedly re-establishing it as the “ur-relationship” from which subject and world origi-nate… Seen from this perspective, the “musicalization” of the world since the twentieth century seems to be an almost inevitable correlate (because complementary in its effects) to the growing reification of our two-sided bodily relationship to the world[.]

— Hartmut Rosa (tr. James C. Wagner), Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (London: Polity, 2019), 94–95