Brahms, modernity, and tradition
#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.