contrabass-player in the theatre orchestra of Hamburg. In him his son's
positiveness of character seems to have been foreshadowed, for we
learn that when the conductor once directed him not to play so loud,
he replied with dignity: «Herr Capellmeister, this is my contrabass, I
want you to understand, and I shall play on it as loud as I please.»
Brahms was born at Hamburg in 1833, and from his earliest years was
trained for music as a matter of course. His early acquaintance with
the best works was of incalculable value to him. Mr. Hadow points out
that the eclecticism and solidity of his style was doubtless largely
due to the study of Bach and Beethoven that he made in youth under
Marxsen. He had the advantage, too, of early practical experience. When
he was only twenty he made a concert tour with Reményi, the Hungarian
violinist, during which he gained much training and confidence. A feat
he performed during this trip showed even more virtuosity than that of
«le petit Saint-Saëns» already recorded. Having to play the Kreutzer
Sonata on a piano too low in pitch to suit Reményi, who disliked to
tune down his violin, he transposed it up a semi-tone, and though
playing without notes, performed it accurately and with spirit. To
this feat, which aroused the admiration of Joachim, Brahms owed his
acquaintance with the great violinist, and through him with Liszt and
Schumann. His experience with the former, then in the height of his
fame, was unfortunate, but characteristic. Brahms, who was worn out
with travel, fell asleep during one of the most moving parts of Liszt's
Sonata, which the great virtuoso was so condescending as to play.
Though Brahms was only a boy at the time, he was evidently, even then,
undazzled by worldly glory.
His meeting with Schumann was much more happy; indeed, it was one of
the important events of his life. Probably no young composer ever
received such a hearty welcome into the musical world as Schumann
extended to Brahms in his famous article, «New Paths.» «In sure and
unfaltering accents,» writes Mr. Hadow, «he proclaimed the advent of
a genius in whom the spirit of the age should find its consummation
and its fulfilment; a master by whose teaching the broken phrases
should grow articulate, and the vague aspirations gather into form and
substance. The five-and-twenty years of wandering were over; at last
a leader had arisen who should direct the art into 'new paths,' and
carry it a stage nearer to its appointed place.» It is not surprising
that Schumann, whose generous enthusiasm often led him to praise
worthless work, should have received the early compositions of Brahms
so cordially. Their qualities were such as to affect profoundly the
great romanticist. Although the essential character of his mature works
is their classical balance and restraint, these first compositions
show an exuberance, a wayward fertility of invention, thoroughly
romantic. His first ten opuses, or at any rate the three sonatas and
the four ballades for piano, are frequently turgid in emotion, and
ill-considered in form. The massive vigor of his later work here
appears in the guise of a cyclopean violence. It is small wonder that
Schumann, dazzled, delighted, overwhelmed, gave his ardent support
to the young man. Brahms now found himself suddenly famous. He was
discussed everywhere, his pieces were readily accepted by publishers,
and his new compositions were awaited with interest.
But fortunate as all this was for Brahms, it might easily, but for his
own good sense and self-control, have turned out the most unfortunate
thing that could happen to him. For consider his position. He was a
brilliant young composer who had been publicly proclaimed by one of the
highest musical authorities. He was expected to go on producing works;
he was almost under obligation to justify his impressive introduction.
Not to do so would be much worse than to remain a nonentity; it would
be to become one. And he had meanwhile every internal reason for
meeting people's demands. He was full of ideas, conscious of power,
under inward as well as outward compulsion to express himself. Yet
for all that, he was in reality immature, unformed, and callow. His
work, for all its brilliancy, was whimsical and subjective. If he
had followed out the path he was on, as any contemporary observer
would have expected, he would have become one of the most radical of
romanticists. At thirty he would have been a bright star in the musical
firmament, at forty he would have been one of several bright stars,
at fifty he would have been clever and disappointed. It required rare
insight in so young a man, suddenly successful, to realize the danger,
rare courage to avert it. When we consider the temptation it must have
been to him to continue these easy triumphs, when we imagine the inward
enthusiasm of creation with which he must have been on fire, we are
ready to appreciate the next event of the drama.
That event was withdrawal from the musical world and the initiation
of a long course of the severest study. When he was a little over
twenty-one, Brahms imposed upon himself this arduous training,
and commanded himself to forego for a while the eloquent but
ill-controlled expression hitherto his, in order to acquire a
broader, firmer, purer, and stronger style. For four or five years,
to borrow Stevenson's expression, he «played the sedulous ape» to
Bach and Beethoven, and in a minor degree to Haydn and Mozart. The
complex harmonies of his first period gave place to simple, strong
successions of triads; for an emotional and often vague type of melody
he substituted clearly crystallized, fluent, and gracious phrases,
frequently devoid of any particular expression; the whimsical rhythms
of the piano sonatas were followed by the square-cut sections of
the Serenade, opus 11. Of course the immediate effect of all this
was a great sacrifice of what is called originality; had Brahms
not had complete faith in the vitality of his genius he could not
have surrendered so much of immediate attainment for the sake of an
ultimately greater mastery. It is a profound lesson in the ethics of
art that a man who could write the fourth of the Ballades, opus 10,
should have been willing to follow it up with this Serenade, opus 11.
Yet Brahms knew what he was about, and his first large work, the Piano
Concerto, opus 15, shows his individuality of expression entirely
regained, and now with immensely increased power and resource.
Nothing could exhibit better than this dissatisfaction with his early
work and withdrawal from the world for study, that intellectual breadth
which we have noted as characteristic of Brahms. He was not a man who
could be content with a narrow personal expression. No subjective
heaven could satisfy him. His wide human sympathy and his passion
for artistic perfection alike, compelled him to study unremittingly,
to widen his ideals as his powers increased. No fate could seem to
him so horrible as that «setting» of the mind which is the æsthetic
analogue of selfishness. Originality, which so often degenerates into
idiosyncrasy, was much less an object to him than universality, which
is after all the best means of being serviceably original. Dr. Deiters,
in his reminiscences, after describing this period of study, continues:
«Henceforth we find him striving after moderation, endeavoring to
place himself more in touch with the public, and to conquer all
subjectiveness. To arrive at perspicuity and precision of invention,
clear design and form, careful elaboration and accurate balancing of
effect, now became with him essential and established principles.»
From this time until the end of his life, in fact, a period of only a
little less than forty years--he died in 1897--Brahms never departed
from the modes of work and the ideals of attainment he had now set
himself. He labored indefatigably, but with no haste or impatience. He
was too painstaking and conscientious a workman to botch his products
by hurrying them. He thus described to his friend, Mr. Henschel, his
method of composing: «There is no real _creating_ without hard work.
That which you would call invention, that is to say, a thought, is
simply an inspiration from above, for which I am not responsible,
which is no merit of mine. Yes, it is a present, a gift, which I ought
even to despise until I have made it my own by right of hard work.
And there need be no hurry about that either. It is as with the seed
corn: it germinates unconsciously and in spite of ourselves. When I,
for instance, have found the first phrase of a song, I might shut the
book there and then, go for a walk, do some other work, and perhaps not
think of it again for months. Nothing, however, is lost. If afterward
I approach the subject again, it is sure to have taken shape; I can
now really begin to work at it.» Another inkling of the severity of
his standard we have in a remark he made after pointing out certain
imperfections in a song of Mr. Henschel's. «Whether it is beautiful
also,» he said, «is an entirely different matter; but perfect it must
be.» With such a standard, we need not be surprised that he imposed so
severe a training upon himself at twenty-one, or that he continued all
his life the practice of writing each day a contrapuntal exercise, or
that he wrought for ten years over his first symphony, that Titanic
work. Thus laboring always with the same calm persistence, returning
upon his ideas until he could present them with perfect clarity, caring
little for the indifference or the applause of the public, but much
for the approval of his own fastidious taste, he produced year by year
an astonishing series of masterpieces. No one has better described the
kind of work that made Brahms great than Matthew Arnold in those lines
about labor
«which in lasting fruit outgrows
Far noisier schemes; accomplished in repose;
Too great for haste, too high for rivalry.»
A just conception of this broad scheme of Brahms's ideal and of his
thoroughness in working it out is necessary, we must insist, not only
to appreciation of the man himself, but to any true understanding of
his relation and service to music. Brahms was enabled, by the tireless
training to which he subjected his fertile and many-sided genius, to
couch romantic feeling in classic form. In order to grasp the full
significance of such a work, it is necessary to bear in mind those
fundamental principles of musical effect and facts of musical history
which have been presented in the Introduction. Music has resulted from
the gradual formal definition, by time and pitch relations, of those
vague gestures and utterances by which men expressed their primitive
feelings. It has been, in a word, the product of two human instincts,
neither of which alone would have sufficed to produce it--the instinct
for expression and the instinct for beauty. But these instincts have
not worked with precisely equal efficacy at all times. In fact, so
limited is human attention, so few things can men attend to at once,
every great development of expression has generally disturbed the
equilibrium requisite to beauty, and every great advance in beauty has
generally, for the time being, restrained the eloquence of expression.
Musical history is a series of reactions between man's primal emotional
impulse and his desire for intelligibility. First, urgency of feeling
drives him to a formless cry; then the wish to be understood and the
love of beauty induce him to formulate this cry; finally, as soon as
the formula is felt to be inadequate to further expression, it is
discarded in favor of one more elastic and complex. The conventions
that are helpful at one stage prove hindrances in the next. The same
forms that subserve growth up to a certain point, beyond that point
hamper it. Accordingly, in the history of music, formulation has always
been followed by relaxation of the formulæ to admit of new expression;
and when new expression has been thus evolved, a new and more complex
form has had to be worked out to regulate and fix it.
Such a period of relaxation was that which intervened between Beethoven
and Brahms. The romanticists, headed by Schumann, seized upon the
possibilities of poignant expression that they were quick to recognize
in their heritage from Beethoven, and developed an extraordinarily
mobile and eloquent instrument for voicing personal emotion. At the
same time they inevitably lost the perfect control of form, the
transparent lucidity of structure, that had characterized Beethoven. In
some respects more moving, they were on the whole less intelligible.
They were enriching their art, and must leave the perfect subordination
of the new material to their successors. It is most interesting to
trace the analogy between this development of musical expression and
the growth of emotional life in the individual, and to observe how in
both the period of experience, in which emotion is felt in all its
immediate stress, inhibiting all else and being therefore conceived in
no relations, but merely as a single and ultimate fact, is followed by
the period of meditation and self-inspection, when the whole emotional
life is grouped into order, and the man learns to see the significance
and the spiritual value of his feelings. With the romanticists music
necessarily became more and more the medium of personal passion, less
and less the revealer of universal order.
Browning, himself a romanticist through and through, has summed up
the spirit of romanticism in a single stanza of his «Old Pictures in
Florence»:
«On which I conclude, that the early painters,
To cries of 'Greek art and what more wish you?'
Replied, 'To become now self-acquainters,
And paint man, man, whatever the issue!
Make new hopes shine through the flesh they fray,
New fears aggrandize the rags and tatters:
To bring the invisible full into play!
Let the visible go to the dogs--what matters?'»
The individualism, the subjectivity, the mystical distrust of definite
forms, so stirringly championed in these lines, are vital principles
in the work of all the composers of the generation after Beethoven.
Thus in Schumann's music, for example, the generality of the emotional
burden of classical music is changed to something far more individual
and introspective. Expression is more tinged by temperament; the work
of art exhales a personal fragrance. Schumann tells us not merely of
love, longing, and passion, but of Robert Schumann's love, longing,
and passion. His work, for all its beauty, is much less inclusive and
complete than the classical masterpieces. In the same way Chopin filled
his nocturnes and preludes with the lovely but often unhealthy poetry
of the isolated dreamer, and Wagner, separating the passion of love
from the other interests of the heart, and thus throwing out of balance
the spiritual economy, sacrificed as much in health as he gained in
potency. And of the men we have been studying, Grieg, Franck, and
Tschaïkowsky also illustrate in various ways the tendency to «paint
man, man, whatever the issue,» to let the «flesh be frayed» and the
«visible go to the dogs.» It is hardly necessary to say that all these
men have their legitimate place. Their message of passion and unrest,
already audible in Beethoven, was the inevitable and indispensable
expression of one of those self-conscious phases in man's growth when
he freshly realizes his finitude. Their utterances make a deeply
pathetic appeal to us, because they reveal all the terrible sadness of
personal life which as yet finds no resting-place in the universal.
Aspiration and disappointment, bitter grief and blind pain, speak in
their fragmentary loveliness. The romanticists will never want for our
love, since they interpret to us a part of our own experience.
But, as we have said, after man suffers emotion he reflects upon it;
after he feels the parts he learns the whole; after musicians have
developed new capabilities of expression they proceed to subordinate
them to plastic beauty. Adjustment follows discovery, and the romantic
takes on classical perfection. The chaos of one age is thus the order
of the next; and after Schumann and his fellows had enriched the world
with their beautiful but fragmentary and wayward feelings, it remained
for Brahms to essay a further conquest; to commence at least (and
perhaps he has not done more) the task of making these new feelings
more intelligible, of clarifying their turgidity, of subordinating
their conflicts in a more complex harmony. Or, to state his function in
more specifically musical terms, he had to discover how rugged melodic
outlines, bold harmonic progressions, and the large-spanned phrases of
modern musical thought could be organized and brought into that unity
in variety which is beauty.
We are now in a position to grasp the full significance of that severe
training to which Brahms subjected himself in his youth. Without it he
would have gone on doing brilliant work of the romantic order, like his
first compositions, but he would never have attained the grasp and
self-control that raised him above all his contemporaries and that made
possible his peculiar service to music. That period of training was
the artistic counterpart of what many men undergo when they discover
how many sacrifices and how long a labor are necessary to him who
would find a spiritual dwelling-place on earth. Many pleasures must be
renounced before happiness will abide; evil and suffering are opaque
save to the steadfast eye. So, in music, effects and eloquences and
crises must be the handmaids of orderly beauty, and tones are stubborn
material until one has learned by hard work to make them transmit
thoughts. Technic is in the musician what character is in the man. It
is the power to stamp matter with spirit. Brahms's long apprenticeship
was therefore needed in the first place to make him master of his
materials; in the second place to teach him the deeper lesson that
the part must be subordinated to the whole, or, in musical language,
expression to beauty.
He achieved this subordination, however, not by the negative process of
suppression, but by conquest and co-ordination. In his music emotion
is not excluded, it is regulated; his work is not a reversion to an
earlier and simpler type, it is the gathering and fusing together of
fragmentary new elements, resulting in a more complex organism. Thus
it is a very superficial view to say that he «went back» to Beethoven.
He drew guidance from the same natural laws that had guided Beethoven,
but he applied these laws to a material of novel thought and emotion
that had come into being after Beethoven. Had he repudiated the new
material, even for the reason that he considered it incapable of
organization, he would have been a pedant, which is to say a musical
Pharisee. One masters by recognizing and using, not by repudiating.
And just as a wise man will not become ascetical merely because his
passions give him trouble, but will study to find out their true
relation to _him_ and then keep them in it, so Brahms recognized the
wayward beauties of romanticism, and studied how to make them ancillary
to that order and fair proportion which is the soul of music.
To this great artistic service he was fitted by both the qualities
which have been pointed out above as co-operating to form his
unique nature. His deep and simple human feeling, which put him in
sympathy with the aims of the romanticists and enabled him to grasp
their meaning, would not have sufficed alone; but fortunately it was
associated with an almost unprecedented scope of intellect and power
of synthesis. Brahms's assimilative faculty was enormous. Like a fine
tree that draws the materials of its beauty through a thousand roots
that reach into distant pockets of earth, he gathered the materials
of his perfectly unified and transparent style from all sorts of
forgotten nooks and crannies of mediæval music. Spitta remarks his
use of the old Dorian and Phrygian modes; of complex rhythms that had
long fallen into disuse; of those means of thematic development, such
as augmentation and diminution, which flourished in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries; of «the _basso ostinato_ with the styles
pertaining to it--the Passacaglia and the Ciaconna;» and of the old
style of variations, in which the bass rather than the melody is the
feature retained. «No musician,» Spitta concludes, «was more well read
in his art or more constantly disposed to appropriate all that was new,
especially all newly discovered treasures of the past. His passion
for learning wandered, indeed, into every field, and resulted in a
rich and most original culture of mind, for his knowledge was not mere
acquirement, but became a living and fruitful thing.»
The vitality of his relation with the past is nowhere more strikingly
shown than in his indebtedness to the two greatest masters of pure
music, Bach and Beethoven. He has gathered up the threads of their
dissimilar styles, and knitted them into one solid fabric. The great
glory of Bach, as is well-known, was his wonderful polyphony. In his
work every voice is a melody, everything sings, there is no dead wood,
no flaccid filling. Beethoven, on the other hand, turning to new
problems, to problems of structure which demanded a new sort of control
of key-relationship and the thematic development of single «subjects»
or tunes, necessarily paid less attention to the subordinate voices.
His style is homophonic or one-voiced rather than polyphonic. The
interest centres in one melody and its evolutions, while the others
fall into the subordinate position of accompaniment. But Brahms,
retaining and extending the complexity of structure, the architectural
variety and solidity, that was Beethoven's great achievement, has
succeeded in giving new melodic life also to the inner parts, so that
the significance and interest of the whole web remind one of Bach. His
skill as a contrapuntist is as notable as his command of structure.
Thanks to his wonderful power of assimilating methods, of adapting
them to the needs of his own expression, so that he remains personal
and genuine while becoming universal in scope, he is the true heir and
comrade of Bach and Beethoven.
It was, perhaps, inevitable that in his great work of synthesis and
formulation he should sometimes be led into dry formalism. One who
concerns himself so indefatigably with the technic of construction
naturally comes to take a keen joy in the exercise of his skill;
and this may easily result, when thought halts, in the fabrication
of ingenuities and Chinese puzzles. Some pages of Brahms consist of
infinitely dexterous manipulations of meaningless phrases. And though
one must guard against assuming that he is dry whenever one does not
readily follow him, it certainly must be confessed that sometimes
he seems to write merely for the sake of writing. This occasional
over-intellectualism, moreover, is unfortunately aggravated by a lack
of feeling for the purely sensuous side of music, for clear, rich
tone-combination, to which Brahms must plead guilty. His orchestra is
often muddy and hoarse, his piano style often shows neglect of the
necessities of sonority and clearness. Dr. William Mason testifies that
his touch was hard and unsympathetic, and it is rather significant of
insensibility or indifference to tone color that his Piano Quintet was
at first written for strings alone, and that the Variations on a Theme
of Haydn exist in two forms, one for orchestra and the other for two
pianos, neither of which is announced as the original version. There is
danger of exaggerating the importance of such facts, however. Austere
and somber as Brahms's scoring generally is, it may be held that so
it should be to be in keeping with the musical conception. And if his
piano style is novel it is not really unidiomatic or without its own
peculiar effects.