The death of Johannes Brahms in 1897 removed from the sparsely settled
land of music the last of the immortals; the one whom Bülow justly
ranked with Bach and Beethoven; the one upon whom Schumann lavished
both praise and prophecy. Not by any wrench of the imagination can we
conjure the name of Antonin Dvorák, despite his delightful gift of
saying naïve and Slavic things; not by any excess of sentiment can we
dower Italy’s grand old man Verdi with the title, nor yet France’s
favorite son, Saint-Saëns; not any one nor all of these three varying
talents can be compared to the great, virile man who died in Vienna,
the city of his preference but not of his birth.
When the printed list of Brahms’ achievements in song, sonata, symphony
and choral works of vast proportions is placed before you, amazement
at the slow, patient, extraordinary fertility and versatility of the
man seizes upon you. It is not alone that he wrote four symphonies
of surpassing merit, two piano concertos, a violin concerto, a double
concerto for violin and violoncello, songs, piano pieces, great set
compositions like the Song of Destiny and the German Requiem, duos,
trios, quartets, quintets, sextets, sestets, all manner of combinations
for wood, for wind, for strings and voices; it is the sum total of high
excellence, the stern, unyielding adherence to ideals sometimes almost
frostily unhuman--in a word, the logical, consistent and philosophic
bent of the man’s mind--that forces your homage. For half a century
he pursued the beautiful in its most elusive and difficult form;
pursued it when the fashions of the hour, day and year mocked at such
wholesale, undeviating devotion, when form was called old-fashioned,
sobriety voted dull, and the footlights had invaded music’s realm and
menaced it in its very stronghold--the symphony.
When a complete life of Johannes Brahms is written, this trait of
fidelity, this marvellous spiritual obstinacy of the man will be
lovingly dealt with. There seems to be a notion abroad that because
Brahms refused to challenge current tendencies in art and literature
he held himself aloof, was remote from humanity, was a bonze of art, a
Brahmin, and not a bard chanting its full-blooded wants and woes with
full throat. Nothing could be wider of the truth. Brahms’ music throbs
with humanity; with the rich red blood of mankind. He was the greatest
contrapuntist after Bach, the greatest architectonist after Beethoven,
but in his songs he was as simple, as manly, as tender as Robert Burns.
His topmost peaks are tremendously remote, and glitter and gleam in
an atmosphere almost too thin for dwellers of the plains; but how
intimate, how full of charm, of graciousness are the happy moments in
his chamber music!
It is not rashly premature for us to assign to Brahms a place among
the immortals. Coming after the last of the most belated romanticists,
untouched by the fever for the theatre, a realist with great
imagination, both a classicist and a romanticist, he led music back
in her proper channels by showing that a phenomenal sense of form
and a mastery of polyphony second only to Bach are not incompatible
with progress, with the faculty of uttering new things in a new way.
Brahms is not a reactionary any more than is Richard Wagner. Neither
of these men found what he needed, so one harked back to Gluck and
the Greeks, the other to Bach and Beethoven. Consider the massiveness
of Brahms’ tonal architecture; consider those structures erected
after years of toil; regard the man’s enormous fertility of ideas;
enormous patience in developing them; consider the ease with which he
moves shackled by the most difficult forms--not assumed for the mere
sake of the difficult, but because it was the only form in which he
could successfully express himself--consider the leavening genius,
the active geniality of the man, which militates against pedantry,
the dryness of scholasticism and the mere arithmetical music of the
kapellmeister; consider the powerful, emotional and intellectual brain
of this composer, and then realize that all great works in art are the
arduous victories of great minds over great imaginations! Brahms ever
consciously schooled his imagination.
Brahms was Brahms’ greatest critic. He worked slowly, he produced
slowly and, being of the contemplative rather than the active and
dramatic type, he incurred the reproach of being phlegmatic, Teutonic,
heavy and thick. There is enough sediment in his collected works to
give the color of truth to this allegation, but from the richness and
the cloudiness of the ferment, is thrown off the finest wine; and how
fine, how incomparably noble is a draught of this wine after the thin,
acid, frothing and bubbling stuff concocted at every season’s musical
vintage!
Brahms reminds one of those mediæval architects whose life was a prayer
in marble; who slowly and assiduously erected cathedrals, the mighty
abutments of which flanked majestically upon mother earth, and whose
thin, high pinnacles pierced the blue; whose domes hung suspended
between heaven and earth, and in whose nave an army could worship,
while in the forest of arches music came and went like the voices of
many waters.
He was a living reproach to the haste of a superficial generation.
Whatever he wrought he wrought in bronze and for time, not for the
hour. He restored to music its feeling for form. He was the greatest
symphonist in the constructive sense since Beethoven. He did not fill
it with a romantic content as did Schumann, but he never defaced or
distorted its flowing contours. Not so great a colorist as Schumann or
Berlioz, he was the greatest master of pure line that ever lived. He is
accused of not scoring happily. The accusation is true. Brahms does not
display the same gracious sense of voicing the needs and capabilities
of every orchestral instrument as have Berlioz, Dvorák and Strauss. He
is often very muddy, drab and opaque, but his nobility of utterance,
his remarkable eloquence and ingenuity in treatment make you forget
his shortcomings in color. But in writing for choral masses, for
combinations, such as clarinet and strings, piano, violin and ’cello,
or for piano solo, he had few masters. There seems to be a perverse
vein in his handling of orchestral color. He gives you the impression
of mastery, but writes as if to him the garb, the vestment were naught,
and the pure, sweet flesh and form, all.
Brahms had his metaphysical moments when he wrestled with the pure
idea as speculatively as a Pascal or a Spinoza. There are minutes in
his music when he becomes the purely contemplative mind surveying the
nave of the universe; when Giotto’s circle is for him an “O Altitudo.”
It cannot be said, then that Brahms the philosopher, the utterer of
cryptic tones, is as interesting as Brahms the composer of the second
and third symphonies, the composer of the F minor piano sonata, the
F minor piano quintet, the creator of the Schicksalslied, the German
Requiem or those exquisite and fragrant flowers, the songs.
Brahms is the first composer since Beethoven to sound the note of the
sublime. He has been called austere for this. He has sublimity at
times; something that Schumann, Rubinstein, Raff or Tschaïkowsky never
quite compassed. To this is allied that forbidding quality, that want
of commonplace sympathy, that lack of personal profile which make his
music very often disliked by critic, amateur and professional. He would
never make any concessions to popularity; indeed, like Henrik Ibsen, he
often goes out of his way to displease! The facile, cheap triumph he
despises; he sees all Europe covered with second and third rate men in
music, and he notes that they please; their only excuse for living is
to give cheap pleasure.
This, and the naturally serious bent of the man, superinduced excessive
puritanism. It is a sign of his great culture and flexible mental
operations that he grew to study and admire Wagner toward the close of
his hardworking life.
Brahms’ workmanship is almost impeccable. His mastery of material is
as great as Beethoven’s and only outstripped by Bach. I have dwelt
sufficiently upon his formal and contrapuntal sense. His contribution
to the technics of rhythm is enormous. He has literally popularized
the cross-relation, rediscovered the arpeggio and elevated it from the
lowly position of an accompanying figure to an integer of the melodic
phrase. Wagner did the same for the essential turn.
A pure musician, a maker of absolute music, a man of poetic ideals, is
Brahms, without thrusting himself forward in the contemporary canvas.
Not Berlioz, not Wagner, but the plodding genius Brahms, was elected by
destiny to receive upon his shoulders the mantle dropped by Beethoven
as he ascended the slope to Parnassus, and the shoulders were broad
enough to bear the imposing weight.
They are fast becoming sheeted dead, these great few left us. Who
shall fill Wagner’s tribune; who shall carve from the harmonic granite
imperishable shapes of beauty as did Johannes Brahms?
I
With the death of the master the time has come for an extended and
careful investigation of the piano sonatas, the rhapsodies, the
intermezzi, the capriccios, the fantasias, the ballades and all the
smaller and curious forms left us; a collection, let me preface
by declaring, that is more significant and more original than any
music since Chopin. Now that I have sounded the challenge I must at
once proceed to attenuate it by making some qualifications and one
explanation. Brahms occupies an unsought for and rather unpleasant
position in the history of contemporary music. Without his consent
he was championed as an adversary of Wagner, and I believe Eduard
Hanslick, most brilliant of critics, had something to do with this
false attitude. Hanslick hated Wagner and adored Brahms. There you
have it; and presently the silly spectacle was observed of two men of
straw being pitted one against the other and all musical Europe drawn
into a quarrel as absurd as the difference between tweedle-dum and
tweedle-dee. Wagner and Brahms are the very antipodes of art, and let
it be said most forcibly that art contains easily without violence the
various music of two such great artists, although some critics differ
from me in this.
Wagner was a great fresco painter, handling his brush with furious
energy, magnificence and dramatic intensity. Beside his vast, his
tremendous scenery, the music of Brahms is all brown, all gray, all
darkness, and often small. It is not imposing in the operatic sense,
and it reaches results in a vast, slow, even cold blooded manner,
compared with the reckless haste of Richard of the Footlights. One
is all showy externalization, a seeker after immediate and sensuous
effects; the other, one of those reserved, self-contained men who
feels deeply and watches and waits. In a word, Wagner is a composer
for the theatre, with all that the theatre implies, and sought to
divert--and nearly succeeded--the tide of music into theatrical
channels.
Brahms is for the concert room, a symphonist, a song writer and, above
all, a German. I wish to emphasize this point of nationality. Wagner
was the Celt, with a dash of the Oriental in his blood, and he bubbled
and foamed over with primal power, but it was not the reticent, grave
power of the Teuton, who, as Amiel puts it, gathers fuel for the pile
and allows the French to kindle it. Whether it was Wagner’s early
residence in Paris, or perhaps some determining pre-natal influence,
he surely had a vivacity, an esprit, imagination and a grace denied
to most of his countrymen, Heine excepted. You may look for these
qualities in Brahms, but they are rarely encountered. Sobriety,
earnestness, an intensity that is like the blow of a steam hammer, and
a rich, informing spirit are present, and undoubted temperament also,
but as there are temperaments and temperaments, so the temperament
of Brahms differs from the temperament of Wagner, the temperament
of Chopin and the temperament of Liszt. There is a remoteness, a
sense of distance in his music that only long pursued study partially
dissipates. He is a chilly friend at first, but the clasp of the hand
is true, if it is not always charmful. I find the same difficulty in
Beethoven, in Ibsen, in Gustave Flaubert, and sometimes in Browning,
but never in Schumann and never in Schubert. As Emerson said of Walt
Whitman, there must have been a “long foreground somewhere” to the man,
and that foreground is never wholly traversed with Brahms.
You will ask me what is there then so fascinating in this austere,
self-centred man, whose music at first hearing suggests both a
latter-day Bach and a latter-day Beethoven?
The answer is simply this: Brahms is a profound thinker; his chilliness
is in manner, not matter; he is a thinker, but he also feels sincerely,
deeply, and maybe, as Ehlert says, feels with his head and thinks with
his heart. He is hardly likely to become popular in this generation,
yet he is a very great artist and a great composer. Von Bülow was
enjoying a little of his perverse humor when he spoke of the three
Bs. Brahms is not knee-high to Bach or Beethoven, yet he is their
direct descendant, is of their classic lineage, although a belated
romanticist, and the only man we see fit to mention after the two
kings of the tone art.
This does not mean that Schumann, Berlioz, Tschaïkowsky, Liszt, Wagner
and the rest are not as great, or even greater, but simply that certain
immutable and ineluctable laws of art are understood by Brahms, who
prefers to widen in his own fashion the beaten path rather than conquer
new ones.
In 1853 Schumann wrote his New Paths, and Brahms became known. Schumann
had doubtless certain affinities with the young man of twenty, and he
also recognized his strangeness, for in the first bar of Brahms you are
conscious of something new, something strange. It is not in the form,
not in the idea, not in the modulation, rhythmical change, curve of
harmonic line, curve of melodic line, yet it is in all these that there
lurks something new, something individual. This same individuality
caused Schumann to rub his eyes when he heard the C major sonata, and
made Liszt grow enthusiastic when he read the scherzo in E flat minor.
I quite agree with Spitta that it is a mistake to suppose that Brahms
worked altogether on the lines of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Schumann.
I called him a belated romanticist a moment ago because much of the
content of his music is romantic, and in his latter days excessively
modern. It is because of his adherence to classic forms, and his
harking back to the methods of the sixteenth century, that the music
of Brahms so often misleads both critic and public. Spitta dilates
most admirably upon the richness and variety of his tonality, by
his reversion to almost forgotten manners and modes; the Doric, his
characteristic use of the octave, the sharpening of minor thirds and
sixths, his remarkable employment of the chord of the sixth, sharp
transitions in modulation, the revival of playing common time against
triple time, and the use of rhythms and tonalities that are vague,
indeterminate and almost misleading, without damage to the structural
values and beauty of the music.
Then in form Brahms knows the canon as no other composer. Listen to
Spitta: “Schumann had already seriously studied and revised the canon,
which had sunk to the level of an amusing exercise; Brahms interested
himself in its stricter construction and used it in a greater variety
of forms. The extension and diminution of the melody again--that is
to say, the lengthening of the strain by doubling the value of the
notes, or shortening it by diminishing their value, which was such an
important element of form in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
came to light again for the first time with all its innate musical
vitality when Brahms took it up, and even in his earliest works (for
instance, op. 3, no. 2) showed how thoroughly he understood it. The
same is to be said of the method of inversion, the derivation of a new
melody from the former by reversing the intervals. When the use of such
‘artifices’--as they were called with an amazing misapprehension of the
very essence of music--had from time to time been admitted, they had
always been restricted to what was termed a ‘Gelehrten Satz’; that is
to say, they were worked out as school exercises and formed no part of
the artist’s living work. But with Brahms they pervade all his music,
and find a place as much in the piano sonata and the simple ballad as
in the grand choral pieces with orchestral accompaniments.
“The basso ostinato, with the styles pertaining to it--the Passacaglia
and the Ciacona--resume their significance for the first time since
Bach’s time, and their intrinsic importance is enhanced by the support
of the symphonic orchestra.”
And with all this, as Ehlert truly says, “Brahms’ art undoubtedly rests
upon the golden background of Bach’s purity and concentration.”
I know it may be questioned whether Brahms belongs to the
romantic camp, but while he has absorbed with giant-like ease the
individualization of voices and the severity of Bach, yet he is a
modern among moderns. How modern, you will discover if you play first
the early music of Schumann, or the music of Chopin’s middle period,
and then take up the B minor rhapsody or some of the later fantasias.
Brahms then seems so near, so intimate, so full of vitality, while
the romantic music has a flavor of the rococo, of the perfume of the
salon, of that stale and morbid and extravagant time when the classics
were defied and Berlioz thought to be a bigger man than Beethoven.
But all passes, and time has left us of Schumann’s piano music, the
Symphonic Variations, the F sharp minor and the F minor sonatas, the
fantasy in C and the concerto, while the mists are slowly enveloping
most of Chopin’s earlier music. Doubtless the studies, preludes, the F
minor fantasy, one polonaise, the barcarolle, the F minor ballade, the
C sharp minor and the B minor scherzi will live forever, and I am not
so sure that I could predict the same of the piano music of Brahms.
However, escape this fact we cannot: Brahms is our most modern music
maker, and if, as Edward MacDowell says, Tschaïkowsky’s music always
sounds better than it is, the music of Brahms is often better than it
sounds!
Now I have made all of my qualifications, and my single explanation
is this: I am not a reckless Brahms worshipper. There is much in
his music that repels, and I have often studied his piano with
knitted brow. After the exquisite, poetic tenderness of Chopin, the
overflowing romance of Schumann, the adorable melody of Schubert, and
the proud pose of Weber--who prances by you on gayly and gorgeously
caparisoned arpeggios--Brahms may sound cold, formal, and much of the
mathematician, but strip him of his harsh rind, taste the sweetness,
the richness, the manliness of the fruit and you will grow enthusiastic.
It would be easy and it would look imposing for me to map out three
styles in Brahms, as De Lenz did with the piano sonatas of Beethoven.
But it would be manifestly absurd, for as much as Brahms gained in
mastery and variety in his later years, yet he was more Brahms in
his op. 1 than was Chopin in _his_ op. 2--the famous La Ci Darem,
the variations that led Schumann to his famous discovery. Take, for
instance, the E flat minor scherzo, so different from Chopin’s glorious
one in the same key in the B flat minor sonata. This scherzo of Brahms
is an op. 4, and he played it for Schumann during the historical visit
to Düsseldorf. It has in it something of Chopin, more in color than
idea, and it is so free, so flowing, so plastic, so happily worked out,
that it must have come upon Liszt and Schumann as something absolutely
new. Yet I find it old-fashioned compared to his op. 116 or 117 or
118 or 119. Even the rhapsodies strike a new note, so I may without
impropriety, and I hope without pedantry, make a general division of
his piano music into two groups. In the first I include the three
sonatas, the scherzo--which is a separate opus--the variations, the
four ballades, and the Walzer, op. 39. There is then a skip to op. 76
before we encounter solo music, and here I begin my second group with
the eight capriccios and intermezzi. Then follow the two rhapsodies,
and until op. 116 we encounter no piano soli. With op. 119 Brahms’
contributions to piano literature end. The two books of technical
studies, fifty-one in all, will be considered, as will the Hungarian
dances, arranged by the composer from the orchestral partition.
This grouping is purely arbitrary, and I warn you that the composer
cannot be pinned down to any such cataloguing, for we find in his
second sonata, the one in F sharp minor, stuff that is kin to his
latest works and in some of his new fantasies a reversion to the Brahms
of the Ballades.
Regarding his technics I can only recommend to you a close study of
the music. There is much that is unusual side by side with the most
trite patterns. He has a special technic, sudden extensions, he is
fond of tenths and twelfths--the interlocking--for instance, in the
capriccio in D minor with its devilish rhythms and cross accent, and
the spreading of the triplet over two bars of three-four time--the
rapid flights in chord playing--all these things require a firm seat
in the saddle, hands with ten well individualized voices and a light
wrist. The best preparation for Brahms is Bach, then the toccata of
Schumann, and then the Brahms studies. There are scales in Brahms’
music, but not many. His passage work is of the most solid character,
broken chords, double notes, especially thirds and sixths, and few
arpeggios. The triolen he has idealized as did Wagner the essential
turn, and his accompaniment figures are always simple, indeed vital
parts of the composition. Brahms is not a great original melodist. Like
Schumann his melodies can hardly be divorced from his harmonies. He
had his moments of ecstatic lyrism, and I can show you many specimens
of perfect melodies in his piano music. He is not always gloomy,
forbidding, cross-grained and morbid. Take the first movement of the D
major symphony, the slow movement of the F minor sonata, some of the
songs, the horn trio, and tell me if this man cannot unbend the bow,
say lovely, gracious things and be even nimble of wit and of gait?
Regarding Brahms’ muddy orchestration, this is a question I leave to my
betters. Scored in the high, violent purples and screaming scarlets of
Richard Strauss, the grave, reflective, philosophic accents of the C
minor and E minor symphonies would be as foolishly attired as Socrates
the day Plato insisted upon his donning the fashionable costume of
Athens’ gayest youth.
Touching the muddiness and heaviness of the doubled basses of the
piano music, I may say that it is a matter of taste. Some pianists,
indeed some musicians, do not care for a broad foundational bass. The
arpeggio figure in the left hand has been worked to death, and it is a
relief to find Brahms making his accompaniment figures an integer of
the piece itself.
He has dealt the death blow to the tyranny of virtuoso passage work.
No composer dare follow him and expect to build up, to advance, who
employs passage work for the sake of mere display of the desire to
dazzle. Every note of Brahms belongs to the framework, to the musical
scheme. He is more Hellenic than Mozart in his supreme economy, and not
even Beethoven is more devoted to formal beauty. He has not much sense
of humor, and the scherzi, while not being as ironical or as brilliant
as Chopin’s, are none the less misnomers. In his working-out sections
the marvellously inventive and logical brain of Brahms is seen at its
culminating splendor. As free in his durchführungsatz as the wind, he
has emancipated the sonata form in the matter of tonality and in the
matter of emotional content. Excepting Chopin and Wagner, no composer
has ever exhibited such versatility in the choice of keys. His use
of mixed scales--a result of his studies in Hungarian music--gives
his music its intensely foreign coloring. There you have Brahms, a
German, a follower of Bach and Beethoven as regards polyphony and form,
a reticent romanticist and a lover of certain colorings that I call
foreign, because they are certainly not European. He has appropriated
the Magyar spirit with infinitely more success than Liszt--take the
last movement of the B flat major concerto--and when I say Magyar I
mean almost Asiatic.
Brahms has in the piano concerto freed the form forever, while writing
within the limits of that form. His two concertos are concertos, not
rhapsodies and fantasies, and the solo instrument, instead of being a
brilliant but loquacious gabbler of glittering platitudinous passage
work, is now the expounder of the musical idea and the stanch ally of
the orchestra.
Despite his vast knowledge, an almost magical erudition, there is a
certain looseness and want of finish about Brahms that is refreshing
in these days of Art for Art’s sake and the apotheosis of the cameo
cutter. He is never a little master, although he can work exceeding
fine and juggle for you by the hour the most gorgeous balls of
bitter-sweet virtuosity. He is not, I say, always the pedant, and he
can be as dull as ditch water two times out of ten. He has his feminine
side--his songs--but in the main he is a muscular male, not given to
over-expansion and not always companionable.
I agree with Mr. Edgar Kelley that his music is not always
klaviermässig, but the same objection was urged against Beethoven,
Schumann and even Chopin! I prefer a granitic bass, although the
doubling is not always agreeable. But Schumann and Chopin were sinners
in this respect, especially the former. That is why I recommend the
great toccata in C as a preliminary study to Brahms. To sincere
antagonists of Brahms, such as Mr. Henry T. Finck, I can only say that
not every poet is to one’s taste. Browning’s Sordello is crabbed music
after Tennyson, and Swinburne cloying, after Matthew Arnold or Arthur
Hugh Clough. But the inner, the spiritual ear is longer enamored of the
harmonies of a Brahms or Bach than of the sonorous splendors of Wagner
or Verdi. It is the still, small voice discerned in a Brahms adagio
or a Chopin prelude that abides by us and consoles when the music of
the theatre seems superficial and garish. Those who do not care for
Brahms--let them choose their own musical diet. There are, however,
some of us who prefer his lean to other composers’ fat. The light that
beats about his throne is a trifle dry at times, but it is at least
white, and the time comes to all when the chromatic ceases to make
thrall, and line, not color, seems the more beautiful. Therefore do not
follow me further if you are a genuine anti-Brahmsianer. You might hear
unpalatable truths.