BRAHMSODY
After Wagner the deluge? No, Johannes Brahms. Wagner, the high
priest of the music-drama; a great scene-painter in tones. Brahms, a
wrestler with the Dwellers on the Threshold of the Infinite; a
musical philosopher, but ever a poet. "Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms,"
cried Von Buelow; but he forgot Schumann. The molten tide of passion
and extravagance that swept over intellectual Europe threescore
years ago bore on its foaming crest Robert Schumann. He was first
cousin to the prince of romancists, Heinrich Heine; Heine, who
dipped his pen in honey and gall and sneered and wept in the same
couplet. In the tangled, rich underwood of Schumann the young Brahms
wandered. There he heard the moon sing silvery, and the leaves
rustle rhythms to the heart-beats of lovers. All German romance,
fantasy, passion was in Schumann, the Schumann of the Papillons and
the Carneval. Brahms walked as did Dante, with the Shades. Bach
guided his footsteps; Beethoven bade him glance aloft at the stars.
And Brahms had for his legacy polyphony, form, and masterful
harmonies. In his music the formulist finds perfect things.
Structurally he is as great as Beethoven, perhaps greater. His
architectonic is superb. His melodic content is his own as he
strides in stately pomp in the fugued Alexandrines of Bach. Brahms
and Browning. Brahms and Freedom. Brahms and Now.
The romantic infant of 1832 died of intellectual anaemia, leaving the
world as a legacy one of the most marvellous groupings of genius
since Athens's sky carolled azure glances to Pericles. Then came the
revolution of 1848, and later a race of sewermen sprang up from the
mud. Flaubert, his face turned to the past, his feet to the future,
gazed sorrowfully at Carthage and wrote an epic of the bourgeois.
Zola and his gang delved into moral cesspools, and the world grew
aweary of the malodor. Chopin and Schumann, faint, fading flowers of
romanticism, were put in albums where their purple harmonies and
subtle sayings are pressed into sweet twilight forgetfulness. Even
Berlioz, whose orchestral ozone revivified the scores of Wagner and
Liszt; even mad Hector, with the flaming locks, sounded garishly
empty, brilliantly superficial. The New Man had arrived. A short,
stocky youth played his sonata in C, his Opus I, for Liszt, and the
Magyar of Weimar returned the compliment by singing in archangelic
tones his own fantasy in B minor, which he fondly and futilely
believed a sonata. Brahms fell asleep, and Liszt was enraged. But
how symbolical of Brahms to fall asleep at the very onset of his
career, fall asleep before Liszt's music. It is the new wearied of
the old, the young fatigued by the garrulities of age. It is sad. It
is wonderful. Brahms is of to-day. He is the scientist turned
philosopher, the philosopher turned musician. If he were not a great
composer he would be a great biologist, a great metaphysician. There
are passages in his music in which I detect the philosopher in
omphalic meditation.
Brahms dreams of pure white staircases that scale the Infinite. A
dazzling, dry light floods his mind, and you hear the rustling of
wings--wings of great, terrifying monsters; hippogriffs of horrid
mien; hieroglyphic faces, faces with stony stare, menace your
imagination. He can bring down within the compass of the octave
moods that are outside the pale of mortals. He is a magician,
spectral at times, yet his songs have the homely lyric fervour and
concision of Robert Burns. A groper after the untoward, shudders at
certain bars in his F sharp minor sonata and weeps with the moonlit
tranquillity in the slow movement of the F minor sonata. He is often
dull, muddy-pated, obscure, and maddeningly slow. Then a rift of
lovely music wells out of the mist; you are enchanted and cry:
"Brahms, master, anoint again with thy precious melodic chrism our
thirsty eyelids!"
Brahms is an inexorable formulist. His four symphonies, his three
piano sonatas, the choral works and chamber music--are they not all
living testimony to his admirable management of masses? He is not a
great colourist. For him the pigments of Makart, Wagner, and
Theophile Gautier are as naught. Like Puvis de Chavannes, he is a
Primitive. Simple, flat tints, primary and cool, are superimposed
upon rhythmic versatility and strenuousness of thought. Ideas,
noble, profundity-embracing ideas he has. He says great things in a
great manner, but it is not the smart, epigrammatic, scarlet,
flashing style of your little man. He disdains racial allusions. He
is German, but a planetary Teuton. You seek in vain for the
geographical hints, hintings that chain Grieg to the map of Norway.
Brahms's melodies are world-typical, not cabined and confined to his
native Hamburg. This largeness of utterance, lack of polish, and a
disregard for the politesse of his art do not endear him to the
unthinking. Yet, what a master miniaturist he is in his little piano
pieces, his Intermezzi. There he catches the tender sigh of
childhood or the intimate flutterings of the heart stirred by
desire. Feminine he is as no woman composer; and virile as are few
men. The sinister fury, the mocking, drastic fury of his first
rhapsodies--true soul-tragedies--how they unearthed the core of
pessimism in our age. Pessimist? Yes, but yet believer; a believer
in himself, thus a believer in men and women.
He reminds me more of Browning than does Schumann. The full-pulsed
humanity, the dramatic--yes, Brahms is dramatic, not theatric--modes
of analysis, the flow, glow, and relentless tracking to their
ultimate lair of motives is Browning; but the composer never loses
his grip on the actualities of structure. After Chopin, Brahms? He
gives us a cooling, deep draught in exchange for the sugared
wormwood, the sweet, exasperated poison of the Polish charmer. A
great sea is his music, and it sings about the base of that mighty
mount we call Beethoven. Brahms takes us to subterrane depths;
Beethoven is for the heights. Strong lungs are needed for the
company of both giants.
Brahms, the surgeon whose scalpel pierces the aches of modern
soul-maladies. Bard and healer. Beethoven and Brahms.