It is not an exaggeration to say that probably there are not a dozen
musicians in Europe who have formed any precise and final opinion as
to where Brahms should be placed. One gets to know him very slowly.
His appearance and manner (so to speak), so extremely dignified, are
very much in his favour; but when one tries to get to terms of
intimacy with him he has a fatal trick of repelling one by that
"austerity" or chilliness of which we have heard so much. And the
worst of it is that too frequently a sharp suspicion strikes one that
there is little behind that austere manner--that his reticence does
not so much imply matter held in reserve as an absence of matter. I do
not mean by this that Brahms was a paradoxical fool who was clever
enough to hold his tongue lest he was found out, nor even that he
purposely veiled his lack of meaning. On the contrary, a composer who
wished more devoutly to be sincere never put pen to paper. But he had
not the intellect of an antelope; and he took up in all honesty a rôle
for which he had only the slightest qualification. The true Brahms,
the Brahms who does not deceive himself, is the Brahms you find in
many of the songs, in some of the piano and chamber music, in the
smaller movements of his symphonies, and in certain passages of his
overtures; and I have no hesitation whatever in asserting (though the
opinion is subject to revision) that his songs are much the most
satisfactory things he did. Here, unweighted by a heavy sense of a
mission, he either revels in making beautiful--though never supremely
beautiful--tunes for their own sake, or he actually expresses with
beauty and considerable fidelity certain definite emotions. Had he
written nothing but such small things--songs, piano pieces,
Allegrettos like that in the D symphony--his position might be a
degree lower in the estimation of dull Academics who don't count, but
he would be accepted at something like his true value by the whole
world, and the whole world would be the better for oftener hearing
many lovely things. But merely to be a singer of wonderful songs was
not sufficient for Brahms: he wanted to be a great poet, a new
Beethoven. It was a legitimate ambition. The kind of music Brahms
really loved was the kind of which Beethoven's is the most splendid
example; and he wanted to create more of the same kind. He doubtless
thought he could; in his early days Robert Schumann predicted that he
would; and in his later days his intimate friend Hanslick and a small
herd of followers asserted that he did. He was run as the prophet of
the classical school with all the force of all who hated Wagner and
had not brains enough to understand either Brahms' or Wagner's music;
he became the god of all the musical dullards in Europe; and it is
small wonder that he took himself with immense seriousness. A little
more intelligence, ever so little more, would have shown him that,
despite the noise of those who perhaps admired him less than they
dreaded Wagner, he was not the man they said he was. He had not a
great matter to utter; what he had he could not utter in the classical
form; yet he tried to write in classical form. If ever a musician was
born a happy, careless romanticist, that musician was Brahms--he was
even a romanticist in the narrower sense, inasmuch as he was fond
rather of the gloomy, mysterious, and dismal than of sunlight and the
blue sky; and whenever his imagination warmed he straightway began
breaking the bonds in which he had endeavoured to work. But that
miserable article of Schumann--deplorable gush that has been
tolerated, nay, admired, only because it is Schumann's--the evil
influence of the pseudo-classicism of Mendelssohn and his followers,
the preposterous over-praise of Hanslick,--these things drove Brahms
into the mistake never made by the really able men. Wilkes denied that
he ever was a Wilksite; Wagner certainly never was a Wagnerite; there
are people who ask whether Christ was ever a Christian. But Brahms
became more and more a devoted Brahmsite; he accepted himself as the
guardian of the great classical tradition (which never existed); and
he wrote more and more dull music. It is idle to tell me he is austere
when my inner consciousness tells me he is merely barren, and idler
to ask me feel beauty when my ears report no beauty to me. He had no
original emotion or thought: whenever his music is good it will be
found that he has derived the emotion from a poem, or else that there
is no emotion but only very fine decorative work. In most of his
bigger works--the symphonies, the German Requiem, the Serious songs he
wrote in his later days--he sacrificed the beauty he might have
attained to the expression of emotions he never felt; he assumed the
pose and manner of a master telling us great things, and talked like a
pompous duffer. An exception must be made: one emotion Brahms had felt
and did communicate. It was his tragedy that he had no original
emotion, no rich inner life, but lived through the days on the merely
prosaic plane; and he seems to have felt that this was his tragedy.
Anyhow, the one original emotion he brought into music is a curious
mournful dissatisfaction with life and with death. The only piece of
his I know in which the feeling is intolerably poignant, seems to cut
like a knife, is his setting of that sad song of Goethe's about the
evening wind dashing the vine leaves and the raindrops against the
window pane; and in this song, as also in the movement in one of the
quartets evolved from the song, the mournfulness becomes absolutely
pitiable despair. Brahms was not cast in the big mould, and he spent a
good deal of his later time in pitying himself. It is curious that
one of his last works was the batch of Serious songs, which consist of
dismal meditations on the darkness and dirt of the grave and
feebly-felt hopes that there is something better on the other side.
That does not strike one as in the vein of the big men.
Much of Brahms' music is bad and ugly music, dead music; it is a
counterfeit and not the true and perfect image of life indeed; and it
should be buried or cremated at the earliest opportunity. But much of
it is wonderfully beautiful--almost but never quite as beautiful as
the great men at their best. There are passages in the Tragic overture
that any composer might be proud to have written. If the opening of
the D symphony is thin, unreal, an attempt at pastoral gaiety which
has resulted merely in lack of character, at anyrate the second theme
is delightful; if the opening of the slow movement is also twaddle,
there are pleasant passages later on; the dainty allegretto is as
fresh and fragrant as a wild rose; and the finale, though void of
significance, is full of an energy rare in Brahms. Then there are many
of the songs in which Brahms' astonishing felicity of phrase, and his
astounding trick of finding expression for an emotion when the emotion
has been given to him, enable him almost to work miracles. And it must
be remembered that all his music is irreproachable from the technical
point of view. Brahms is certainly with Bach, Mozart, and Wagner in
point of musicianship: in fact, these four might be called the
greatest masters of sheer music who have lived. A Brahms score is as
wonderful as a Wagner score; from beginning to end there is not a
misplaced note nor a trace of weakness; and one stands amazed before
the consummate workmanship of the thing. The only difference between
the Wagner score and the Brahms score is, that while the former is
always alive, always the product of a fervent inner life, the latter
is sometimes alive too, but more frequently as dead as a door-mat, the
product of extreme facility and (I must suppose) an extraordinary
inherited musical instinct divorced from exalted thought and feeling.
The difference may be felt when you compare a Brahms and a
Tschaikowsky symphony. Although in his later years Tschaikowsky
acquired a mastery of the technique of music, and succeeded in keeping
his scores clear and clean, he never arrived at anything approaching
Brahms' certainty of touch, and neither his scoring nor his
counterpoint has Brahms' perfection of workmanship. Yet one listens to
Tschaikowksy, for the present at least, with intense pleasure, and
wants to listen again. I have yet to meet anyone who pretends to have
received any intense pleasure from a Brahms symphony.
Brahms is dead; the old floods of adulation will no longer be poured
forth by the master's disciples; neither will the enemies his friends
made for him have any reason to depreciate his music; and ultimately
it will be possible to form a fair, unbiassed judgment on him. This is
a mere casual utterance, by the way.