Listen to This (43 page)
Authors: Alex Ross
“Proximity” is the crucial word: Schumann came very close and then was torn away. Not long after the suicide attempt, Brahms began sketching a sonata for two pianos, which was to have become a symphony in D minor. The first movement of that work evolved into the first movement of the First Piano Concerto. Joachim once intimated that the concerto’s brutal opening—a throbbing low D followed by a slashing B-flat-major figure—is a depiction of Schumann’s plunge into the Rhine. Jan Swafford, the most probing of recent biographers, explains in musical terms why this picture is convincing: the ear expects D to be the tonic note of a D-minor triad, and when it turns out to be the middle note of a B-flat-major triad the effect is jarring, disorienting, vertiginous. In technical terms, the chord is an inversion; in programmatic terms, it is tumbling head over heels.
Another clue to the meaning of this fairly shocking prologue is buried in the bass. After the dread D, which is held for ten bars, the jagged opening theme is repeated, this time over a bass C-sharp, one semitone lower. Then elements of the theme’s final phrases—shivering trills, plunging intervals—reappear over consecutively lower notes (C-natural, B-natural, B-flat), before the crisis subsides on a calming A. The notes make up a chromatic descending line, a
basso lamento.
And they belong to the same tragic-minded D-minor key to which the lamento has historically gravitated, notably in the overture to
Don Giovanni
and the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth. The motif returns at the beginning of the development, and again in the recapitulation, broken but still colossal. In the coda, it moves into the treble, flickering spectrally in the winds. In the sublime Adagio that follows, the droning D resurfaces, but it stays in place instead of stepping down. Toward the end, the low note rolls for six slow bars while the piano part, momentarily suggesting a Bach chorus, is filigreed with falling chromatic patterns. The tension of the first movement
is gone, replaced by that tone of late-night consolation which may be Brahms’s chief gift to the human race.
basso lamento.
And they belong to the same tragic-minded D-minor key to which the lamento has historically gravitated, notably in the overture to
Don Giovanni
and the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth. The motif returns at the beginning of the development, and again in the recapitulation, broken but still colossal. In the coda, it moves into the treble, flickering spectrally in the winds. In the sublime Adagio that follows, the droning D resurfaces, but it stays in place instead of stepping down. Toward the end, the low note rolls for six slow bars while the piano part, momentarily suggesting a Bach chorus, is filigreed with falling chromatic patterns. The tension of the first movement
is gone, replaced by that tone of late-night consolation which may be Brahms’s chief gift to the human race.
These charged motifs—drone, lamento, Bachian chorus—recur in the
German Requiem
, Brahms’s vocal-orchestral masterpiece of 1868. He wrote it in memory of his mother, with Schumann still on his mind; the second movement, a setting of the biblical text “All flesh is as grass,” is also derived from the two-piano sonata that took shape after Schumann’s suicide attempt. In religious matters, Brahms remained agnostic; although he certainly intended to write a sacred piece that would please the God-fearing German public, he confined himself to an idiosyncratic melange of passages from the Old and New Testaments, neglecting to mention Jesus Christ by name. The first movement conflates the second line of the Sermon on the Mount—“Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted”—with part of Psalm 126: “They that sow in tears shall reap in joy …” The movement begins with the note F, pulsing in the cellos and basses and sounding in the horns. Then some of the cellos trace a chromatic descent. The weeping figure is carefully woven through the movement that follows, recurring in a ritualistic, neo-Baroque manner.
German Requiem
, Brahms’s vocal-orchestral masterpiece of 1868. He wrote it in memory of his mother, with Schumann still on his mind; the second movement, a setting of the biblical text “All flesh is as grass,” is also derived from the two-piano sonata that took shape after Schumann’s suicide attempt. In religious matters, Brahms remained agnostic; although he certainly intended to write a sacred piece that would please the God-fearing German public, he confined himself to an idiosyncratic melange of passages from the Old and New Testaments, neglecting to mention Jesus Christ by name. The first movement conflates the second line of the Sermon on the Mount—“Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted”—with part of Psalm 126: “They that sow in tears shall reap in joy …” The movement begins with the note F, pulsing in the cellos and basses and sounding in the horns. Then some of the cellos trace a chromatic descent. The weeping figure is carefully woven through the movement that follows, recurring in a ritualistic, neo-Baroque manner.
All the while, Brahms had been worrying about the burden of the past, mulling over his unavoidable confrontation with the ghost of Beethoven. “I shall never compose a symphony!” he said a couple of years after finishing the
German Requiem.
“You have no idea how someone like me feels when he keeps hearing such a giant marching behind him.” Nevertheless, a symphony did emerge, in 1876. It begins in an atmosphere of stupefying gloom, with a single note once more planted in the bass and lines diverging on either side of it: violins meander upward while violas go down the same staircase that the cellos take at the start of the Requiem. The sequence harks back to the opening chorus of Bach’s St.
Matthew Passion
—“Come, daughters, help me mourn”—where a musical wedge shape surrounds a monotone. Bach places a tangy dissonance in his second bar; Brahms goes one better, letting an out-of-nowhere chord of F-sharp minor gnash against the fundamental C. Add to this an upper melody that sways unsteadily, almost drunkenly, outside the bar lines, and you have a scene no less disturbing than the opening of the First Piano Concerto.
German Requiem.
“You have no idea how someone like me feels when he keeps hearing such a giant marching behind him.” Nevertheless, a symphony did emerge, in 1876. It begins in an atmosphere of stupefying gloom, with a single note once more planted in the bass and lines diverging on either side of it: violins meander upward while violas go down the same staircase that the cellos take at the start of the Requiem. The sequence harks back to the opening chorus of Bach’s St.
Matthew Passion
—“Come, daughters, help me mourn”—where a musical wedge shape surrounds a monotone. Bach places a tangy dissonance in his second bar; Brahms goes one better, letting an out-of-nowhere chord of F-sharp minor gnash against the fundamental C. Add to this an upper melody that sways unsteadily, almost drunkenly, outside the bar lines, and you have a scene no less disturbing than the opening of the First Piano Concerto.
From here on, Brahms’s First Symphony sticks to a fairly conventional heroic-Romantic plot. Like Beethoven’s Ninth, it goes through stages of struggle and reflection to attain a final victory. There is even a hummable
hymnal theme in the closing movement. (When the resemblance to the “Ode to Joy” was pointed out, Brahms replied, “Any ass can hear that.”) The symphony is a towering achievement, yet its emulation of Beethoven somehow rings a little hollow. The trouble isn’t that Brahms cannot rejoice; his output has many sun-kissed pages. It’s that the onward-and-upward,
per aspera ad astra
narrative goes against the grain of his personality, where happiness and sadness alternate unpredictably and the emotional reality lies somewhere in between. The Second Symphony, with its dances and shadows, is truer to his nature. When, in the finale of the First, Brahms comes around at last to the triumph that Beethoven’s template demands, gears keep grinding the wrong way. The unadulterated C-major joy lasts about a minute.
hymnal theme in the closing movement. (When the resemblance to the “Ode to Joy” was pointed out, Brahms replied, “Any ass can hear that.”) The symphony is a towering achievement, yet its emulation of Beethoven somehow rings a little hollow. The trouble isn’t that Brahms cannot rejoice; his output has many sun-kissed pages. It’s that the onward-and-upward,
per aspera ad astra
narrative goes against the grain of his personality, where happiness and sadness alternate unpredictably and the emotional reality lies somewhere in between. The Second Symphony, with its dances and shadows, is truer to his nature. When, in the finale of the First, Brahms comes around at last to the triumph that Beethoven’s template demands, gears keep grinding the wrong way. The unadulterated C-major joy lasts about a minute.
Having produced the landmark works expected of him, Brahms abandoned the monumental mode. Significantly, in the years immediately following the Leipzig fiasco of 1859, he concentrated on chamber music—the first two piano quartets and the First String Sextet—and also wrote numerous songs, duets, vocal quartets, four-hand piano pieces, and other pieces suitable for the intelligent middle-class home. His chief model may have been not Beethoven but Schubert, whose music he studied intently. (The chromatic opening of Schubert’s Quartet in G reappears in the fourth movement of Brahms’s Serenade No. 2.) Or perhaps he aimed to fuse Schubert’s effortless lyricism with Beethoven’s laborious development of relatively short motives. The entire first movement of the Piano Quartet in G Minor stems from the simple four-note figure with which it begins (rising minor sixth, falling major third, rising minor second). Such works are no longer “veiled symphonies,” as Schumann said of the First Piano Sonata; they are complete in themselves, worlds narrow yet deep.
Brahms’s secret weapon is rhythm. Nineteenth-century classical music is generally not prized for its rhythmic invention—composers would generally put a 4/4 time signature at the outset of a piece, set a pulse in motion, and attempt to sustain large structures through harmonic means—but Brahms paid close attention to the science of the beat. He steeped himself in the elemental rhythms of folk music, filling up hundreds of pages of manuscript paper with arrangements of German folk songs. More important, in the 1860s he set about fashioning Hungarian dances for
piano duet, opening himself to a Gypsy strain (and gaining a large popular audience in the process). His mature music is rife with syncopating accents, themes that hang back a beat or jump ahead, jaunty polyrhythms of three against two or three against four. The G-Minor Piano Quartet ends with a Rondo alla Zingarese that precisely evokes the exuberance of a Gypsy wedding band. “What Brahms was after was to create a tension, a tug of war, as it were, between the actual heard rhythm and phrase, and the underlying metric pulse,” Gunther Schuller writes. Alas, rhythmic study is routinely neglected in the modern classical conservatory. As Schuller demonstrates in painful detail, Brahms’s games around the beat are routinely smudged in performance and on recordings.
piano duet, opening himself to a Gypsy strain (and gaining a large popular audience in the process). His mature music is rife with syncopating accents, themes that hang back a beat or jump ahead, jaunty polyrhythms of three against two or three against four. The G-Minor Piano Quartet ends with a Rondo alla Zingarese that precisely evokes the exuberance of a Gypsy wedding band. “What Brahms was after was to create a tension, a tug of war, as it were, between the actual heard rhythm and phrase, and the underlying metric pulse,” Gunther Schuller writes. Alas, rhythmic study is routinely neglected in the modern classical conservatory. As Schuller demonstrates in painful detail, Brahms’s games around the beat are routinely smudged in performance and on recordings.
There was an ideological strain to Brahms’s self-presentation in the 1860s and ’70s. With his chamber-music obsession, his studied classicism, his punchy rhythms, and his scarcely hidden pessimism (all flesh is as grass, indeed), he was separating himself from the “New German School” of Liszt, Wagner, and their allies, who talked of the “music of the future” and insisted on the need for new forms. The appearance of that professorial beard, two years after the First Symphony, seemed to confirm Brahms’s caretaker role. Yet it is easy to make too much of the difference between the young Brahms and the older one. If anything, his music grew more dream-besotted, more “youthful,” as the years went by. His early works are the most academic, his later works the most fantastic. A fine epigraph to his career may be found in an aphorism by Novalis that Brahms entered in his notebooks: “Our life is no dream, but ought to be and perhaps will become one.”
Brahms did not conform to social type, either the conservative or the bohemian. He believed in the German nation and in the wisdom of the middle class, but he had a tendency toward vagrancy, a sympathy for outcasts (at one dinner he toasted Sitting Bull’s victory at Little Bighorn), a firm adherence to Viennese liberal views, and an outspoken scorn for anti-Semites. “Anti-Semitism is insanity!” he exploded when it became evident that Karl Lueger was going to be mayor of Vienna. In musical politics, he proclaimed, it is true, the supremacy of the past, but he was responding to a musical market that had already turned in favor of the “classical” canon. Aware of his audience’s love of tradition, he composed with its literacy in mind. His music follows canonical models while also subverting them, asserting a skeptical modern self.
Brahms’s relationship with Wagner was deliciously complex. By the 1870s, the two composers represented opposite poles of German music, the classicist and the futurist. Everyone had to answer the question
“Brahmsianer oder Wagnerianer?”
Brahms’s chief critical ally, Eduard Hanslick, published reams of anti-Wagnerism in the
Neue Freie Presse
of Vienna; Wagner responded by laying into an unnamed but easily recognizable composer who dressed up “tomorrow in Handel’s Hallelujah wig, another time as a Jewish czardas player.” Still, Brahms made a point of praising his rival. For some years he had the original manuscript of the Paris version of the Venusberg scene from
Tannhäuser,
and when Wagner asked for it back Brahms agreed to return it if he could have another score as a replacement.
Das Rheingold,
the prologue to the
Ring,
arrived in the mail, and Brahms wrote back as follows: “I give the best and most appropriate thanks daily to the work itself—it does not lie here without being utilized. Maybe this section is not, at first, such a great inducement to the thorough study which your entire great work demands; this Rheingold did pass through your hands in a very special way, however, and so let the Walkyre [
sic
] radiate her beauty brightly, so as to outshine its accidental advantage.” The tone is friendly, although one can imagine Wagner puzzling over the particulars of the phrases. One possible translation: the
Ring
turns out to be magnificent, though one would never guess as much from seeing nothing but E-flat-major chords on the first page.
“Brahmsianer oder Wagnerianer?”
Brahms’s chief critical ally, Eduard Hanslick, published reams of anti-Wagnerism in the
Neue Freie Presse
of Vienna; Wagner responded by laying into an unnamed but easily recognizable composer who dressed up “tomorrow in Handel’s Hallelujah wig, another time as a Jewish czardas player.” Still, Brahms made a point of praising his rival. For some years he had the original manuscript of the Paris version of the Venusberg scene from
Tannhäuser,
and when Wagner asked for it back Brahms agreed to return it if he could have another score as a replacement.
Das Rheingold,
the prologue to the
Ring,
arrived in the mail, and Brahms wrote back as follows: “I give the best and most appropriate thanks daily to the work itself—it does not lie here without being utilized. Maybe this section is not, at first, such a great inducement to the thorough study which your entire great work demands; this Rheingold did pass through your hands in a very special way, however, and so let the Walkyre [
sic
] radiate her beauty brightly, so as to outshine its accidental advantage.” The tone is friendly, although one can imagine Wagner puzzling over the particulars of the phrases. One possible translation: the
Ring
turns out to be magnificent, though one would never guess as much from seeing nothing but E-flat-major chords on the first page.
What’s striking about this letter is that Brahms is simply being candid about his mixed reactions to Wagner’s music. His honesty in such moments was both endearing and infuriating. Very often he passed up the chance for the easy, problem-solving phrase; his offhand letters caused countless misunderstandings and strained several friendships. His closest relationships were fraught with tensions and breaks. He could be callous, unthinking, unfeeling. It is painful to read him berating Joachim for failing to fulfill his promise as a composer, as if such words could have helped matters. It is horrible to read him offhandedly lecturing Clara Schumann—one of the leading pianists of the age, and a composer of considerable gifts—on the direction and pace of her career. Yet he surely intended no gratuitous pain. Power trips were not his style. The British composer Ethel Smyth said: “[Brahms] knew his own worth—what great creator does not?—but in his heart he was one of the most profoundly modest men I ever met.” In an age of Wagnerian megalomania, Brahms took a democratic
view of the artist’s role. “Art is a republic,” he wrote to Clara. “Do not confer a higher rank upon any artist, and do not expect the minor ones to look up to him as something higher, as consul.”
view of the artist’s role. “Art is a republic,” he wrote to Clara. “Do not confer a higher rank upon any artist, and do not expect the minor ones to look up to him as something higher, as consul.”
Out of many passages in the letters that give a sense of Brahms’s down-to-earth nature, my favorite is a note that the composer sent to his father in 1867, supplying lovingly pedantic instructions on travel from Hamburg to Vienna (with a change in Berlin): “If you continue on right away in Berlin you must take a hackney to the other station. A policeman hands out the voucher at the exit. Before you travel the night through, as is practical in the heat, drink a glass of grog so you sleep well. But take along very little … No cigars, nothing new, nothing that is taxable. You’ll find every conceivable thing here with me.” There, basically, is the Life of Brahms.
Composers often gain strength as they get older. While other art forms thrive on youthful passion, the technique of composition—a hard, cumulative labor, a solitary process of trial and error—generally sharpens over time. In old age, certain composers reach a state of terminal grace in which even throwaway ideas give off a glow of inevitability, like wisps of cloud illumined at dusk. It’s hard to think of another art form where so many peak achievements—Bach’s
The Art of Fugue
, Beethoven’s late quartets, Messiaen’s
Saint Francis of Assisi
—arrive at, or near, the close of day. The youth-mad logic of the popular marketplace makes it considerably harder for nonclassical figures to pull off the same kind of late-career transfiguration, although Duke Ellington, Johnny Cash, Sarah Vaughan, and Bob Dylan, among others, have shown that age can find its voice.
The Art of Fugue
, Beethoven’s late quartets, Messiaen’s
Saint Francis of Assisi
—arrive at, or near, the close of day. The youth-mad logic of the popular marketplace makes it considerably harder for nonclassical figures to pull off the same kind of late-career transfiguration, although Duke Ellington, Johnny Cash, Sarah Vaughan, and Bob Dylan, among others, have shown that age can find its voice.
Every so often, a music theorist tries to determine what late works have in common, with interesting but murky results. In 1937, Theodor W. Adorno wrote an essay titled “Late Style in Beethoven,” in which he hazarded the idea that late works are “furrowed, even ravaged. Devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny, they do not surrender themselves to mere delectation.” This is apt enough for Shostakovich’s spectral final string quartets, or for Stravinsky’s
Requiem Canticles,
or for the densest thickets of
Parsifal,
but it hardly accounts for the sexual charge of Monteverdi’s
Coronation of Poppea,
or the spacious rapture of Handel’s
Theodora,
or the radiance of Richard Strauss’s
Four Last Songs
. Some late works consolidate
early gains; others spin off in fresh directions. Liszt, around the age of seventy, began writing something like atonal music, to the consternation of Wagner, who thought his friend had gone senile.
Requiem Canticles,
or for the densest thickets of
Parsifal,
but it hardly accounts for the sexual charge of Monteverdi’s
Coronation of Poppea,
or the spacious rapture of Handel’s
Theodora,
or the radiance of Richard Strauss’s
Four Last Songs
. Some late works consolidate
early gains; others spin off in fresh directions. Liszt, around the age of seventy, began writing something like atonal music, to the consternation of Wagner, who thought his friend had gone senile.
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