Listen to This (44 page)
Authors: Alex Ross
Verdi is perhaps the most astonishing case of all. In
Falstaff,
he took command of a genre—comic opera—that once had frustrated him, and in the process he gave it new psychological depth. When, in the last act, Falstaff arrives in Windsor Park, about to be tricked and merrily humbled, he counts off the strokes of midnight—“
Una
…
due
…
tre
…
quattro
…”—and there is a musical foreshadowing of the dejection that takes hold of Falstaff at the end of Shakespeare’s
Henry IV, Part
2 (“We have heard the chimes at midnight”). The old man sings on one note while a weird mist of chords revolves around him. The moment passes quickly, as such moments do in late Verdi, but it gives the sense of a chasm opening.
Falstaff,
he took command of a genre—comic opera—that once had frustrated him, and in the process he gave it new psychological depth. When, in the last act, Falstaff arrives in Windsor Park, about to be tricked and merrily humbled, he counts off the strokes of midnight—“
Una
…
due
…
tre
…
quattro
…”—and there is a musical foreshadowing of the dejection that takes hold of Falstaff at the end of Shakespeare’s
Henry IV, Part
2 (“We have heard the chimes at midnight”). The old man sings on one note while a weird mist of chords revolves around him. The moment passes quickly, as such moments do in late Verdi, but it gives the sense of a chasm opening.
The difficulty in describing the late style of Brahms—the composer died of liver cancer in 1897, a month shy of his sixty-fourth birthday—is that even in his youth he was a master of the twilight tone. In a way, all Brahms is late Brahms. In
Late Idyll
, Reinhold Brinkmann devotes many pages to Brahms’s pervasive melancholy, which seems at once personal and philosophical. It is rooted in the solitude that the composer chose for himself, or that was forced upon him by his shyness and his fear of unpredictable social situations. Only in isolation, in bouts of endless labor, could he obtain the purity that he sought. In a wider sense, he was marking the passing of a golden age. As Brinkmann says, Brahms was haunted by the sense of being a “latecomer,” a straggler in the musical succession that stretched from Bach to Mozart and on to Beethoven and Schubert. Like little Hanno in Thomas Mann’s
Buddenbrooks,
Brahms effectively drew a line at the bottom of the musical family tree: after him there would be nothing more.
Late Idyll
, Reinhold Brinkmann devotes many pages to Brahms’s pervasive melancholy, which seems at once personal and philosophical. It is rooted in the solitude that the composer chose for himself, or that was forced upon him by his shyness and his fear of unpredictable social situations. Only in isolation, in bouts of endless labor, could he obtain the purity that he sought. In a wider sense, he was marking the passing of a golden age. As Brinkmann says, Brahms was haunted by the sense of being a “latecomer,” a straggler in the musical succession that stretched from Bach to Mozart and on to Beethoven and Schubert. Like little Hanno in Thomas Mann’s
Buddenbrooks,
Brahms effectively drew a line at the bottom of the musical family tree: after him there would be nothing more.
He was, of course, entirely wrong. He met his match when he went out walking one day with Gustav Mahler, the fiery young Austrian modernist. Brahms launched into a diatribe against all that was new and futuristic in music, saying that the last truly beautiful works had already been composed. As he said this, the two men were standing on a bridge over a stream. Mahler, feeling puckish, pointed to a random ripple in the water and exclaimed, “Look,
Herr Doktor
! Look!” Brahms asked, “What?” Mahler replied, “There goes the last wave.” Brahms rewarded him with a gruff smile. Music, he admitted, no more has an end than it has a beginning.
All the same, Brahms did mark the end of a certain line; after him, Viennese classicism gently died away, and the language of music fractured into a Babel of competing dialects.
Herr Doktor
! Look!” Brahms asked, “What?” Mahler replied, “There goes the last wave.” Brahms rewarded him with a gruff smile. Music, he admitted, no more has an end than it has a beginning.
All the same, Brahms did mark the end of a certain line; after him, Viennese classicism gently died away, and the language of music fractured into a Babel of competing dialects.
If there is a Brahmsian late style, it seems to emerge in the Third Symphony, which was sketched in the summer of 1883. Wagner had passed away several months earlier, and in the symphony Brahms nods several times to the wizard of Bayreuth: the Venusberg music floats in before the second theme of the first movement; questing,
Tristan-esque
chords sound in the winds about a dozen bars before the end of the first movement; and one scholar hears
Götterdämmerung
near the end of the Andante. But the real story may be that Brahms is again confronting Beethoven’s ghost, now on his own terms. When Beethoven reached the number three, he unleashed the
Eroica,
the mightiest symphony yet written. Brahms, in his Third, disavows the hero role. The symphony begins with a sweeping, almost flamboyant violin theme that surges over the audience like ocean waves. At the end of the finale, the theme returns, but it is given a pianissimo halo, as if it were representing the obliteration of will. Like Wagner, Brahms had read Schopenhauer on the renunciation of self, but where Wagner’s gestures of self-abnegation always seem a bit of a put-on—you are aware of the power being held in check—Brahms’s come as second nature.
Tristan-esque
chords sound in the winds about a dozen bars before the end of the first movement; and one scholar hears
Götterdämmerung
near the end of the Andante. But the real story may be that Brahms is again confronting Beethoven’s ghost, now on his own terms. When Beethoven reached the number three, he unleashed the
Eroica,
the mightiest symphony yet written. Brahms, in his Third, disavows the hero role. The symphony begins with a sweeping, almost flamboyant violin theme that surges over the audience like ocean waves. At the end of the finale, the theme returns, but it is given a pianissimo halo, as if it were representing the obliteration of will. Like Wagner, Brahms had read Schopenhauer on the renunciation of self, but where Wagner’s gestures of self-abnegation always seem a bit of a put-on—you are aware of the power being held in check—Brahms’s come as second nature.
This is not to say that Brahms grew passive. Two minor-key chamber pieces conceived in the summer of 1886—the Third Piano Trio and the Third Violin Sonata—recall the heaven-storming works of decades past. More often, though, Brahms tended toward understatement. Various movements of the late chamber pieces have titles containing the word
“grazioso,”
or gracefully—not always a prized value in the industrialized later nineteenth century. In slow movements, especially, Brahms backed away from the gigantism of the era. In these years, Anton Bruckner was writing adagio slow movements that went on for twenty minutes or more, and were often marked
“feierlich,”
or solemn. Brahms, too, produced a string of adagios in his last years, but he avoided the rapt, ecstatic mode, which, as the musicologist Margaret Notley observes, was often associated with notions of peculiarly German soulfulness. Instead, in the G-Major String Quintet and the Clarinet Quintet, Brahms pointedly incorporated an aspect of Gyspy performance—the practice of “allowing a soloist to emerge from the band and play an elaborate improvisation,” in Notley’s
words. Gypsy impressions were common in rousing fast movements, less so in adagios, where the composer was assumed to be speaking from the heart.
“grazioso,”
or gracefully—not always a prized value in the industrialized later nineteenth century. In slow movements, especially, Brahms backed away from the gigantism of the era. In these years, Anton Bruckner was writing adagio slow movements that went on for twenty minutes or more, and were often marked
“feierlich,”
or solemn. Brahms, too, produced a string of adagios in his last years, but he avoided the rapt, ecstatic mode, which, as the musicologist Margaret Notley observes, was often associated with notions of peculiarly German soulfulness. Instead, in the G-Major String Quintet and the Clarinet Quintet, Brahms pointedly incorporated an aspect of Gyspy performance—the practice of “allowing a soloist to emerge from the band and play an elaborate improvisation,” in Notley’s
words. Gypsy impressions were common in rousing fast movements, less so in adagios, where the composer was assumed to be speaking from the heart.
Even more intimate are the four sets of short compositions for piano: the Fantasias Opus 116, the Intermezzos Opus 117, and the Piano Pieces Opus 118 and Opus 119. The title Intermezzo is attached to no fewer than fourteen of the twenty pieces in this series. Brahms was no doubt aware of the long history of the term; he may have been thinking back to the Renaissance, when theatrical productions at the courts of Florence and Ferrara were interspersed with
intermedi,
musical interludes that grew ever more elaborate and led to the art of opera. Brahms’s Intermezzos are hardly operatic, but they are, in a sense, miniature dramas, too harmonically involuted and emotionally elusive to be considered occasional pieces. They tilt toward dark keys with many flats or sharps—E-flat minor, B-flat minor, C-sharp minor. The harmony often has an untethered quality, theoretically justifying Arnold Schoenberg’s claim, in his essay “Brahms the Progressive,” that the later Brahms anticipated the advent of an “unrestricted musical language,” namely Schoenberg’s own. The Intermezzo in B-flat Minor, Opus 117, No. 2, almost neurotically evades the home triad in root position. Schoenberg played similar games in the works he wrote just before his leap into atonality.
intermedi,
musical interludes that grew ever more elaborate and led to the art of opera. Brahms’s Intermezzos are hardly operatic, but they are, in a sense, miniature dramas, too harmonically involuted and emotionally elusive to be considered occasional pieces. They tilt toward dark keys with many flats or sharps—E-flat minor, B-flat minor, C-sharp minor. The harmony often has an untethered quality, theoretically justifying Arnold Schoenberg’s claim, in his essay “Brahms the Progressive,” that the later Brahms anticipated the advent of an “unrestricted musical language,” namely Schoenberg’s own. The Intermezzo in B-flat Minor, Opus 117, No. 2, almost neurotically evades the home triad in root position. Schoenberg played similar games in the works he wrote just before his leap into atonality.
Yet the greatest of the Intermezzos, Opus 117, No. 1, is outwardly the simplest. The writing is straightforward enough that even a bad pianist can get through the piece without incident. In one of his characteristic confessional jokes, Brahms said the Intermezzos might be labeled “‘Sing Lullabies of My Sorrow’ Nos. 1, 2, and 3,” and at the top of No. 1 he placed a quotation from Herder’s folk-song collection: “Sleep softly, my child, sleep softly and well.” (The poem is a translation of the old Scottish song “Lady Anne Bothwell’s Lament”: “Balow, my babe, lye still and sleipe / It grieves me sair to see thee weipe.”) The German text fits the rise and fall of the opening melody, as Max Kalbeck, Brahms’s devoted biographer, noticed. Still, the black wings of depression hover overheard, opening to their full span in the middle of the piece, when the music veers into E-flat minor. Slow arpeggios in the left hand reach treacherously low in the bass, at one point touching the bottom C on the keyboard. That note tolls like a bell from whatever unknown church Brahms chose for his doubting faith. Then the major-key material returns, wistfully garlanded
with sixteenth-note figures, its closing phrases broken by palpable sighs. For Mitsuko Uchida, Schubert is the music that you will hear when you die; for me, it is this.
with sixteenth-note figures, its closing phrases broken by palpable sighs. For Mitsuko Uchida, Schubert is the music that you will hear when you die; for me, it is this.
The pensive tone that hangs over so much of the late Brahms is mainly absent from the Fourth Symphony, in which the composer bade farewell to the form that caused him such trouble. It would not be wrong to detect a streak of irony in Brahms’s valediction. The symphony begins coolly, without fanfare. The first theme, a violin figure arranged around descending thirds, is so casual as to seem pedestrian: it’s as if Brahms pulled back the curtain on a symphony already in progress. Here is another of his anti-Beethoven effects, the reverse of the abrupt, attention-getting gestures that begin the
Erotica
and the Fifth Symphony—although, as Raymond Knapp notes, the falling thirds distantly and strangely echo the Fifth’s famous four-note opening.
Erotica
and the Fifth Symphony—although, as Raymond Knapp notes, the falling thirds distantly and strangely echo the Fifth’s famous four-note opening.
The deliberately plain material in the Brahms Fourth—one wit wrote under the first theme, “
Es fiel
…
ihm wie
…
der mal
…
nichts ein”
(“Once more he had not one idea”)—becomes a foil for the usual bouts of variation. Brahms also transforms his material by altering the context. The first movement follows the hallowed sonata-form structure of Viennese Classical tradition: exposition, in which first and second themes unfold in neighboring keys; development, in which principal themes are worked over; and recapitulation, where the themes recur, their keys now aligned. Here, though, when the theme in thirds makes its expected return, we hear it first in muffled, slowed-down, “frozen” form (to quote the scholar Walter Frisch); and between each halting phrase is a drawn-out shudder in the strings, like wind through a ruin. Then the first theme resumes, at the original ambling tempo, in the original laid-back scoring, and in the middle of the phrase. It is a cinematic coup, a jump cut. And it is an effect nearly impossible to bring off in performance. Brahms is using phrases in the literary sense: strands of speech are broken off and picked up again, with unspeakable emotions implied in the pauses.
Es fiel
…
ihm wie
…
der mal
…
nichts ein”
(“Once more he had not one idea”)—becomes a foil for the usual bouts of variation. Brahms also transforms his material by altering the context. The first movement follows the hallowed sonata-form structure of Viennese Classical tradition: exposition, in which first and second themes unfold in neighboring keys; development, in which principal themes are worked over; and recapitulation, where the themes recur, their keys now aligned. Here, though, when the theme in thirds makes its expected return, we hear it first in muffled, slowed-down, “frozen” form (to quote the scholar Walter Frisch); and between each halting phrase is a drawn-out shudder in the strings, like wind through a ruin. Then the first theme resumes, at the original ambling tempo, in the original laid-back scoring, and in the middle of the phrase. It is a cinematic coup, a jump cut. And it is an effect nearly impossible to bring off in performance. Brahms is using phrases in the literary sense: strands of speech are broken off and picked up again, with unspeakable emotions implied in the pauses.
In the slow movement, the harmony takes a turn to the ancient, with the E-major scale altered to resemble medieval and Renaissance modes. As Notley observes, such archaisms, which crop up fairly often in Brahms’s final period, are characteristic of late style as Adorno defined it: they suggest
an alienation from the present or a position outside the flow of time. Yet, in line with his mature practice, Brahms refrains from a somber, heavy-going adagio atmosphere. The movement is marked Andante moderate—a a moderate walking tempo. (Alas, many modern conductors drag it out for twelve minutes or more, evidently under the impression that Brahms must have had something enormously weighty to say in the slow movement of his final symphony.) In the same spirit, the Scherzo, marked Allegro gio-coso, barrels along in merry fashion, as if it were purposefully forgetting the enigmas of the first movement and averting its eyes from the draconian finale that is imminent.
an alienation from the present or a position outside the flow of time. Yet, in line with his mature practice, Brahms refrains from a somber, heavy-going adagio atmosphere. The movement is marked Andante moderate—a a moderate walking tempo. (Alas, many modern conductors drag it out for twelve minutes or more, evidently under the impression that Brahms must have had something enormously weighty to say in the slow movement of his final symphony.) In the same spirit, the Scherzo, marked Allegro gio-coso, barrels along in merry fashion, as if it were purposefully forgetting the enigmas of the first movement and averting its eyes from the draconian finale that is imminent.
The final movement is the crux of the work, maybe of Brahms’s entire career. Frisch, in his book on the Brahms symphonies, calls it “perhaps the most extraordinary symphonic movement written in the post-Beethoven and pre-Mahler era.” It is marked Allegro energico e passionate: fast, energetic, passionate. It begins with a furious statement in the winds and brass: blaring chords built around an eight-note theme that climbs up step by step and then plunges down. For the remainder of the movement this theme repeats in ostinato style, through thirty variations and a coda. Brahms has let go of time’s arrow and returned to the cyclical Baroque. Indeed, the movement is a chaconne in all but name: the chaconne finale of Bach’s Cantata No. 150, “Meine Tage in den Leiden / endet Gott dennoch in Freuden” (“My days that pass in sadness / God will end in joy”), is known to have inspired Brahms directly. Knapp also argues that Buxtehude’s Ciacona in E Minor served as a model. And there can be little doubt that the grimly driving mood of the movement owes much to Bach’s Ciaccona in D minor for solo violin, which Brahms had arranged for piano left hand. “On a single staff, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and the most powerful feelings,” Brahms wrote to Clara Schumann, when he sent her that arrangement. “If I were to imagine how I might have made, conceived the piece, I know for certain that the overwhelming excitement and awe would have driven me mad.”
Entering the zone of madness, Brahms deconstructs his models even as he copies them. He tends to keep the theme out of the bass, so that you sometimes have to strain to hear it. And, as Frisch demonstrates, the chaconne form is overlaid with a traditional sonata form. Form upon form, layer upon layer: the music gives the impression not of a ranting individual
but of a ranting architecture. Brahms is certainly musing on the musical past, but he may also be speaking to his contemporaries—donning the garb of the ancients to deliver a sermon on the music of the present. The movement could have carried the scathing inscription that Mahler placed on one manuscript of the Rondo-Burleske, the Scherzo of his Ninth Symphony: “To my brothers in Apollo.”
but of a ranting architecture. Brahms is certainly musing on the musical past, but he may also be speaking to his contemporaries—donning the garb of the ancients to deliver a sermon on the music of the present. The movement could have carried the scathing inscription that Mahler placed on one manuscript of the Rondo-Burleske, the Scherzo of his Ninth Symphony: “To my brothers in Apollo.”
At the center comes a respite: a halting, lamenting solo for flute, and, a little later, a funereal procession for choirs of wind and brass. This is also, in Frisch’s analysis, the second theme of the sonata form. The brass sequence—led by another trio of trombones—smacks of
Tannhäuser,
the work over which Brahms and Wagner had their epistolary squabble. But the solemnity is soon disrupted by a blistering restatement of the main theme-echoing and amplifying that traumatic moment in Bach’s Ciaccona when major darkens to minor. As events speed toward their conclusion, Brahms begins to treat the motif with a certain perversity. Its ceaseless upward motion stirs memories of Mozart’s diabolically jumping figures in the hell scene of
Don Giovanni.
Only in the final bars does Brahms let us hear what we subliminally crave: a grand, contrary, descending motion, a kind of lamento fortissimo in the bass.
Tannhäuser,
the work over which Brahms and Wagner had their epistolary squabble. But the solemnity is soon disrupted by a blistering restatement of the main theme-echoing and amplifying that traumatic moment in Bach’s Ciaccona when major darkens to minor. As events speed toward their conclusion, Brahms begins to treat the motif with a certain perversity. Its ceaseless upward motion stirs memories of Mozart’s diabolically jumping figures in the hell scene of
Don Giovanni.
Only in the final bars does Brahms let us hear what we subliminally crave: a grand, contrary, descending motion, a kind of lamento fortissimo in the bass.
Reinhold Brinkmann sees the finale of the Fourth as an exercise in philosophical negation. He quotes the conductor Felix Weingartner: “I cannot get away from the impression of an inexorable fate implacably driving some great creation, whether it be an individual or a whole race, toward its downfall … This movement is seared by shattering tragedy, the close being a veritable orgy of destruction, a terrible counterpart to the paroxysm of joy at the end of Beethoven’s last symphony” Brinkmann thinks at once of Thomas Mann’s
Doctor Faustus,
in which the fictional composer Adrian Leverkühn is said to have “taken back” Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” But this may be going too far. Brahms was no iconoclast: his respect for tradition was absolute. His scary fury at the end of the Fourth may have to do with his determination to keep tradition alive. The music of the future, he implies, must be filtered through the inherited language. Premonitions of the spectral scoring of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern—the atomization of the orchestra into floating timbres—show the need for a negotiation between past and future. And the tone is not quite tragic. There is a joy in darkness here, an animal pleasure in violence. In the first variation, the brass, timpani, and strings make a curious noise-
rrrrrRUH!
rrrrrRUH!
—like the growl of a sleepy dog.
Doctor Faustus,
in which the fictional composer Adrian Leverkühn is said to have “taken back” Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” But this may be going too far. Brahms was no iconoclast: his respect for tradition was absolute. His scary fury at the end of the Fourth may have to do with his determination to keep tradition alive. The music of the future, he implies, must be filtered through the inherited language. Premonitions of the spectral scoring of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern—the atomization of the orchestra into floating timbres—show the need for a negotiation between past and future. And the tone is not quite tragic. There is a joy in darkness here, an animal pleasure in violence. In the first variation, the brass, timpani, and strings make a curious noise-
rrrrrRUH!
rrrrrRUH!
—like the growl of a sleepy dog.
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