Explanatory exordium

This short article is not intended to be a musicological or even academic text about the work of Johannes Brahms. It is rather a series of impressions and conclusions drawn from episodes in the life and work of the German composer, which have no other methodological material than my own intuition and access to a few books on the history of music and aesthetic theory of music in the European 19th century. Please, scholars and exegetes, don’t kill this poor little pianist with your vast knowledge.

P.S.: I don't consider the performances which appear in the example recordings as referential, and I have only chose them because they contain audio and score together.

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If there is a problematic figure in the understanding and study of the musical nineteenth century in the Germanic world, it is that of Johannes Brahms.

Whenever someone tries to put him in a box someone protests. If whoever says he is an academic, Schönberg jumps out saying no, that, in fact, the subtle progressivism of his works has not been properly understood. If Hugo Wolf claims that he is as a "failed Beethoven imitator", Hanslick protests defending him as the true successor to the true Germanic tradition. If Schumann considers him a true magician and says that “when he holds his magic wand [without double meanings] (…) wonderful visions of the secrets of the spiritual world will be opened to us”, Joachim replies “yes, very good, but don’t let him take a lot of space, because "he would consume us all." Or perhaps he is, as Furtwängler puts it, trying to save him, "the first composer in the history of music in which his role as artist-creator was greater than his historical musical role" (whatever that means, Furtwängler dixit)?

Who the hell is then this Brahms who gives us so many problems? Is he, as it seems, a free spirit, an unrivaled composer, who knew how to combine tradition and modernity like no one else did? Or, rather, have we completely misunderstood his role in the history of music and the context of his life and works?, and if so, why does he still seem to us to be a figure of utter reverence?

There are some elements from the biography of the German composer that I am interested in highlighting and commenting on in a somewhat more extensive way. It is not a question here of making a biographical journey through his life, but we will rather focus on some less-known aspects of his life experiences, to try to understand in what context our friend Johnny moved.

An element that has been notably neglected when discussing the biography of Brahms and that seems nevertheless to play a very important role in understanding his figure, is the relationship that the composer had with the popular culture of his time. Somehow, we have a vision of Brahms as a kind of ascetic anchorite, a badly-spoken solitary man who spent his hours being inspired in solitude by the Muses of Parnassus.

Right from the beginning of his life this image has been completely discredited. The stories about him playing in brothels in St. Pauli doesn’t seem to be true, but on the other hand, it has been proved that, during his youth, Brahms played in salons and made money from it, therefore he knew well the world of wine glasses, exuberant costumes, hinted seduction and entertaining music.

And someone may say, well, but this was just a way to earn money in his youth to be able to subsist and contribute to the family - which, by the way, was not as poor as it is normally depicted. Well, it turns out that it’s not the case, in Vienna he walked from salon to salon (it is possible that his great chamber music catalogue is very influenced by this fact), he received at his place the greatest musicians who visited the city, he was a legendary joke teller with the purest old-uncle-style, he traveled repeatedly to Italy to enjoy the good life by the Mediterranean and was in love with Hungarian music to which his dear friend Reményi introduced him. In fact, the relationship that Brahms established with Johan Strauss Jr. at the end of his life is perhaps little known. So much so that, apparently, the last public appearance of Brahms before his death was attending the premiere of an operetta by the composer of the Blue Danube, and it is quite famous the postcard in which Brahms signs just below of a handwritten reproduction of the melody of the famous waltz with the following words: "Unfortunately, not by Johannes Brahms." It seems clear that the world of popular music and social events in vogue in Vienna, which was an undeniable part of its tradition as an meeting point for musicians, played an important role Brahms’s conception of the world and, so much so, that it ended up permeating all his work, although this is systematically erased from history books. Not only in the Hungarian Dances or in the collection of Waltzes, op. 39, where it is evident, but in many of his works considered serious: the finale of the Piano Quartet, op. 25, the finale of the Violin Concerto, op. 77, the third movement of the Trio, op. 114, or nos. 3 and 4 of op. 119, just to give a few examples.

So where does Brahms get this reputation as a profound intellectual artist? Well, it might surely come from somewhere that has absolutely nothing to do with him, because it is quite possible that the positivist and absolutely Philo-German musicology of the late 19th and the first half of the 20th Century played a fundamental role here. In any case, I am not going to go into so much depth here, because it would need another full article that I would love to write about the necessary outdated and unfair veneration of the German musical canon, which turns out to be more a political decision than an artistic one.

It seems, however, justified that certain aspects of intellectualism belong to Brahms’s figure. And more than intellectualism, we could qualify it as a kind of obsession with the past and its in-depth study, as a kind of learning method. What we might venture to call an enlightened conservatism.

Another little-known aspect of Brahms's life is his work as a musicologist, editor, and recuperator of interesting works of European music from the centuries before his time. Mendelssohn is always referred to as the great 19th century recuperator – when, in fact, he only had a partial role in bringing back certain works by J.S. Bach - however, Brahms is not far behind from him. Our protagonist studied, revised, and published volumes of works by authors such as Gabrielli, Couperin, C.P.E. Bach, Mozart, Chopin and, of course, his beloved Beethoven. There are two interesting elements that we can extract from here: on the one hand, we see that the collection of different composers is quite rich, which lead us to think that perhaps Brahms was not such an indisputable champion of the Germanic culture and nation - whatever that means, and without alluding to certain racial ideas... -. On the other hand, it is interesting to observe the characteristics of those editions: in many cases, they would be what we call today an Urtext edition, meaning an edition that is as clean and surgically disinfected as possible of the layers that time leaves behind. It is curious how Brahms departs from that tradition of revising and changing many earlier music a la manière of 19th century and which, on the other hand, are a precious and invaluable mirror of the performance traditions of the 19th century. Brahms, on the other hand, projects a cold, almost scientific gaze towards a past which he wants to grasp in its Ursprung and not in a particular contemporary reinterpretation.

Another interesting fact in this context is the elongated shadow of the last Beethoven upon Brahms. There is a continual external comparison between the works of the composer from Bonn and that of Brahms, and apparently there was also an intense personal concern about this matter. Contemporary critics either praise him as a successor to Beethoven's nineteenth-century mystification, or they regard him as a helpless and failed creator. Hugo Wolf comments on the first symphony:

If we think of it as a symphony by Mr. Dr. Brahms, it is in part an intelligent and worthy work; If we conceive it as the work of a second Beethoven, we must demand everything that Dr. Johannes Brahms lacks: originality.

While Eduard Hanslick flatters him greatly:

If I say that no composer has come as close to the late Beethoven style as Brahms in this ending, I am not saying it as a paradoxical pronouncement but rather as a simple statement of indisputable fact. (…) Brahms's new symphony is a possession that the nation can be proud of, an inexhaustible source of sincere pleasure and fruitful study.

From our current perspective, comparing the works of late Beethoven with Brahms is something inconceivable, due to aesthetic and historical and first-rate musical misunderstandings. If Brahms tries to imitate the late Beethoven, of course, he does so in a boringly academic way and completely detached from the experimental and revolutionary spirit of the late Beethoven. In my opinion, Brahms' interest in Beethoven has more to do with his procedures and his mastery of the compositional procedures - therefore, closer to Hanslick's formalism - than, in his aesthetic ideals and his intellectual interests, which are, however, the ones that really define his final style.

It seems, then, that the predictions and flattery with which the already established Robert Schumann generously praised Brahms in the article that allowed the latter to start making a name for himself in the world of music, Neue Bahnen, was more of a punishment than an award, and made Brahms a composer obsessively interested in the past and surely somewhat powerless in his creative endeavors, at least from the point of view of intellectual progressive views, due to the force of the shadows that haunted him. This is surely where Furtwängler's idea brings up something important, namely: Brahms is a great composer, however, he has no interest in looking forward, in bringing something new to musical discourse, even if that does not detract from his musical quality. I would add, and we will comment on it later, that perhaps there is some overrating in the reception of his work, but what seems evident is that Brahms does not belong to the context where in recent years he has been put on.

Is then Brahms an academic composer? The question is difficult to answer. If, by academic, we mean something related to academia, of course, that is not the case at all with Brahms. Brahms never taught in any official institution, he never held positions in conservatories and, only occasionally, he sparely worked managing concert societies and playing concerts. Surely, academicism is not the right word. Rather than talking about academicism, we could get closer if we employ the terms formalism and, again, enlightened conservatism, that is, we are not facing someone who imposes rules established by a community of intellectuals against the creative power of this or that composer, we are, rather, in front of someone interested in a purely technical and formal way on the compositional procedures of the masters who have come before him, and who considers this method as the only one possible to be able to master the compositional language. However, he does not show any interest in the intellectual construction or the constitutive ideas of a certain style/aesthetic, probably because he considers them superfluous, and this is what we will discuss next. Trying to get closer to a certain vague definition, Brahms would enter into a kind of conservative materialism, which, surely, would be closer to composers in the style of Max Bruch or Carl Reinecke, than to those with whom he is regularly compared (Schumann, Wagner, Liszt , etc.). Putting it in today’s terms, closer to Ligeti than to Stockhausen.

The following idea is possibly one of the most widespread and accepted by the musical world: Was Brahms an intellectual?

I am going to return here to a geographical/stylistic distinction of notable acceptance within Germanic musicology, but which, unfortunately, has hardly transcended the borders of the German language - should it be, again, the propaganda of the German musical canon? -. It is well known, that Germany was one of the countries that, during the Reformation, was divided in religious terms. Broadly speaking and without considering exceptions, the northern half of it is Protestant and the south and Austria are Catholic. Thus, there are two theological conceptions of the world and two notoriously different attitudes to understanding life between these two communities, and these are differences that, even today, we can clearly observe when traveling from a traditionally Catholic city to a Protestant one within the country.

In musical terms, the would be two areas of influence: those close to Berlin and those who congregate around Vienna. This is not trivial, although it may seem – and it is - a very general and imprecise distinction. However, Catholic theology, related with a social cult, the importance of rite, visuality and speech over reading, has left a different mark in society than the Protestant one, much more inclined to reflection, individuality, the austere and reading as opposed to spoken word. As a general rule, composers who have remained faithful to the North German environment (CPE Bach, Schumann, etc.) have tended to establish very fruitful interdisciplinary relationships, to experiment with materials on which to base their works, to establish the idea as the original point of an eventual artisan work and/or a big interest in what we now call aesthetics. In fact, it is curious to observe that the very idea of aesthetic itself is a German invention and, in fact, the first time we see it written is in a 1735 publication by the Berlin philosopher and professor at Halle University Alexander G. Baumgarten. Therefore, it is not by chance that the excessive interest in formal experimentation in C.P.E. Bach, or the amazingly fruitful literary-philosophical passion of Robert Schumann in his works exist. By this I mean that there is a favorable context in Northern Germany to those kinds of artistic expressions, and not by any means that other kinds of art were not made there.

Vienna is something of a completely different atmosphere, it is the great city of opera and operetta, full of artists' parties, the city where continuous expectation for premieres is raised. Vienna represents in music the world of social life, interest in the technical mastery and hard work as opposed to the intellectual germination of a certain composition, good taste and moderation. Vienna is the city of Mozart and Schubert, Strauß and Schönberg - in my opinion, a tremendously conservative musician, just to create a little more controversy. This does not mean that in northern Germany all of this did not exist, of course it did, but unfortunately there is too little space here to enter in more detailed considerations, which would be much more interesting and refined. But it is true that there are circles of cultural influence and different hierarchies of values ​in different geographical areas, and this seems to be supported by quite a few theorists in the study of musical historiography in the German-speaking environment.

Beethoven is an interesting bridge here. A northern composer, educated with Versuch by C.P.E. Bach, who travels to Vienna and becomes an important performer there, as well as a recognized musician. However, he will never completely forget his education, and his interest in philosophy and literature will continue to grow and contribute to new ideas, which will eventually lead him into absolute experimentalism and compositional idealism of his late works. Perhaps Brahms felt also identified with this idea of ​​Beethoven as a bridge between two worlds. However, his work speaks for itself, Brahms is, without a doubt, a composer who belongs to the world of the Viennese, as we have already been trying to prove, to that world which is interested in tradition, complete mastery of compositional language, popular music and music as a social act. Brahms is not an intellectual solitary person and hopelessly tormented, he is very practical musician and a man who enjoys life through his music. It is not a coincidence that he ended up settling and developing his work in Vienna. Despite this, there is a part of his catalog that remains faithful to the German tradition, namely: the treatment of vocality in his work. The music of northern Germany tends to give preponderance to the instrumental over the vocal, so much so that, even in essentially vocal genres, the voice becomes, many times, something secondary, an addition that already belongs, before its appearance, to the instrumental construction of the work. Here Brahms is still a hamburger, which is evident in his lieder collections and in his choral symphonic work (which, by the way, would be one of the things that I would save, without any discussion, from his catalog).

Finally, I would like to discuss examples about his work and try to dialogue with one of the most famous texts that have been written about the composer from Hamburg, namely: Brahms, the progressive, by Arnold Schönberg. The Viennese composer tries here to defend Brahms as a subtle progressive, as a composer who, following Mozart, was so masterful and subtle in his compositional progressive procedures that it went unnoticed by most musicians and scholars. This idea somehow takes us back to that Viennese environment in which, perhaps, Brahms was not so much of a composer anchored in an obsession with the past and he was, surely and regarding his context, a fairly original musician and, above all, well informed within the social context in which he lived. Although, in my opinion, this idea also tells us more to us about the potential conservatism of twelve-tone music, than of the apparent progressivism of Brahms, although should remain as an outer topic.

We will focus on some of the aspects that Schönberg discusses and, immediately afterwards, we will present some counterexamples, to try to support our thesis, in which everything he claims as new has already been done by many others before, and what Brahms does is rather a full and profound appropriation of all these processes and he applies them to his own creation, giving them a systematic approach.

Firstly, he concentrats in harmonic procedures. Schönberg proposes as an example of radicalism in harmony a passage between b. 11 and 23 (0'33''-0'57'') of the Quartet, op. 51 no. 1. It is a passage with indeed has a certain harmonic ambiguity, which derives mainly from contrapuntal movements that create certain tonal movements in keys that remain far away from the main one and which do not quite cadence (B flat minor, F minor, C minor, G minor, B minor). It is also interesting how he resignifies some notes meaning in a masterful way, as it is the case of the F sharp in b. 19-21, in which is starts as a G sensible, goes on as a B dominant, and ends up as a dominant of the dominant of C.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEJ-wzoZgGI

However, if we talk about chromatic harmony, we can go as far as we want, back to Gesualdo or the enharmonic experiments of Vicentino in the 16th Century, and examples of rapid tonal movements, for example, to Neapolitan sixth, sixth degree, or seventh (subtonic) keys can be found in almost any era, with examples as exuberant as Georg Muffat's Violin Sonata. It is true that Romanticism brought with it an interesting approach regarding harmonic ambiguity, but we find it already clearly developed in Chopin, Schumann or Berlioz, among others. As a possibility to illustrate it clearly and simply, I chose the famous beginning of Mazurka op. 17, nº4, where an F Major chord in first inversion remains the main center until the appearance of the tonic (A minor) at bar 20. In this mirror game, the resignification of tension/resolution and chordal/extrachordal notes takes a primary place. In any case, at the time Brahms writes his music - let's not forget that Brahms is a composer of the second half of the 19th Century! - either tonality is dissolving by contrapuntal/chromatic means (Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler, etc.), or new harmonic substitutive paradigms are being sought, as is the case of the modality (Fauré, Janacek, Duparc, etc.). 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmLvpJySb50

Schönberg also discusses numerical irregularity of Brahmsian musical phrases as an element of interest, which it indeed is. Here he does recognize the role of Mozart, for example, as a forerunner, but he gives it an operatic and dramatic justification, namely, the sentences are irregular because it is assumed that there is a basic dramatic approach that forces them to be like that – an idea already debatable. So let's go to Beethoven, for example, a composer which himself was little fond of stage and operatic writing. Already in a sonata like op. 81a, the first theme of the exposition is structured in a 5-bars phrase, to give a random example. And let's not go into interruptions and structural elisions, like, to take another random example, that of the cadence in the b. 30-31 of the 3rd movement of the Sonata op. 31, No. 2. I say randomly, because the number of these compositional procedures in classicism and, especially, in Beethoven are very common.

Rhythm is another parameter that Schönberg discusses in detail. To give a Brahmsian example, which is not mentioned in the text, we can observe one of the second themes (b. 69-77), in which a 5/4 hemiolia occurs within a general measure of 3/4 (2'10''-2'20''). True.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L29nRXWoCM

But Schumann, 40 years earlier, is writing hemiolias in which, in a general measure of 3/4, a general hemiolia of 2/4 is produced, which is broken by a quatruplet of quarter notes in the last measure of each phrase, in the coda of the Préambule from Carnaval, op. 9 (from 1'57'' to the end), to give another example. Let's see who's skilled enough to beat the bar in this example! 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTKG7NPp0ME

Schönberg also gets into matters regarding counterpoint or interval construction - which are very much to the liking of analysts in general and which continue to be one of the main arguments for the defense of Brahms' work - but I do not think it is necessary to continue putting counterexamples and getting the reader bored, because the invalidatiy of the subtle progressivism argument is already demonstrated.

Now, does Brahms' work have objective quality? It cannot be denied that the knowledge of tradition and the in-depth study of compositional procedures made Brahms a very aware and interesting composer with a wide mastery of form, counterpoint, harmony, and motivic-structural unity of the work. Although, it is striking to observe how Eduard Hanslick, who will later become an absolute defender of Brahms's works, make several comments in his criticism of the first movement of the Piano Quartet, op. 25, upon Brahms’ tendency to use melodies that are only such because of their possible contrapuntal viability, which I fully agree on, especially in slow movements. His orchestration procedures are also objectively not marvelous, they rather reproduce or expand earlier over-exploited schemes. His formal experiments have already been tremendously surpassed by other composers of the strictly previous generation, such as Chopin or Schumann, although it is true that his way of dealing with sonata forms works, establishes new tonal relationships and has an interesting discursive approach. We could keep discussing several other characteristics of his, but it is maybe not anymore of interest.

And someone stand up firmly will say: “but Brahms gives me goosebumps”. Well, that has many possible answers, ranging from us being used to his works, to personal tastes of each one. In my opinion, it cannot be denied that there are wonderful moments in Brahms, as there are also in many other composers that we consider of second rate, and as there are also very bad moments in composers that we consider fundamental. Perhaps it is moderation and perpetuation of the technical quality what makes Brahms' a remarkable artist. Because, if I were to define the music of Johannes Brahms, in a word, it would surely be solid. A music with strong technical foundations, but which nevertheless does not have the nostalgic and profoundly new yearning of Schubert, the overwhelming naturalness of Mozart or the conceptual force of Beethoven, to name three other great Viennese names.

With all due respect, in my opinion, it is necessary to reconsider the situation of Brahms and its historical consideration, to try to understand him in his own context. And, thus, to realize that he has perhaps stolen a place from many other artists who, possibly, deserve that place more than him, or to at least recognize that he is not the composer that we have always been told he is.

4-XII-2020