ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT The Romantic Brahms

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31231, 1 December 1966, Page 12

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT The Romantic Brahms

Is it really true that ; Brahms is to be admired as the champion of classicism in a romantic age? i “Music students were taught as much in the days of my youth,” writes the music critic of “The Times.” “By predilection, environment, and training Brahms belonged more to the past than his own time” was a blamelessly uncontroversial statement in 1943 when Ralph Hill wrote it—and the same doctrine may well be being passed on to students of today (perhaps with the rider that it was the classical element in Brahms which provided a launching-pad for i Arnold Schoenberg’s new developments in music). , It is not an attitude that I modern interpretations of Brahms, and modern appreciaj tion of them, seem to confirm. The emphasis on classicism in Brahms survives, perhaps, from the, eventually successful, defence proposed by the composer’s champions, in the years before 1914, against those who held Brahms to be dour and austere, muddily scored, drily intellectual. Richard Capell’s admirers will hardly believe that, in 1911, he could declare: “There is a Brahms style, but not a Brahms spirit. His music is an almost impersonal amalgam, just flavoured with a sort of austere and dry pessimism—hardly the note of genius.” How does this description fit the finale of the

B flat piano concerto, or the slow movements of the first symphony and the violin concerto, or the chorale-prelude for organ on “Est ist ein Ros entsprungen”? To us nowadays it does not.

At that period (only 14 years after the composer’s death) Brahms was still resented for not having espoused Liszt’s “Music of the Future”; therefore it was assumed that he wrote music of the past. MUSIC OF PERIOD Three generations after his death Brahms’s music reflects more certainly the half-cen-tury in which he worked. We can consider his songs in relation to Wolf’s and regard them as more romantic, more waywardly spontaneous, more subjective in conception, than the tautly controlled Goethe settings or the Italian Songbook of Wolf: in a few cases, Keller’s poem “Du milchjunger Knabe” for example, there are rival settings, and Wolf’s are the more intellectually refined, the more scrupulously judged in structure and detail (even if Brahms’s “Therese” is the more popular of the pair). Their last songs, Wolf’s “Michaelangelolieder” and Brahms’s “Vier ernste Gesange,” written only a year apart, show the two composers, arch-enemies in life, to be spiritual soulmates. With Brahms’s symphonies

we may appreciatively compare those of Bruckner, Dvor-

ak, Tchaikovsky, his contemporaries. Having rejected those blinkers (marked “Blundering Bruckner” and “Shallow Tchaikovsky”) which ! our grandparents affected out of noblesse oblige, we may agree that all four are masters of the symphony (after finding it difficult to master), that each pursued his own sympathetic ideal—thus reminding us that the symphony is a name for musical argument but not for the form in which it is conducted—but that their musical language and imagery are recognisably related. Bruckner’s tensions, textures, and materials, almost to the end of his life, remained more purely classical, more Haydenesque if you like, than those of Brahms, whose textures and ideas are richer in themselves, his structures more concise yet within their frame more flexible, closer' to Dvorak or Tchaikovsky (yet, we may think, more masterly than any of theirs, at least in the case of Brahms’s last two symphonies). STIFF THEME RELAXED

Brahms had a habit, more in the chamber than the orchestral works, of proposing a stiffly-shaped, carefully formulated opening theme (e.g., those in the G major sexet and F major string quintet, though you might also mention the Tragic Overture and the E minor symphony) and then developing it until it thaws and yields gracious,

human qualities of subjective expression. This is also a trait of Dvorak, never of Bruckner, whose initial themes grow more highly tensed with each structural reappearance. Particularly characteristic of the finest Brahms are his visionary aspiring tunes, the opening of the D minor piano concerto, the second subject in the first movement of the second symphony and its equivalent in the finale of the third symphony (a close kinsman of a melody in the F major quintet, by the way)— these are essentially romantic in their cut, surely. Brahms used to be admired. lin the days when programmatic music was a dirty expression. for the pure and abstract nature of his compositions. Biography has shown that the D minor piano concerto, the piano quintet, the C minor symphony and the “Requiem." all derive inspiration from extra-musical experience connected with the tragic collapse of Robert Schumann. The Tragic Overture was inspired by Goethe's “Faust.” Brahms did not deny that the G major string quintet reflected the charm of pretty girls in the Prater. There are other examples, and passages which strongly suggest a subjective inspiration (the slow movement of the Horn Trio) of the same sort which is a hallmark of nineteenth - century romantic music.

NATIONAL STYLES But most romantic of all in Brahms is his love for folkmusic and the national styles of other lands, notably Hungary, of course, in the famous Dances for piano duet and the finales of the violin concerto and second piano concerto and G minor piano quartet, and most evocatively of all in the Adagio of the clarinet quintet. In his own folk-song settings he dropped the careful scholarship that he had brought to editorial work on earlier composers (Chopin. Couperin, Handel, and others), selecting songs that he liked, whether or not they were genuinely traditional, and harmonising them as though they were by Brahms —which “In stiller Nacht,” one of the loveliest, virtually is.

It would be absurd to pretend that in Brahms’s music high romanticism reigns unchecked. Certainly he was devoted to the music of earlier periods, and understood how their techniques could fertilise his own invention. But the finale of the fourth symphony is not the less romantic in feeling for being cast in the form of a passcaglia. Certainly Brahms's temperament was characterised by two opposed forces, the Hammer and Anvil dualism of Goethe’s “Cophtisches Lied” or, as Geiringer has described them, “an urge to freedom and a desire for subjection.”

If we consider Brahms’s music within its historical context the Zeitgeist is there all the time. A Klemperer, a Menuhin, an Arrau, may play Brahms in the most superb classical style, but the spirit behind the notes is still audibly romantic, and to pretend otherwise is to miss the full flavour of the music.