BLESSED ARE THE SAD
LATE BRAHMS
The composer Morton Feldman once told a story about music and meaning. “Two guys visit Haydn, two journalists from Cologne,” Feldman said. “They ask him about literary, programmatic pieces and he says, ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘oh, I wrote this piece which was a dialogue between God and a sinner.’ Big theme, right? And they said, ‘What’s the name of that piece?’ He said, ‘I forget.’”
Feldman’s joke—based on an episode from Haydn’s biography—could have been told about Johannes Brahms. It could have been told
by
Brahms. This titan of German music, whom Hans von Bülow placed with Bach and Beethoven in the league of the “three B’s,” had a wily sense of humor, and he often did a variation on that little dance with meaning—a feint of disclosure, a quick step back.
In 1879, Brahms wrote a characteristically devious letter to the composer and conductor Vincenz Lachner, who had inquired about a passage in Brahms’s Second Symphony. The work is ostensibly a pastoral scene in the summery key of D major, beginning with horn calls from afar and ending with an earthy dance for orchestra. But ominous shapes glide beneath the surface—low chords in the trombones and tuba, pungent dissonances in archaic cadences. Why such “gloomy lugubrious tones” at the outset of a light-filled piece, Lachner wished to know? Brahms replied:
That first entrance of the trombones, that belongs to me—I can’t get along without it, nor the trombones. Defending the passage would require me to be long-winded. I would have to confess, by the way, that I am a profoundly melancholy man, that black wings
incessantly flap above us, and that in my output this symphony is followed—perhaps not entirely by accident—by a little essay on the great “Warum?” [the motet
Why Is Light Given to Him That Is in Misery?
]
.
I will send it to you if you do not know it. It throws the necessary sharp shadows across the bright-spirited symphony and may explain those trombones and timpani.
At this point, Vincenz Lachner and all of us reading over his shoulder are thinking, “Aha! The Master is giving away secrets!” The Second Symphony has a subtext, and it is Job’s despair, a blasphemous longing for death, quite literally a “dialogue between God and a sinner.” Then Brahms laughs out loud: “Please don’t take all this too seriously or too tragically, especially that one passage!” And he goes on to describe a passing dissonance in the closing bars of the movement as a “sensuously beautiful sound” that “comes about in the most logical way—entirely of its own accord.”
In other words, it’s all a question of technique. Such things as black wings and light in darkness and dialogues with God are sweets thrown to musical children. When we grow up, the music will be sufficient in itself. Brahms more or less repeated the joke in a letter to his publisher about the
Warum?
motet and its companion piece,
O Savior, Fling Open the Heavens.
He proposed, in the interest of saving space, the following advertisement: “Motets by Joh. Br. No. 1.
Why?
No. 2.
Oh!”
Yet it is not so easy to forget those flapping black wings. They are like Dostoyevsky’s polar bear, the one you are supposed to try not to think about. The message to Lachner is revealing because it mirrors a mechanism in the music itself. Not only does Brahms the letter-writer hint at, and then withdraw, meanings in his music; Brahms the composer does the same. The Second Symphony begins with a dipping-and-rising three-note figure, the thematic kernel of the entire piece. The opening paragraph—warm, deliberate, lushly scored—establishes the symphony’s dominant mood. But the music soon loses momentum: the texture thins out, the strings wend their way downward, and that hooded Wagnerian quartet of trombones and tuba creeps onstage. The three-note figure sounds bleakly in the woodwinds, the timpani rumbling underneath. Thus Brahms breaks the conventional narrative rhythm of a symphonic movement. He has the tone of a storyteller who launches into his tale—“Once upon a
time, in my youth …”—and then falls silent, overcome by some vague memory.
Just as remarkable is what happens next. Having shot a ray of darkness into a world of light, Brahms recovers light without struggle. He shrugs, and resumes. The main key of D major comes back, anchored more firmly in the bass, and the three-note pattern blossoms in a fluid, streaming violin line. It is a “fresh beginning,”to quote Reinhold Brinkmann’s book
Late Idyll: The Second Symphony of Johannes Brahms.
For Brinkmann, the music “conceals the unfathomable as the subterranean dimension of a seemingly secure composition.” The tremor returns periodically, and in the coda of the movement it nearly takes over: the strings and a solo horn lose themselves in an aching chromatic extension of the first idea. Then the winds burst in with a new theme. It is a chipper, bouncing ditty, quoting Brahms’s own song “Es liebt sich so lieblich im Lenze” (“Love is so lovely in springtime”). The music is as naïve as the words: the symphony might be trying to cheer itself up, cast off a nameless sadness. Perhaps this is what Brahms has been meaning to tell us all along. But it’s closing time: the spring song whirls away in a fast diminuendo, like a group of revelers vanishing down an empty street. In the last bars, the horns come full circle, with the sad-happy opening chords.
Brahms is a complicated proposition. On the one hand, he may be the most purely classical of composers, the one who epitomizes the latter-day ethos of the art. He never wrote an opera; he disdained the Romantic fad for self-dramatization; he cultivated old forms of the Classical and the Baroque; he destroyed dozens of his own works in an apparent effort to leave an exquisite corpse for posterity. Richard Taruskin identifies Brahms as a pioneer of the historical mind-set—“the first major composer who grew up within, and learned to cope with, our modern conception of ‘classical music.’” If you were in a prosecutorial frame of mind, you might argue that Brahms inaugurated the age of academic music—the practice of generating works that are designed more for scholarly dissection than for popular consumption.
At the same time, he is an intensely personal, even confessional artist. For those who love him, he is the most companionable of composers, the one who speaks to the essential condition of solitude in which we all find ourselves sooner or later. He addresses us not in the godlike voice of Bach, nor in some Mozartian or Schubertian trance, but on roughly equal footing,
as one troubled mind commiserating with another. A work like the Second seems to exhibit Brahms’s own hour-by-hour struggle to stave off paralyzing depression. I say seems, because an uncertainty remains. What might be the composer’s point of view in the street scene that I have suggested? Is he the mournful one who is left behind, tangled up in blue? Or is he one of the laughing revelers who dance away? Are we the lonely ones, we listeners in the dark?
Every great composer stays frozen in one readily reproducible image—Bach grimacing under his wig, Mozart staring out with his tight little smile, stormy-haired Beethoven clutching a pen. Brahms took the step of manufacturing his own iconography: in 1878, at the age of forty-five, he grew a shaggy beard and hid behind that apparatus until the end of his life. With his silver mane and roly-poly belly, Brahms sometimes looked like a grumpy Santa Claus, but more often he had the appearance of an overbearing professor. The image went hand in hand with the stereotype of Brahms as a ponderous composer, a captive of tradition. Gunther Schuller, in his book
The
Compleat Conductor,
writes, “The opinion held in many quarters that Brahms’s music is heavy and turgid, rather square, and even ‘academic,’ exists primarily because most
performances
of his music are ‘heavy’ and ‘turgid,’ emotionally overladen.” Although Brahms is firmly enshrined among the classics, you still find pockets of resistance—echoes of the Francophile Boston critic Philip Hale, who once jested that Boston’s Symphony Hall should have signs reading EXIT IN CASE OF BRAHMS.
Brahms came from a humble background, although, as with Verdi, the extent of his deprivation has been exaggerated. Many biographies state that Brahms grew up in a slum, and that his father, a working musician who played in bands, forced him to make money for the family in various unsavory ways, including playing the piano in sailors’ taverns and brothels. It has been said that Brahms was scarred by the squalor of his youth, to the point of “shutting down,” in the language of contemporary psychobabble.
Modern scholars have stressed that the Gangeviertel, where Brahms grew up, became a crowded slum only in the later nineteenth century, and that at the time of his birth, in 1833, it was a respectable working-class neighborhood. It would seem that Brahms had a quiet, well-protected
childhood; that his parents, though far from wealthy, put all their resources into his musical training; and that the settings in which he first performed—businessmen’s homes, local restaurants—were by no means unsavory. Styra Avins, who has painstakingly edited and annotated Brahms’s letters, points out that the composer’s early biographers “confused lack of money with lack of morals,” spinning tales of sleaze and degradation.
Where did these tales come from, though? It’s possible that Brahms himself told some version of them, elaborating on a situation that he had observed in passing. He may have looked in a window on his way to a lesson and later fantasized himself on the other side of it. The young Brahms had a fertile imagination: like his older colleague Robert Schumann, he steeped himself in the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann, using them to fashion alternate artistic personalities. Tellingly, Brahms emulated Hoffmann’s solitary, half-mad Kapellmeister Kreisler, signing letters and compositions with the name “Kreisler Junior.” Even if the stories of playing piano in sailors’ dives and being fondled by prostitutes are the invention of others, they remain interesting. They remind us how much speculation Brahms initially inspired—this lovely young man with the flowing blond hair.
Brahms’s exit from the Gängeviertel was almost surreally easy. Through the Hungarian violinist Eduard Remenyi he met Joseph Joachim, who, as violinist and composer, was on his way to becoming a major figure in nineteenth-century music. Joachim sent Brahms to see Eiszt—a meeting that went sour when the young man dozed off during Liszt’s B-Minor Sonata—and also encouraged a visit to Schumann. In August 1853, Brahms set off on a walking tour of the Rhine, ambled into Schumann’s home in Düsseldorf some weeks later, and presented several of his piano works. Shortly after Brahms had begun playing, Schumann summoned his wife, the pianist Clara Schumann, and both of them listened transfixed. Robert promptly submitted a brief article, titled “New Paths,” to his old magazine, the
Neue
Zeitschrift für
Musik, hailing Brahms in terms not unlike those he had bestowed on Chopin more than two decades earlier (“Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!”). After extolling various of Brahms’s youthful works, Robert wrote, “It seemed as though, roaring along like a river, he united them all as in a waterfall, bearing aloft a peaceful rainbow above the plunging waters below.” Clara, for her part, found herself the object of an infatuation that she reciprocated in emotional terms, although the relationship probably remained platonic.
One of the works that Brahms played for the Schumanns was the Piano Sonata No. 1 in C Major, and while it exhibits the obvious borrowings of a novice composer—the keyboard-jumping opening chords of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” are echoed at the outset—it is a work of startling finesse. The movement that most clearly telegraphs the Brahms to come is the Andante, which takes the form of variations on a folkish melody called “Stealthily Rises the Moon.” (The tune comes from the 1838—40 anthology
Deutsche Volkslieder;
it resembles the hurdy-gurdy song that ends Schubert’s
Winterreise.)
After giving the theme the full Romantic treatment, Brahms adds an epilogue in which he transforms its opening phrases into a translucent Bachian meditation, with a chromatic pattern woven into the inner voices and the single note C droning in the bass. At once learned and tender, this music has the voice of someone considerably more mature. Brahms possessed an old soul from the start.
Schumann’s panegyric put Brahms on the map; the sonata and a set of songs were published before the year was out, with other works quickly following. Inevitably, the sudden ascent of this unknown youth stirred up a certain amount of skepticism, envy, and hostility. Brahms had his failures early on, notably when the First Piano Concerto flopped in Leipzig in 1859. In a letter to Joachim, Brahms gave a blackly humorous description of that event—“At the end, three hands attempted to fall slowly into one another, whereupon, however, a quite distinct hissing from all sides forbade such demonstrations”—and then struck a tone of equanimity: “I believe this is the best thing that can happen to one; it forces one to collect one’s thoughts appropriately and raises one’s courage. I am plainly experimenting and still groping.” Schumann’s praise gave Brahms the confidence to proceed at his own pace. It made possible the sensational refinement of Brahms’s mature output. It bought him time.
Schumann soon departed from the scene, in a hauntingly gruesome way. In February 1854, he attempted suicide by jumping into the Rhine; he died two years later, in an asylum. The cause of his insanity, a doctor’s diary suggests, was syphilis. Brahms may have been aware of the nature of his mentor’s illness, and taken it into account. In January 1857, less than six months after Schumann’s death, Brahms wrote to Joachim in praise of a book called
Self-Preservation, a Medical
Treatise
on
the Secret
Infirmities and Disorders of the Generative Organs Resulting from Solitary Habits, Youthful Excess, or Infection
, and a little later he wrote to Clara Schumann with the advice that passions are “exceptions or excesses” that “must be driven off.” (No doubt he was speaking more to himself than to her.) He returned to the theme in 1873: “
The memory of Schumann is holy to me
. The noble, pure artist ever endures as my ideal and I will probably never be allowed to love a better person—and will also, I hope, never witness the progress of such a dreadful fate from such ghastly proximity—nor have to share so in enduring it.”