by Alex Ross
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.”
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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 attent
ion 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.
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.”