THE EARLY BRAHMS
When the twenty-year-old Brahms met Robert and Clara Schumann for the first time in the fall of 1853, he carried with him the unpublished manuscripts of several works, mostly written for solo piano. Amongst them were the F-sharp-minor Sonata, the E-flat-minor Scherzo, and the C-major Sonata. Brahms promptly went to the parlor piano and played these three works, as well as other compositions that have not survived. The Schumanns were overwhelmed. There was something raw and elemental in these creations; they seemed to spring uncorrupted from the forces of nature; they were unfettered by conventions and expectations; and, most strikingly, they seemed to personify the youthful, adventurous spirit of the unknown and mysterious composer himself.
Schumann thought of the sonatas as “symphonies in disguise” – so removed were they from the elegant and “pianistic” style in vogue. The E-flat-minor Scherzo dazzled and shocked him because of its wild and relentless energy. This music, true and free from contrivance, promised to redeem art from its present fallen state, or so Schumann ardently believed. He was confident Brahms was up to the task. Schumann’s dithyrambic article in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in October 1853 made the young Brahms famous overnight. As a result, the publisher Breitkopf & Härtel showed interest in publishing his work. Noteworthy is the fact that Schumann insisted that Brahms go to Leipzig to play for the publisher in person; he strongly felt that the composer’s rhapsodic and exuberant manner of performing his own music was inseparable from its being understood. The advice bore fruit; the C-major Sonata was published as opus 1, the F-sharp-minor as opus 2, and the Scherzo as opus 4. The F-sharp-minor Sonata actually predates the C major, but Brahms considered the latter work more worthy, deeming it a more cogent structure. The Scherzo is an even earlier composition, dating from 1851 when the composer was eighteen.
SONATA IN F-SHARP MINOR OP.2
The F-sharp-minor Sonata is a bold and passionate work. Completed in November 1852, it is also the most “Kreisleresque” of the three published sonatas. In his early years, Brahms thoroughly identified with the half-mad composer, Kreisler, E.T.A. Hoffmann’s literary creation. He even signed some of his manuscripts “Johannes Kreisler, Jun.”, or “young Johannes Kreisler.” Indeed, events in Brahms’ own life appeared to echo Kreisler’s ideas, particularly in his mystical understanding of unrequited love. “Kreisler” defines love as only true musicians experience it: “they carry their chosen lady in their hearts and wish only to sing, to write poetry, and to paint for her, and are comparable to the gallant knight of old in matters of courtoisie.”
To the ultimate romantic Brahms was at that time, the beauty of idealized love lay in the impossibility of its fulfillment, and this he was experiencing in his relationship with Clara Schumann. It is no coincidence that the sonata most marked by Kreisler’s imprint is also the one he dedicated to her, the “exalted” lady.
It would be disingenuous to claim that events in the composer’s life and his affinity with Kreisler’s state of mind somehow explicitly play themselves out in the F-sharp-minor Sonata. Yet, clearly the work is saturated with human intention. The striving for an unattainable ideal, with all the yearning, impulsive outbursts and restlessness that such a state engenders, reveals itself throughout the sonata metaphorically and is developed through the stylistic and structural argument found in the music itself.
Equally significant is the strangeness in structure and style. The music had a fantastical quality bordering on eccentricity, which Brahms did not shy away from during this period. Indeed, eminent Brahms scholar Bernard Jacobson describes the sonata as “a weird and utterly original work.” Here again E.T.A. Hoffmann’s influence is inescapable: music is the realm where the supernatural erupts into everyday existence; music becomes the key to some greater, more fantastic and sublime reality beyond our present world.
In the F-sharp-minor Sonata, Brahms strove to achieve his own image of the sublime. Artistically and temperamentally, he was irresistibly drawn to it. To characterize the essence of what he may have been after, it suffices to quote William Smith, Longinus’ eighteenth-century translator. According to Smith, the sublime consists in “boldness and grandeur” and possesses that “power of raising the passions to a violent and even enthusiastic degree”. Brahms’ search for the sublime does come at a cost, however: by its very nature, it shuns the merely beautiful, pretty, and pleasurable. Thus the two notions – the sublime and beautiful (or at least the beautiful in a conventional sense) – must be at odds. Another eighteenth-century writer and thinker of exceptional perspicacity, Edmund Burke, elicitates the distinction:
Sublime objects are vast in their dimension, beautiful ones comparatively small; beauty should be smooth and polished; the great is rugged and negligent… Beauty should not be obscured; the great ought to be dark and gloomy; beauty should be light and delicate; the great ought to be solid and even massive. They are indeed ideas of a very different nature, one being founded on pain, the other on pleasure.
Rugged, negligent, dark, gloomy, solid, massive – this describes the great and sublime F-sharp-minor Sonata in a nutshell. Brahms was to reach for the same ideal of the sublime – albeit perhaps in a more controlled and perfected manner – in many works to come.
Allegro non troppo ma energico
Heroic and imposing, the movement bursts forth in a flurry of wild and virulent octaves. As spontaneously inspired as the salvo may be, it also forms the basis for architectonic procedures Brahms utilizes throughout the sonata. This holds true not only in the contrapuntal complexity of the development section but in other movements as well. The soulful melody of the Andante is derived from this initial motivic cell, and, in turn, the theme of the Scherzo, rhythmically altered, is nearly identical. An ominous motive in triplets serves as a bridge to the soaring and impassioned second theme. In the development, restlessness, tender reminiscences, and an imposing imitative counterpoint play out in a dialogue between the primary and secondary themes. All fury is unleashed in the coda, which ends – ghost–like – in a deathly whisper.
This Andante con espressione is constructed as a theme and three variations, whose melody – as well as its atmosphere of wintry bleakness – are borrowed from an old German love song:
Mir ist leide How sad I am
Dass der Winter beide That winter
Walde und auch die Heide Has laid bare
Hat gemachet Kahl… Both the forest and moors…
Each successive variation brings forth a renewed urgency to the pervasive sentiment of melancholy. Brumous passages in pianissimo give way to fortissimo eruptions, which punctuate the desolate musical landscape. Yet not all is despondent. Magnificent and visionary in its grandeur, this intense and poetic music succeeds in intimating something altogether greater and beyond all earth-bound sorrows.
Mysterious and caustic, the Scherzo – marked attacca – unexpectedly springs forth from the unresolved Andante. Its contrasting Trio, both lyrical and in the rhythm of a Siciliana, possesses the epic and grandiose qualities of an Ossianic legend. Fiendish trills in chords and octaves embellish the return of the Scherzo, which concludes — after a brief trill-enhanced reminiscence of the Trio — with an impetuous outburst.
Amongst the four movements, the Finale exemplifies the most striking departure from the classical tradition. Gypsy-inspired, this music doubtlessly takes its cues from the colorful, kaleidoscopic shifts from slow and improvisatory to fast and fiery, which is typical of Romani performance. Brahms doubtlessly indulged in this formula during his concert tours with Eduard Remenyi, Hungarian violinist of considerable talent and panache. In sum, the style embodies an emancipation from the rhythmic tyranny of unbending beat and bar line. An Introduzione in the form of a recitative unveils the primary melodic material of the Allegro non troppo that follows. In the development section Brahms gives free reign to his fertile invention. Contrapuntal textures are juxtaposed with fanciful, Gypsy-derived sequences; subdued and revelatory chords grow into an Animato of tremendous agitation; massive, cathedral-like sonorities are piled one upon another. The philosophical and searching ideas found in the introduction return with the coda. Improvisatory, ornamented with trills and diaphanous garlands of figuration in thirty-second notes, it is a stroke of daring inspiration on the part of the young composer who realizes E.T.A. Hoffmann’s ideal of a music capable of conjuring up the magical strangeness of otherworldly realms. All the preceding drama then slowly dissipates into a tender and ethereal glow – a conclusion consistent with the visionary power of a “young Kreisler”.
SCHERZO IN E-FLAT MINOR OP.4
“Pure as the diamond, tender as the snow” is the way Joseph Joachim described Brahms in the first months of their acquaintance. The great violinist understood better than anyone the artistic nature of his friend’s childlike blend of adventurousness and frankness, character traits he was not the only one to observe in Brahms at the time. Another great artist in his own right, author H.G. Wells wrote with vivid insight on the subject of why such rare, childlike qualities are only found in exceptionally creative individuals:
Children pass out of a stage – open, beautiful, exquisitely simple – into silences and discretions beneath an imposed and artificial life. And they are lost. Out of the finished, careful, watchful, restrained and limited man or woman, no child emerges again… no jewel is given back again at last, alight, ripened, wonderful, glowing with the deep fires of experience. I think that is what ought to happen; it is what does happen with true poets and true artists…
– The Passionate Friends
It is precisely the qualities of openness, the lack of artificiality and pretense, the wild excitement, the headlong daring and nearly savage willfulness embodied both in the E-flat-minor Scherzo and — doubtlessly as well — in Brahms’ manner of performing it that generated so much awe and enthusiasm on the part of contemporary listeners.
The work’s originality was thus recognized from the start. The piece has held up to the present against such criticism as composer Joachim Raff’s observation that its beginning too closely resembles Chopin’s earlier Scherzo in B-flat minor, and more recently, Charles Rosen’s analysis of the strong structural – perhaps too strong to be coincidental – connections between the two works. Besides Chopin’s apparent imprint on the overall design, which is constructed as a Scherzo with two contrasting, lyrical trios, Brahms’ Scherzo belongs to an altogether different world. Its daemonic principal theme permeates the work to a nearly obsessive degree. The blunt, driven quality of this heroic theme is decidedly Germanic. Absent is the suave, declamatory elegance so prized by Chopin. If anything, Beethoven’s spirit – if not content – looms over the first Trio, while echoes of Schubert resonate throughout the second. Such “influences” however, should not be situated as much on the level of conscious borrowings for the purpose of implementing certain compositional ideas. Rather, they should be seen as another manner in which Brahms renders homage to those heroic voices from the past, much in the same way that he draws inspiration from the allusive power of Nordic legends.
FOUR BALLADES OP.10
After producing three sprawling, impassioned piano sonatas and the impetuous E-flat-minor Scherzo, Brahms entered a period of soul-searching. He had always composed quickly, naturally, and in an unrestrained manner; his new approach would be more deliberate, self-conscious, and disciplined. As a result, the Ballades op.10 are masterpieces of musical economy coupled with an astonishingly expressive power. The four miniatures intentionally exclude any pianistic effect, and absent are the daredevil virtuosity and sheer physicality required of the earlier piano works. Here Brahms’ search for intimacy and poetic immediacy demand that awareness of the instrument per se and its physical properties be laid aside.
The four pieces, while often performed separately, really form an in-dissociable whole; they are linked not only by their structural and tonal relationships, but, most importantly, by a poetic unifying theme. Composed in 1854 and dedicated to Julius O. Grimm, all were inspired by the old Scottish ballad “Edward,” which Brahms knew from Johann Gottfried Herder’s German translation. The original text is found in Relics of Ancient English Poetry by Thomas Percy (1729-1811).
Ballade No.1
The tragic and Nordic atmosphere of the poem “Edward” is strongest in the first piece in D minor. The legend behind the poem is one of patricide:
Why does your sword so drip with blood, Edward, Edward?
And why so sad are ye?
“Oh, I have killed my hawk so fine…”
Yet Edwards’ words are deceiving; it is not his hawk he has killed, but his own father. Three measures into the Ballade are all that is necessary for Brahms to create the tone of foreboding that pervades the piece. Schumann, finding this Ballade marvelous, remarked on its strange novelty. Paradoxically, this freshness derives from Brahms’ delving into the past as a source of inspiration. The wide-spaced open fifths and octaves recall medieval plain chant; their hollow sonorities ring archaic and create the atmosphere of a distant legend.
Brahms’ aesthetic outlook is often defined by his shunning of any programmatic content. Yet it is clear from such pieces as the D-minor Ballade that he was willing at times to draw from extra-musical sources for inspiration, as there is a precise relation between the music and the text of the poem. This said, the piece is more a poetic illustration of the text rather than its actual mise en scene. If the Andante sections set the brooding mood of the poem, the Allegro, raw and deliberate, sets in music its action: Edward’s crime. In this Allegro, Brahms chooses not to develop its five-note theme, but instead employs repetition to create the sentiment of inevitability. The atmosphere of a remote Scottish legend returns with the Andante and concludes the tragic tale.
Ballade No.2
The ambiance of a Nordic legend continues in the second Ballade in D major, but the initial character is one of tender serenity. The piece is built on stark contrasts. A brusque Allegro, driven and determined, interrupts the bucolic simplicity of the Andante. A third theme (molto staccato e leggiero) creates a magical escape from the preceding dramatic action. After an ominous transition, the Allegro returns. This section most vividly evokes the bardic tone of the “Edward” poem. Brahms finishes with a return to the Andante, wherein the sense of vulnerability and nostalgic reticence are further heightened.
Ballade No.3
Brahms’ penchant for rhythmic inventiveness and vigorous displacement of accents runs throughout the third Ballade, which he entitles Intermezzo. The piece is really a miniature Scherzo with Trio, a ternary form which would become a model of predilection for the Intermezzi of his later years. In a sense, it is Brahms’ small-scale and succinct answer to the Scherzo op.4. The Scherzo section is agitated and mysterious – and permeated with skittering, ghost-like passage work. The Trio, by contrast, evokes an angelic chorus, crystalline and bell-like in its purity. An underlining anxiety begins to accumulate up to the return of the Scherzo, which is even further veiled in mystery. Only with the final B-major chord is a sense of peace and resolution reached. This chord not only sets the tonality of the following Ballade, but also announces its comforting warmth.
Ballade No.4
Referring to this Ballade, Schumann wrote of the “wonderful way the strange melody hesitates between major and minor.” Indeed, Brahms explores such ambiguity throughout the piece, which is the most intimate of the Ballades as well as the most emotionally subtle. The initial theme is an ardent, expansive melody of tender longing; the second (Piщ lento) retreats further inward. Brahms indicates Col intimissimo sentimento, ma senza troppo marcare la melodia. A poetic meditation, the melody only slowly emerges from the harmonies which envelop it within a kind of musical fog. The two-against-three cross rhythm, so frequently employed in Brahms’ later compositions, produce a muted palette of tonal color. The melody returns with a slightly more ornamental accompaniment, followed by a section in chorale style, both noble and earnest in expression. Part of the initial theme is heard again as a chorale, this time epic and tragic with its sense of irremediable loss. Then the Piщ lento reappears, but soon fades away into evocations of obscure and distant legends.
Note on interpretation
I have described Brahms’ early piano music as possessing those characteristics that correspond to Edmund Burke’s definition of the sublime. It must be bold and grandiose, restless and passionate, solid and massive, while at times rugged, obscure, negligent. If one believes – as I do – that the object of a re-creative effort is to make manifest through the imaginative faculty those musical metaphors that constitute a work’s essence, then one particular question inevitably arises: what is the role of the printed text and its authority in determining which choices will be made in bringing the music alive in sound?
Brahms himself, in a somewhat tongue-in-cheek letter, complains about how his first two sonatas and scherzo, when published for the first time “look much too ordinary and timid in their new form, indeed almost philistine. I still cannot get used to seeing these innocent nature children in such proper clothing. ” Although lighthearted in tone, the letter not only shows a composer’s surprise at the transformation from hand-written manuscript to printed text, but also reveals his misgivings about the printed score’s ability to fully represent the sound-world he was imagining. In practical terms, the artistic interpreter must be confronted with the fact that the printed score, no matter how precise the composer’s notation, does not encompass all the critical elements necessary for an expressive performance. Often it inadequately conveys the variegated accents, gradations of tone, and rhythmical ebb and flow that the music seems to demand.
This is particularly true in the treatment of rhythm. The jagged and fierce spontaneity of a motif may be best rendered by subtle prolongations, or reductions, in rhythmical values which create an intentional unevenness. Indeed, there are practically limitless ways for such nuances to be realized, according to the context. Rhythm should above all be sensitive and reactive to what is happening harmonically. On a larger scale, just as the human heartbeat increases or decreases in speed according to the emotion of the moment, so must the rhythmical pulse follow its own movement of flux or reflux.
Brahms was well-aware of these issues and readily recognized the necessity of tempo elasticity. He rejected the sort of relentless, philistine time-beating that too often masquerades as rhythmic rigor. Answering a query by Georg Henschel concerning tempo indications in the German Requiem, he explained: “the metronome is of no value… I myself have never believed that my blood and a mechanical instrument go well together. The so-called ‘elastic’ tempo is moreover not a new invention… con discrezione should be added to that as to many other things. ”
It should then come as no surprise that Brahms’ own style as a pianist has been described as free, spontaneous, improvisatory in character, but also capable of rhythmical drive and clarity when the music demands. Judging by some of the rare recordings realized by musicians whose playing Brahms was familiar with and admired, for example the pianist Ilona Eibenschütz (who gave the premiere of the Klavierstücke op.118 and 119) or his lifelong friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim, it becomes clear (nothwithstanding con discrezione) that his level of tolerance for rhythmic license could be surprisingly high by present-day standards.
Another great nineteenth-century German composer who was keenly aware of the need for tempo elasticity was Richard Wagner. His seminal book Über das Dirigieren (On Conducting) of 1869 is essentially a plea to musicians and, more particularly, conductors to abandon sterile and pedantic time-beating in favor of a flexible approach. “In classical music written in the later style modification of Tempo is a sine qua non. ” By classical music written in the later style, he means Beethoven as well as the masterworks composed in his day – with his own music of course included. Wagner advances the notion that each musical idea, while possessing its own quintessence, also possesses its corresponding tempo; and this is true even if the tempo is at variance with other sections of a single, continuous movement. Manipulations of tempo are ultimately expressive in purpose, while equally motivated by structural concerns. The unity of a symphonic movement, for example, is not necessarily harmed by tempo changes, but may rather be enhanced by them, since each important moment is made to stand out in full relief.
Wagner does not present his ideas on tempo modification as simply an argument in favor of one equally viable approach over another. Rather, he poses the issue as an ethical one of utmost significance. To Wagner, the pseudo-classicism advocated by the opponents of rhythmic freedom is a mere cover for shallow music-making, a refusal to dig deeply. Such musicians and critics reveal an all-too-easy willingness to rely on the automatic, the imitative, the conventional. “ A poor and pretentious pietism at present stifles every effort, and shuts out every breath of fresh air from the musical atmosphere. ” His opponents refuse to
enter deeply into a subject or, as the phrase goes, not to make much fuss about anything. Thus, whatever is high, great and deep, is treated as a matter of course, a commonplace, naturally at everybody’s beck and call; something that can be readily acquired, and, if need be, imitated. Again, that which is sublime, god-like, demonic, must not be dwelt upon, simply because it is impossible or difficult to copy … these people look upon music as a singularly abstract sort of thing, an amalgam of grammar, arithmetic, and digital gymnastics; – to be an adept in which may fit a man for mastership at a conservatory or a musical gymnasium; but it does not follow from this that he will be able to put life and soul into a musical performance.
While warning of the damage that arbitrary nuances of tempo can do to a masterwork, he explains the virulent opposition with which his own tempo modifications were met by the general lack of imagination and understanding on the part of a majority of his musical colleagues. Since they could not really feel and comprehend, these musicians preferred to take refuge in the safety and respectability of an ‘objective classicism’, doubtlessly as a sure means for safeguarding their preeminence and privileges. In place of “excrescencies” and “exaggerations”, a new conception of classicality is thus evolved. According to Wagner, it results in such “shallow meddling with all that is most earnest and terrible in the existence of man.”
It is interesting to note to what extent the pseudo-classicism for which Wagner shows so much disdain bears resemblance to what are generally acknowledged as “modernist” tendencies in interpretation. A preoccupation with surface detail, a basically smooth and uniform tempo throughout entire movements, the systematically literal and mathematical execution of rhythmical ideas, and a general streamlining effect together characterize what might be called a “modern” approach to performance. Although it may be argued that such a style merely reflects our time and tastes and thus rightfully holds preeminence, it is clear from Wagner – as well as other sources – that such interpretive tendencies are nothing new. Although some musicians followed the trail Wagner blazed, from Hans von Bülow to Wilhelm Furtwängler, many did not. In any case, the positivists and “objectivists” eventually won out.
The significance of Wagner’s text lies not so much in what it prescribes, but rather in its spirit, which is essentially one of greater and expansive freedom. Wagner trusted that any artist worth his salt would refuse to be guided and controlled by a communion of established views, the chill of the academy, or that convention known as “modern taste”. From the record, we can safely assume that this is an approach Brahms would have embraced – and we should as well.
Eric Le Van
Copyright October 2009