“Or let us not forget that our dear friend Sibelius seemed to have ended his long career by composing himself into a corner with motives…and the only reason he didnt end up shooting himself in the head with a Mauser, is that bullets were both expensive and hard to find considering there were a few wars going on in Europe during his time. However, I was reminded of one comment from composer Bryan-Kirk Rheinhardt this week as I was working on these two symphonies side-by-side. To say it was met with some skepticism is an understatement. The article focused a great deal on Sibelius, as well as Mahler and Beethoven, but somehow avoided Brahms. Several years ago, I wrote a short blog post on the subject of composition as analysis. Brahms takes Beethoven’s method of motivic development and extends it into something we call Developing Variation (every musician should read Wa lter Frisch’s marvelous book Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation)
This is composition as communication, composition as creativity, composition as an act of willing beauty into the world, but also composition as analysis, as mathematics, as high reasoning.
It is also one of the towering intellectual achievements in human history.īrahms takes motivic development and formal unity on the microscopic level to a place that Bach, Haydn and Beethoven never attempted to go. It is music that has the power to shake your very soul. It is fun to play, and has fantastic solos for the members of the orchestra. However, after many long delays, much uncertainty and many years of withering self-criticism, Brahms did indeed produce a symphony which met Beethoven on his own terms, and at least this respect, surpassed him. However, there was surely nobody alive who thought Brahms, or any other future talent, would be able to meet Beethoven on the territory where he reigned most supreme in the eyes of musicologists and composers, that of motivic development, and actually surpass him. Much was expected of Brahms as a symphonist from the time that Robert Schumann announced him to the world. Sibelius: Balder and more depressed than Schoenberg. Sibelius, for me, is the composer who most directly tries to answer the challenge of Brahms in the same way that Brahms answered the challenge of Beethoven. The idea of apealing from an unappreciative present to an imaginary future would have seemed preposterous to him.” * And as open as Brahms would have been to Schoenberg’s technical approach and even his use of dissonance (and as strong as Schoenberg’s part structure is), I don’t think Brahms could possibly have accepted the meaning of form without modulation or tonal centers. No matter how mixed, it constituted a tribunal whose competence he always acknowledged. For him, these were always the decisive critics, and beyond them was the public, the community of listeners. This is one of its most essential qualities it helps strengthen its part structure and makes it stimulating for the executants. Hans Gal wrote of Brahms in his excellent biographical study Johannes Brahms: His Work and Personality “Brahms, himself a devoted performer of music, wrote music for people who make music. On the other hand, Brahms would have found Schoenberg’s idea that the future would come around to his more difficult music incomprehensible.
Of course the comparison is apt in many ways- Brahms’ extremely dense and rigorous way of working with motives, the technique known as Developing Variation, is in many ways a logical technical precursor of serialism. (You’ve got to hand it to Schoenberg- he managed to position himself pretty convincingly as the heir to both Brahms and Mahler, grabbing a chunk of Wagner’s legacy for good measure). Many knowledgeable musicians consider Schoenberg to be the musical successor of Brahms. Arnold Schoenberg- Would he have been Brahms’ favorite depressed, bald composer?