It’s hard to think of another major 19th-century composer who rejected pictorialism in music as wholeheartedly as Brahms. Bruckner, maybe? Though one could argue that while his symphonies are as outwardly ‘pure’ as any, the music expresses tangible sensations and feelings through his channelling of religious and Wagnerian influences. Chopin? For all his poeticism, his musical forms are abstract and any descriptive subtitles were imposed by others – except that he felt the need to label the viscerally illustrative ‘Funeral March’ of the B flat minor Sonata as such. Even Brahms’s idol Beethoven allowed the outside world to invade his otherwise highly cogent musical edifices with the babbling brook and thunderous storm of the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony.
Aside from works with
texts – songs and choral works in his case – the closest Brahms
came to illustrating anything tangibly extra-musical was the Tragic
Overture, and even here the portraiture is generic and
non-specific in the extreme (and in some commentators’ views not
even particularly ‘tragic’). No symphonic poems like Liszt or
Dvořák; no operas or works for the theatre requiring pictorial
scene-setting like most of his contemporaries; no descriptive piano
pieces like Schumann. And there’s a tell-tale indication in that
none of his pieces – even his piano miniatures, which persist in
using generic musical titles such as ‘intermezzo’ or ‘rhapsody’
– has been given a poetic nickname, or at least one that has stuck.
Instead, we have symphonies, concertos, a wealth of chamber music,
all couched in purely musical terms. Could this be one reason why
some people don’t ‘get’ Brahms, as was discussed recently when
BBC Radio 3 devoted a week of programmes to the composer’s music?
I’ve recently been
absorbing myself in the musical intricacies of Brahms’s First Piano
Concerto, in the writing and preparation for publication of the
latest of my Masterpieces of Music eBooks. It’s a work that, by all
accounts, was written under the influence of life-changing
experiences for the young composer: witnessing at first hand the
tragic decline of his new mentor Robert Schumann, while recognising
his growing affection for Robert’s wife, Clara. The concerto’s
central slow movement has variously been described as a portrait of
either Clara or of Brahms’s great friend Joseph Joachim, who acted
as his musical and career advisor through the 1850s. But while these
options may well have been in the composer’s mind when he wrote the
music, as indeed Robert’s suicide attempt may have coloured the
portentous nature of the first movement (though in reality it was
drafted before Schumann leapt into the Rhine), it is fair to say that
expressions of these extra-musical inspirations do not reach the
audience as such. The emotions have been sublimated into musical
abstraction.
The bulk of my book, as
in the others in the series, is devoted to a blow-by-blow
description, with audio and musical illustrations, of the music
itself, with the intention of taking the reader through every
thematic transformation, each formal reference point, all the
textural and harmonic subtleties of a work that lasts some
three-quarters of an hour in performance. What I found hard to avoid
was presenting the concerto’s first main theme in terms of a
vehement question that frustrates the questioner by going unanswered.
Here I was not attempting to pose anything descriptive, but merely
pointing out how a musical line can mirror the structure, the
grammar, of prose or poetry, how a theme can be constructed like a
sentence, with principal and subsidiary clauses.
In the end this
‘analysis’, for want of a better word, reinforced my view that
Brahms, above nearly all his contemporaries, used music in an
abstract way to express nothing more than itself. Which isn’t to
degrade his ambition in any way, but to emphasise that he was the
supreme exponent of ‘pure’ music, music whose effect on the
listener’s brain and heart is achieved not by reference to things
beyond itself but instead by drawing an emotional response from the
very notes, harmonies and textures of his writing – in short the
very essence of the Classical–Romantic creator that he was.
Strangely, this might almost make him a kind of soul-mate to
Stravinsky of all people, who claimed in 1936 (at the peak of his
neo-Classical phase) that music ‘is essentially powerless to
express anything at all’. Yet we know that it can and does, and in
Brahms’s case the composer manages, by the miracle of his genius,
to express the whole of human experience in music – it’s just
that as listeners we don’t have, or have the need, to translate it
into a medium beyond the music itself.
My Masterpieces ofMusic eBook on Brahms’s First Piano Concerto is published by
Erudition.
