Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [104]
Brahms’s contributions included several movements of a canonic mass in more or less Renaissance/Palestrina style. Eventually he destroyed it, but sections survive in the motet Warum ist das Licht gegeben?, Opus 75, and more in copies made by Julius Otto Grimm for a proposed performance. While other canonic exercises were discarded in later years, some ended up in published pieces—a five-voice augmentation canon in the second Opus 29 motet, and two others, it appears, in the Opus 37 Drei geistliche Chöre.
For Brahms, moving to his maturity would have much to do with counterpoint, the least forgiving of musical disciplines, and its procedures such as canon: a grown-up version of a children’s round, in which a composer fashions a melody and its echo in other voices to form effective harmony. That old contrapuntal game, at which Bach was a supreme master, is hard enough in itself; still harder is to make a canon not just technically perfect but beautiful—as are the canons of the Schumann Variations. Yet the real goal of studying counterpoint is not to write canons and fugues all the time, but rather to gain ultimate mastery of notes, to seize control of every part of the musical fabric, to be capable of composing with discipline and expressiveness in any formal design. Brahms felt driven to make his art unassailable, and to that end his technique must be unassailable. And he succeeded: he would arrive at his maturity a superb musical craftsman, as fine a one as ever lived.
Brahms’s more substantial contrapuntal studies from April 1856 survived in forms that he published later and diffidently, but which stand as telling works—an A Minor Prelude and Fugue for organ and the A♭ Minor Fugue for Organ, both in Baroque style, and the Geistliches Lied (Spiritual Song) for choir and organ (built on a double canon at the ninth). Of the A♭ Minor Fugue Joachim wrote Brahms, “From beginning to end it is wonderfully deep; I know few pieces that have made such an impression of unity, beauty, and blissful peace on me.” And of the Geistliches Lied, “On the whole very beautiful … the organ point must make a holy, devout effect. But there are many harsh places!”34 His essential accusation here is that Brahms is more interested in counterpoint than in beauty—a charge Brahms could live with. All the same, on reflection he took several of Joachim’s suggestions for the A♭ Minor Fugue.
If Joachim symbolized his own romantic life in his contrapuntal studies, Brahms naturally did the same, in forms he knew both Joachim and Clara would understand. He based the A Minor Prelude and Fugue on Robert’s Clara theme of C-B-A-G#-A. The fugue subject itself is formed from a variant and at the climax the complete theme thunders in the bass. In the A♭ Minor Fugue, marked on the manuscript “Slowly (despondently),” he uses themes from Schumann’s Manfred music,35 which had powerfully moved Brahms and Clara when they heard it in Hamburg the year before. Brahms presented this fugue to her in honor of Robert’s birthday in June 1856, inscribed “quite particularly for my Clara.”
Most subtle of all the intimate references is found in the Geistliches Lied. It seems to go back to a fantasy of Clara’s during her husband’s illness: to study organ secretly, then lure Robert unsuspecting into a church where he would find her playing his music on the instrument. Brahms’s organ introduction to the Geistliches Lied may portray that fantasy like a program piece: threads of melody accumulate as if in the quietness of a church, then the choir enters. A peculiar task, to write a heartfelt song to paint a fantasy of one’s beloved about her husband. But if Clara had imagined her