Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [129]
He was hardly less fond of the solo quartet—Betty and Marie Völkers, and Marie Reuter along with Laura Garbe. The Frauenchor and its subsidiaries had some of their rehearsals and parties at the house of the Völker sisters, in the country suburb of Hamm. In later life in Vienna, Brahms had with him a photograph of the quartet. Elise, who stayed close to several choristers, kept him posted on them. The time with Brahms marked these women too; of the quartet, only the Völker sisters ever married—Marie, years later.10 Some of the singers closest to him seemed to share a sense that to have had Brahms, even if only in music and probably unspoken affection, could not be matched by anything less in their lives.
He set up the Frauenchor with a motto—Fix oder Nix, “Up to the mark or nothing”—and got to work composing for them. The music came out mostly light, beautiful, pure as a Palestrina motet but with Brahmsian colorations. Here he found the practical experience he needed in writing choral music, and in conducting. Besides his own pieces, which the girls copied into part-books decorated with elaborate drawings, he indulged his passion for older music. In their three years under his direction the women sang music by Bach, Handel, William Byrd, Hans Leo Hassler, Heinrich Isaac, Palestrina, and other Renaissance and Baroque masters.11 In his own works for the Frauenchor, Brahms donned his Renaissance and volkstümlich (national/folkish) masks, as in his organ fugues he had composed wearing his own style of Baroque wig. He possessed the gift of commandeering history without giving up his temperament, his particular musicality. (He has that in common with Stravinsky, equally himself as neoprimitive and neoclassicist.)
With the slight, atavistic period pieces of the later 1850s and early 1860s, Brahms did more than pass the time and sharpen his craft. As with the contrapuntal studies, the Renaissance and Baroque and volkstümlich experiments of those years helped free him from the burden of personal reference in his work. In that respect the choir was a signpost pointing toward his mature music.
In his full maturity, Brahms would largely pull back from Schumann-style symbolism. He had discovered that autobiography could only take him so far, to a point of technical or aesthetic uncertainty. Young Kreisler’s passion and suffering, and the Schumanns’, gave him the first two movements of the D Minor Concerto, three movements of a C# minor piano quartet, perhaps the B Major Trio, some lieder and smaller pieces, perhaps the first movement of a symphony in C minor (if he began it then). In turn, that music helped him put his feelings to rest. The trouble was that symbolism and psychodrama could not teach him orchestration, could not give him a finale for a piece when he was unsure how to approach a last movement. Likewise, E. T. A. Hoffmann may have inspired the quartet in C# minor, but that was no help when Joachim pointed out, after a couple of readings of the piece, how awkward that key is for strings. In pursuit of the perfection he demanded of his work, Brahms was to conclude that only craftsmanship and patient labor could address problems like those.
So the masks of Renaissance contrapuntist and Baroque Kapellmeister helped deliver him from reliance on autobiography, though the weighty events of his life would always find an echo in his work. In going beyond autobiography, he developed an interior dialectic between a composer born to Romanticism and (another mask) a willful Classicist. Eventually four centuries of Western music, from Palestrina to Schumann and even Wagner, became part of Brahms’s persona, the masks overlapping and blending as in a Hoffmann story. What else could he do if, as he confessed to Clara, he had perennial difficulty getting music to flow from his heart?
In his maturity,