Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [134]
Its charm was opaque, however, to some of the first listeners. Soon after the Hanover premiere, Joachim received a letter from a concertgoer: “Brahms’s Serenade is a monstrosity, a caricature, a freak, which should never have been published, much less performed here: we say here, whilst the piano concerto served up to us last winter still sticks in our throats! It is inexcusable that such filth should have been offered to a public thirsting for good music.” Joachim’s employers, the king and queen, quite liked the serenade, he reported to Clara, but as for “the public—rather amusing, to use no harsher word.”23 The livid letter-writer heard the Serenade through the distorting prism of the Piano Concerto; despising that, he felt obliged to deplore the other.
The Second Serenade, in A Major, has more expressive and contrapuntal depth, greater concentration and intimacy, a more unfettered treatment of form than the First. (None of which is to say it is more entertaining.) There are five movements this time, a scherzo and menuetto flanking the striking central adagio. The choice of instruments is novel in concept, if not particularly in orchestral sonority: no trumpets and no violins, only pairs of woodwinds and horns, violas, cellos, and basses. Though sometimes the viola part stands in for violins on the melody, the real point is to give the bulk of the melodic material to the winds. If the tone of the music is generally more sober and introspective than the D Major, Brahms compensates with one of his most vivacious scherzos.
In both serenades there are awkward patches in the scoring, but the instrumentation still manages to be effective, sparkling when it needs to be, also noncommittal and anonymous. In his melodies and harmonies and textures and rhythms, Brahms had possessed a singular personality from the time of the piano sonatas in the early 1850s. If by the end of that decade he had brought his orchestration to a point of professional competence, his orchestral voice had yet to find a definable accent. Thus the startling thing about the serenades: while Brahms’s first surviving piano music sounds conspicuously Brahmsian, his first purely orchestral works are far less so.
There may lie a prime reason for the fourteen years it took Brahms to issue his next piece for orchestra. With his implacable patience, he waited until he had found a voice with instruments as distinctive as everything else in his work. And as it has been with too few artists, the fates granted him the lavish endowment of time he needed for that to develop. Time always treated Brahms kindly. Even in the happenstance of a month and year for his death, he would be lucky.
THE AGREEABLE EXPERIENCE of delivering the serenades into the world preceded, by a reliable Brahmsian rhythm, a burst of ill humor. This one, however, was not visited privately on friends but was public and historic.
As he had observed to Joachim and probably others, by 1860 Brahms was itching “to write anti-Liszt.” Joachim, having made public his break with his old mentor, was ready now to swing a sword alongside Johannes. Together they had been stewing over Liszt’s sensationalism, his rambling and histrionic music, the credo of the New German School that music required other arts to buttress it. It was the last-named above all that insulted the friends’ faith in “absolute” music, in forms and tonal patterns crafted powerfully enough to stand on their own. To them, the New German agenda was the death of music as they understood it.
Finally, their hatred for the Music of the Future took the form of a manifesto, cooked up during