Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [136]
As far as Brahms was concerned most of Wagner’s writings, which presaged similar tracts from generations of artists to come, were so much self-serving gobbledygook. Yet neither he nor Joachim was prepared to dismiss Wagner’s operas as such, even while they considered his ideas, like Liszt’s, lethal to impressionable minds. At that point probably neither of them had heard or studied the operas extensively. Brahms’s acquaintance with Wagner’s stage works was to be an endeavor of decades, which little by little grew into a strange, extravagant, but resolutely private admiration.
Liszt’s writings, in fact mostly ghostwritten by his aristocratic mistress, were less categorical and dismissive of the past than Wagner’s, but still he insisted that the future did not lie in “pure” music—what he called “the posthumous party”27—but in program music and the unity of the arts. Anything other than that was mere formalism, a shallow worship of the past: “The purely musical composer, who only values and emphasizes the formal working-out of his material, does not have the capacity to derive new formulations from it or to breathe new vigor into it.… The formalists … can do nothing better or more clever than to adopt, propagate, rearrange, and perhaps work over the others’ hard-won achievements.”28
From that one can discern the more pragmatic part of the agenda. In trying to claim the future for themselves and their heirs, Liszt and Wagner also attempted to save the musical present from the encroachments of the past. They understood what the growing worship of history and its formal procedures was leading to in the nineteenth century: concert halls dominated by the music of dead composers and their living epigones. With their music and with a gigantic theoretical and philosophical apparatus, Liszt and Wagner attempted to forestall that process, to keep the living composer in the forefront. The attempt proved a historic failure.
Much of the hatred Brahms and Joachim felt for Lisztean ideas rose from what became of program music when it percolated out among the petit-Liszts of the time—say, Joachim Raff, whose symphony To My Fatherland won a prestigious prize from the Vienna Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in 1863. Raff supplied a brave program for his symphony:
First movement: Allegro. Image of the German Character: ability to soar to great heights; trend toward introspection; mildness and courage as contrasts that touch and interpenetrate in many ways; overwhelming desire to be pensive.
Second movement: Allegro molto vivace. The outdoors: through German forests with horns a-winding; through glades with the sounds of folk music.
Third movement: Larghetto. Return to the domestic hearth, transfigured by the muses and by love.
Fourth movement: Allegro drammatico. Frustrated desire to lay a foundation for unity in the Fatherland.
Fifth movement: Larghetto—allegro trionfale. Plaint, renewed soaring.29
In the 1860s, Raff stood among the most famous German symphonists, his work the Music of the Future à la mode. (Actually Brahms, perverse as always, had a certain fondness for Raff’s music.) And in the future these ideas did triumph. In literary quality Raff’s program may be sillier than the ones for Richard Strauss’s later tone poems, but it is not so different in concept. It was that future Brahms and Joachim tried to obstruct with their meager manifesto. In that, they would fail as completely as Liszt and Wagner would in trying to keep living composers in the ascendancy. As Brahms and Joachim hoped, despite the steady presence of progressive composers and program music, in the concert hall the past became established as the unsurpassable