Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [144]
The first products of his stay in Hamm were the G Minor and A Major Piano Quartets, parts of both sent to Clara for comment in July, and the Handel Variations that bear the date September ’61. Clara and Joachim both complained about the somber first movement of the G Minor, its strange concentration on the secondary key of D and its looseness of outline. They were not yet accustomed to the dialectic Johannes had begun with tradition, his ingenious explorations of forms his “Schatzkästlein” called “the product of thousands of years of the greatest masters’ efforts.”
MUCH OF THE MUSICAL STRIFE of the nineteenth century, the War of the Romantics, would be fought over the issues of traditional versus literary-based formal models, with sonata form as the great sticking point. Brahms was associated with the camp upholding the old patterns, and rightly so. Yet he never used them less than creatively, always adapting them to the nature and expression of the work at hand; and in a few pieces his material drove him to carve unique forms. (Actually it was Wagner who invented the term “absolute music,” meaning instrumental music with no explicit connection to a text—and usually using traditional formal models. He invented the idea in order to condemn it.)
The procedures to which nineteenth-century theorists applied the label “sonata form,” most often used in the first movements of pieces, were rationalizations of what for Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and other Classical-era composers had been almost instinctive reflexes of musical grammar and syntax. A Mozart first movement, for example, unfolds for the listener’s ear as logically as a drama or an essay: here is a theme or connected themelets, which we string out like so, and then with this little transition we are carried to another theme, in a new but not too distant key (and if the leading theme is bold to get our attention, the second is apt to be gentler for contrast). Then after the second theme runs its course there is a closing section, maybe touching on a new theme or quasi-theme. Theorists named this whole process the exposition of a sonata-form movement, because it presents the principal themes of the discourse.
To drive home the basic ideas and revisit their pleasures, the exposition is repeated. Next we enter a section in which one or both themes, like characters in a drama, are caught up in a restless flux of fragmented themes and shifts of key and texture and rhythm, known as the development section. Then, with a transition dramatic or mysterious or playful as desired, we are brought from the instability of the development back to the stability of the recapitulation, where we hear the leading theme and the other ideas of the exposition restated with an important difference—everything is now heard in the main key, resolving the harmonic tensions of the exposition and development into stability. The movement usually closes with a section called a coda, which anchors us with a strong finish in the main key. Thus the theoretical, textbook norm of sonata form: exposition with two (or more) contrasting themes, repeated; development that amounts to a quasi-improvisation on the themes; recapitulation resolving all the material into the main key; coda to round things off.
As with most statistical norms, few pieces actually conform to that pattern. Yet by the time of Brahms’s maturity, generations of musicians and concertgoers had absorbed this organizational framework as if it were an eternal archetype, almost a Platonic form: as Eduard Marxsen taught Brahms, part of the “eternally uncorruptible” in music. During the nineteenth century, like hearing a familiar story