Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [145]
Rather than these timeworn formal landmarks, Liszt and the New Germans handed listeners stories, poetic or philosophical ideas, or vocal music. Their models were first, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, in whose course we arrive in the country, watch peasants dance, flee a thunderstorm, and so on through a little story. The other model was Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, with its tale of an artist who takes opium in a fit of despair over a lost love, and experiences a series of hallucinations, which are the movements of the symphony; in each movement the beloved is represented by a recurring melodic idée fixe. For both programmatic and absolute music, the new institution of the program note kept listeners squinting into their literature during the performance, to help find their way through increasingly long, mazy works.
Maybe as an inevitable result of theoretical codification, in the nineteenth century traditional forms tended to fossilize into dogma—part of what drove the New Germans to search out alternative shapes in literary and dramatic models. Charles Rosen writes that for the theorists who defined sonata form in the first half of the nineteenth century, “the purpose of the definition was not the understanding of the music of the past but a model for the production of new works. The definition does not work well for the eighteenth century because it was never intended to.”29
In other words the Classicists Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, none of whom knew the term “sonata form,” treated its principles far more freely and dynamically than theorists pretended. Many Haydn movements, for example, are more or less monothematic. One of Brahms’s advantages over most of his contemporaries was that he understood all that. If he encamped with the traditionalists, he was still too intelligent, canny, and historically aware to fall into the trap so many composers did and theorists encouraged, of treating form mechanically, as a mold to pour notes into.
An entry in Clara’s journal from November 1861 shows him pondering these issues: “An interesting conversation with Johannes about form. How the old masters had the freest form, while modern compositions move within the stiffest and most narrow limits. He himself emulates the older generation and Clementi in particular ranks high in his opinion, on account of his great, free form.”30 Even in the scope of freedom and innovation he allowed himself, Brahms was looking further backward than his contemporaries.
BRAHMS’S DIALECTIC WITH TRADITION takes graphic shape on the manuscript of the G Minor Piano Quartet, completed during his first summer in Hamm (work on it may have gone back several years). In the opening movement he wrote down the usual repeat sign at the end of the exposition. Then he scribbled it out and inserted a new section of ten bars, beginning the development without a repeat. These added bars are deliberately misleading—a literal restatement of the first ten bars of the piece, a false repeat of the exposition. At the end of those ten measures there is a pause, then the listener finds himself not in the expected place, back at the beginning, but in the development. In turn, this uncertainty over where we are in the form creates a tension that itself becomes part of a dramatic, edgy development section dominated to the point of obsession by a driving sixteenth-note