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By Root 1618 0

before he arrived in Vienna, but another manifestation of the historicism that dominated attitudes and design in his era? Brahms’s work, like the Ringstrasse, is an eclectic assemblage encompassing the whole of a tradition. His music arises from the bourgeois art-loving milieu that built the showplaces of the Ringstrasse to glorify itself, and plundered history to do it. And his music was written largely for that milieu and its equivalents elsewhere. Brahms imagined his work in the setting of middle-class Gründerjahre concert halls. When in his last years he saw his era lurching toward its end and his class withering on the vine, he despaired for his work and for all music.

The differences between Brahms and the Ringstrasse lie in the vital intangibles of unity, integrity, quality. By the mid-nineteenth century, Vienna had for a time lost its way in architecture and painting. That never quite happened in music. Brahms’s art is a kind of transcendent historicism in sound, fashioned with immensely more mastery than the committees of artists who planned the Hofoper and Parliament and Burgtheater. If the method is similar, the difference is that between genius and something close to kitsch. If the Opera House has no style, Brahms for all his eclecticism has a style as singular and dynamic as any composer who ever lived—as singular and dynamic as the whole of Vienna itself. Romantic Classicist, Classical Romantic, neo-Baroque and-Renaissance polyphonist, Brahms embodied the self-conscious and contradictory aesthetic that hobbled the Historical Style, but he made that approach breathe and live. If the Ringstrasse only assembled historical themes, Brahms assimilated and masterfully synthesized them. It should not have worked, but he made it work.

Inevitably, seams and contradictions show here and there. The innovations of his technique strain the inherited assumptions of his formal patterns. His self-consciousness shows especially in the genres of which he felt most in awe—string quartet and symphony. He had written Clara early on: Mozart could go into a tavern and compose; I can’t. Yet integrity remains the overwhelming impression of Brahms’s art. In it nearly the whole of Western classical music sings in a single voice, from the polyphony of Palestrina to the somber spirituality of Schütz, the counterpoint and tonal architecture of Bach, the grandness and formal subtlety of Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven, the gentle lyricism of Schubert.9 Only Mahler approached Brahms in such resonance with history, and in Mahler the seams, the despair and dissolution, are left to be heard and contemplated.

Brahms’s achievement required all the immense talent he was born with, and all the skills he so painstakingly taught himself. The very tension among his sources is part of his style, his triumph: his singular assimilation of Classical logic and form and Renaissance/Baroque polyphony pervaded with a Romantic moll-Dur lyricism, his characteristic mingling of bright major and shadowed minor. At the same time, his music stands like the Ringstrasse, but far higher, as a testament and validation of the Austro-German Grossbürgertum. Despite his fears, Brahms’s music survived the end of his milieu and the golden age of his class because, while it was deeply imbedded in its setting, it also transcended its setting. (Perhaps that is a thumbnail description of the most enduring art.)

Nobody ever shaped a musical career more shrewdly and had more luck in it than Brahms. His historical image seems to be that of a plodder, an artist who made himself great by sheer hard work. In fact he was blindingly gifted, as nearly every musician who heard him understood (he made sure they understood it). Brilliant as he was, Brahms faced dilemmas his predecessors had not, above all the burden of history, and he could not accept the New German answers to them. He faced these dilemmas heroically, head on, and mastered them one by one. That his music has a decisive color is a measure of his achievement. He avoided so many traps, and his music pulled together so many