Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [187]
The meaning of those notes to him resounds breathtakingly in the music, but he shaped their effect for the listener by craft, every dimension contributing its part. Melody, harmony, texture, timbre, and form coalesce to make the climax what it is: those notes, those rhythms, at that moment in the form. Musical logic has overtaken personal symbolism. In the end, Agathe’s name in the first movement of the G Major Sextet is as good a demonstration as one can find of what composition is about, at its most subtle and moving—and abstract.
Which is to say, with the G Major Sextet Brahms freed himself not only from the memory of love and gnawing guilt but from the burden of his life in his art. After this there are few games with pitch-symbols in his music. From now on, in large degree Brahms disappears behind his work as behind a mask. That is not to say that his own experience vanished from his music. Rather, in most of it his experience receded into the background, as private inspiration and impetus. With Brahms as with most creators, art may arise from the artist’s life, but that does not make it about the artist. To whatever degree possible work should be about every feeling person living in the world. For Brahms as for others, autobiography was part of the inspiration, a tool among other tools, not ultimately the meaning of his art. In his maturity he came implicitly to understand that while the personal may motivate many things in a work, it justifies nothing, excuses nothing.
So in this work in effect Brahms refutes, in sound rather than in prose, the New German doctrine that the music of the future must be derived from literary sources. At the same time, in its inspiration and its hidden message, the piece refutes Hanslick’s doctrine of pure abstraction in music. This is a piece inescapably about love and loss—Brahms’s particular love and loss, and anyone’s. And by that, from at least the point of the G Major Sextet, he stood alone in the aesthetics of his time. No less, in its universality soaring beyond any personal anguish of its creator, this work like all Brahms’s mature music refutes the common late twentieth-century doctrine that autobiography is the main point of art. At exactly the moment of deepest subjectivity in his music, Brahms repudiates autobiography as an essence.
In the paradox of his music, his unshakable individuality combined with a determination at once to challenge his audience and to meet it partway, Brahms preserved a pre-Modernist conception of art as a social act, part of the fabric of society rather than opposed to it. He wrote music for the bourgeois audience who supported him and for the musical institutions that class supported—the symphony orchestra, the amateur choir, the chamber ensemble, the private performance at the parlor piano. With his waltzes and Hungarian Dances, he was one of the last first-rate composers to write manifestly light, sociable Hausmusik.
If Brahms has always appeared to lie outside the story of late-nineteenth-century aesthetics and of Modernism, it is because his music and its implications, like the man himself, followed no path but his own—yet at the same time a path continuing a social and artistic tradition and fully aware of (even if mostly resisting) the present. Brahms wrote only a few sentences implying a philosophy of art, not much more than “art is a republic,” but his music itself builds a persuasive esthetic, in the century when music was king of the arts and much of the dialogue about it carried on in propaganda tracts.
His retreat