Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [208]
Brahms’s prime achievement in the piece, though, is more intangible than a matter of expanding and refining his technique. He had already created original forms, fashioned intricate thematic work, written plenty of expressive music. Now from movement to movement there is a unity of expression that perhaps he had not found before in his chamber and orchestral music. In the quintet the sweetly nocturnal lyricism of the second movement seems a retreat from the surging passion and grim determination of the first; the demonic scherzo drives the intensity of the first movement to a higher level; the finale, after the eerie and desolate introduction, brings everything to a certain emotional equilibrium—though without the expected resolution of minor into “hopeful” major. In the racing rhythms of the finale the coiled-spring intensity of the first movement drives to the last beat, which in its descent from A♭ to G to F seems to answer the question posed by the ascent of those notes at the very beginning of the piece.
The model for that kind of expressive integration is above all Beethoven, who somehow can carry us through four movements of an abstract work like the Fifth Symphony, with its immense variety of character and color and texture, and at the end make us feel we have heard one story. Beethoven said his means for helping him achieve that quality in his instrumental music was to imagine a parallel story as he composed the piece. In only one important work, the Pastoral Symphony with its program of a visit to the country, did Beethoven spell out his narrative. In other cases he did not provide a story because that was not the point of the music, but rather a private device for achieving dramatic consistency.
Of the subtleties composers aspire to and only occasionally manage to achieve over the course of long pieces, that unity of feeling—within emotional variety—is one of the most elusive. It has little to do with technique as such, or motivic and tonal relationships as such; it cannot be taught, can hardly be analyzed, only felt intuitively by composer and listener alike. For Brahms it began to happen, perhaps, with the F Minor Quintet. Maybe the work reflected his feelings in the middle 1860s, maybe not. In any case, the emotional intensity he achieved in it seems at times anguished, at times (in the scherzo) demonic, at times tragic. Yet the whole quintet remains a unified dramatic plot without becoming monochrome: one story.
In the past that unity-in-variety had eluded Brahms, in one way or another. Ein deutsches Requiem is consistent in mood, in fact too consistent, without enough variety of texture and tempo and feeling to create the illusion of a satisfying story unfolding throughout. The Requiem, as Brahms predicted as he got to work on it, is only “a sort of a whole” despite melodic interconnections uniting its seven movements (among them the derivation of several themes from the Lutheran chorale “Wer nur den lieben Gott lässt walten”). For all its magnificence and limpid lyricism, sameness of tone is the abiding problem of the Requiem. Meanwhile, earlier Brahms masterpieces are satisfying from beginning to end, with plenty of expressive variety, but lack an overall sense of dramatic progression. To name one: each movement of the B Major String Sextet is compelling, but each also stands alone.
Brahms found a sense of one story in the F Minor Quintet. It is another quality he needed to have in his grasp before he returned to the sketches toward a symphony that he had carried around with him for so many years. As has been often said about the F Minor, the quintet did not lead to later developments in his chamber music