Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [229]
Whatever the mixture of earnestness and opportunism behind it, Brahms’s paean for Prussian militarism rang the public like a gong, retaining its popularity down to the catastrophic apotheosis of that spirit in the First World War. Afterward the Triumphlied, an echo of times presumed past, vanished from concert halls, rarely to be heard from again.
Somehow, with his mind full of blood and iron and the whorish French that Baden-Baden summer of 1871, and conversely with evenings spent enjoying Johann Strauss’s band in the Kurpark,54 Brahms also finished the sublime Schicksalslied (Song of Destiny).
Its orchestral introduction, perhaps the one he sketched on the beach in Wilhelmshafen in 1868, is a singular moment in his music. Ethereal and dreamlike, the timpani softly adding the Brahmsian fate-motif to the texture, the E major introduction forms one of his most yearning, piercing moll-Dur stretches. Even the opening major chords sound minor, with their scoring in low, muted strings. Brahms never achieved a more subtle orchestral texture, more expressive in its very sound. The introduction rises to a peak of longing, then sinks for the entrance of the altos declaiming Hölderlin’s vision of the unreachable bliss of the gods:
You walk up there in the Light
Upon soft ground, blessed Genii!
Gleaming divine breezes
Touch you gently,
As the fingers of the woman musician
Touch sacred strings.
After the full choir enters, the verses unfold like a hymn. Then, following an echo of the introduction that draws a line under the evocation of the gods, the middle section plummets to earth and human fate:
But it is our lot
To find rest nowhere;
Suffering mankind
Wastes away, falls
Blindly from one
Hour to the next,
Like water hurled from crag
To crag,
Down into endless uncertainty.55
The music here is the most violent Brahms was capable of, climaxing on frenzied cries of Blindly! Endlessly! He repeats the verse, the second time wrenching the music up from C minor to D minor, rendering the voices more shrill and intense. The end of the section sinks to an exhausted whisper: Down into endless uncertainty.
Then comes a gesture recalling one in the Alto Rhapsody. Brahms did not want to end the piece, as Hölderlin’s verses conclude, with an unequivocal gesture of uncertainty and despair—not quite. The obvious thing to do (as he had done in the Rhapsody) was to back up, to repeat the opening stanza with the opening music, as if the work turned its gaze once more to the heavens. In fact Brahms sketched that approach, but found it wasn’t sitting well, for reasons perhaps musical, perhaps personal. So he visited the man he most trusted for advice at that point, Hermann Levi, and together they went through the piece.
Finally Levi said: leave out the chorus entirely at the end, let the music of the opening have the last word. Brahms did as advised, with gnawing uncertainty. Even after the piece was printed he wrote Reinthaler, “I had already gone as far as writing something for the chorus, but it didn’t work out. It may turn out to be a miscarried experiment, but such grafting would only result in nonsense.”56 Besides leaving the chorus tacet for the entire last section, he reorchestrated the haunting first phrases (winds taking the earlier string music) and changed the opening key of E to C major—an uncommon example, for those days, of a piece ending in a key different than its beginning. Brahms conducted the premiere, with Levi’s orchestra and choir, in Karlsruhe