Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [237]
In history the overwhelming stature of Brahms the composer has tended to obscure his significance as a performer, whether presenting Schubert and Schumann lieder with Stockhausen, or conducting orchestras and choruses. When Brahms was born, Beethoven and Schubert had been dead less than ten years and Schumann and Chopin were in their prime, Bach was still a novelty and earlier composers hardly known, and most of the music heard on concerts was new or less than a half century old. By the time Brahms died, the repertoire was made up largely of the great dead from the Baroque to the mid-nineteenth century.
Brahms’s tenure as Artistic Director of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde represents a landmark in that process of tilting the repertoire away from the present in favor of the past. It was exactly this state of affairs that Liszt and Wagner and the New Germans had attempted to forestall, by keeping the living, revolutionary composer in the forefront of the art. But in the end Brahms had more clout than Liszt, he wrote more successful orchestral music, and his aesthetic prevailed in the middle-class temples called concert halls. Eventually, when the conservative/revolutionary, Brahms/New German factions faded and the world had embraced both sides, and the leading figures were all dead, a curious echo of the factions lingered. Among artists the Wagnerian model of the artist as high priest and redeemer persisted as an article of faith for Modernist artists: the creator as revolutionary leader. In the concert hall, Brahms-style conservatism endured, preserving much of the same canon he favored in his tenure at the Gesellschaft. The few living composers he performed in those years—friends who wrote music he approved of—would mostly vanish from the scene.
As the bitter factionalism of the nineteenth century subsided, the split between artist and public steadily widened. Less and less new work was allowed into the standard repertoire, and Vienna became one of the most reactionary musical centers of all. If in the end the factional feuds of the nineteenth century did not hobble the course of music, the split between composers and the middle-class audience, a development to which Brahms contributed as a conductor, would be a defining, initially freeing, ultimately debilitating, condition of Modernism.
BRAHMS’S FIRST CONCERT with the Gesellschaft went off on November 10, 1872, the program Handel’s Dettingen Te Deum, Joachim’s orchestration of the Schubert Grand Duo, a Mozart concert aria, and a cappella choruses by Renaissance masters Eccard and Isaac. His tenure began as it would proceed: as composer and conductor, Brahms remained aware of his audience and ultimately considerate of them, and at the same time challenged them to go beyond their experience.
Creatively, at the end of 1872 he seemed to have recovered from the aimlessness and depression of the last couple of years, but he still had no particular plans. He wrote Hermann Levi that he had been much occupied with story possibilities for an opera, notably Calderón’s The Open Secret and two fantastic plays of Carlo Gozzi, King Stag and The Love of Three Oranges (the same story Prokofiev later used).22 Levi had been scheming for some time now to tempt Brahms with one libretto or another; a couple of years before it had been Sulamith, based on the Song of Songs.
As Brahms meticulously considered and regretfully rejected one idea after another, he developed various rules of thumb about opera. Among other notions, he did not want continuous music but rather numbers linked with spoken dialogue, like Mozart’s Singspiel The Magic Flute. As did Wagner, Brahms rejected realistic drama in favor of myth and legend; but the magical tales of the Italian Gozzi, in their puckish unreality, are as far as one can get from Teutonic epics, and so would keep Brahms at a useful remove from Wagner. Brahms also clearly preferred