Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [264]
As it turned out, Brahms’s years of dodging practice did not embarrass him too much that night, so at the postconcert dinner the eyes were twinkling, and he even made a small speech.
With young composers Brahms liked to try a bit of mentoring. What little he said about his craft comes down from those neophytes who joined him for the lively suppers, who tried to keep up on his walks, who sat trembling as he went through their music page by (usually defective) page. On the train to Wiesbaden after their days in Koblenz, Brahms was relaxed and willing to talk shop with so avid a listener as Henschel.
There is no real creating without hard work. What you can call invention, which is to say a thought, an idea, is simply an inspiration from above for which I am not responsible.… It is a present, a gift, which I even ought to despise until I’ve made it my own by dint of hard work. And there doesn’t have to be any hurry about that … it germinates unconsciously and in spite of ourselves. For instance when I’ve found the first phrase of a song, say,
I might shut the book there and then, go for a walk, do some other work, and maybe not think about it again for months. Nothing, however, is lost. If afterward I approach the subject again, it is sure to have taken shape; now I can begin to really work at it. But there are composers who sit at the piano with a poem before them, putting music to it from A to Z until it’s done. They write themselves into a state of enthusiasm that makes them see something finished, something important in every bar.
With that Henschel heard the most extended statement Brahms may ever have made about his method—which says something about the results too. Brahms knew that the galvanizing ideas come on their own, in their own time, to whomever the Muse favors. Yet he distrusted the irrationality of inspiration at the same time as he relied on it. Even in composing the kind of lieder that Schubert and Schumann famously could dash off in a sitting, Brahms shunned spontaneity. (Ironically, it was Schumann who with his prophecies had choked off Young Kreisler’s spontaneity.) At the same time, Brahms had a distinctly modern feeling for the workings of what Freud would name the unconscious: ideas can grow in the back rooms of our minds whether or not we know we are working on them. Brahms would wait for an idea to ripen in his unconscious; when it was ready, it would announce itself.
If not spontaneity, what? Craftsmanly perfection, or the closest possible approach to it. On the isle of Rügen in the summer of 1876, as Brahms labored on the First Symphony, he told Henschel after looking over some of the younger man’s songs:
In some … you seem to me too easily satisfied. One should never forget that by actually perfecting one piece one gains and learns more than by starting or half-finishing a dozen. Let it rest, let it rest, and keep going back to it and working it over and over again, until … there is not a note too many or too little, not a bar you could improve on. Whether it’s beautiful too, is an entirely different matter, but perfect it must be.… I never cool down over a work, once begun, until it’s perfected, unassailable.
There lies important and dangerous advice for Brahms’s heirs in the art. Perfection before beauty, he said—perfection meaning unassailable in logic and craft, beautiful implying expressive. In preaching that ideal to a protégé Brahms exaggerated for effect; he knew nothing is perfect. But for good and ill his words echoed through the next generations of composers, some of whom did exalt logic thematic and harmonic logic over expressiveness. (Schoenberg and his pupils Berg and Webern were accused of that, usually wrongly. It could be argued that in lesser hands Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method, which owed much to Brahms in logic and in spirit, did prove amenable to a pedantic elevation