Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [265]
For himself, on the face of it, Brahms did elevate craft above expression. Years before, in the counterpoint exchange with Joachim, the violinist berated him for letting the logic of the lines create ugly harmonies or textures. That objection became an occasional but persistent refrain from Clara, Elisabet von Herzogenberg, and any number of critics. His music proves, though, that in his secret heart Brahms cared more about beauty than he admitted, just as he turned away to hide his tears when a little folk song setting of his moved him. With the North German bourgeois craftsman censoring his tongue, Brahms never spoke of the yearning, lyrical Young Kreisler voice that flowers so often in his work.
Yet that yearning voice has been a prime source of his popularity all along. The lyricism and emotion draw listeners into his music before they come to grips with the complexities—the sheer difficulty of absorbing his constant protean variation, his tonal deflections, his experiments with conventional forms. The middle-class audience loved the beauty and warmth of his music, not the logic. Surely Brahms understood that. Even if he made considerable demands on his listeners, even if he never coddled them in his big pieces, he still never forgot their feelings or his own. He made sure the warmth stayed in his work. But he would never admit it.
The results show the value of his method. Few major works of his caught on unequivocally right away; most of them, like his reputation as a whole, had a slow steady ascent to a summit of acclaim from which they never fell. (Some, notably the Violin Concerto, had not reached that summit when he died.) If Brahms’s advice to composers was pedantic, he had the genius and the passionate secret life, and the unsearchable favor of the Muse, to transcend an aesthetic that placed craft over beauty. Most of his protégés did not have those advantages. History has largely forgotten the names of the ones who took his advice.
In a letter Brahms had jokingly invited George Henschel out to Sassnitz for the company of the ladies, so that the young man in his spare time could “compose songs for them, the badness of which I in turn will expose in my free hours.” When Henschel turned up on the island Brahms kept his promise, pounding away at the exigencies of craft as he understood them, in words he would repeat with any number of composers.
In writing songs you must endeavor to invent, simultaneously with the melody, a healthy, powerful bass.… Then, my dear friend, let me counsel you: no heavy dissonances on the unaccented parts of the bar, please … I’m very fond of dissonances, you’ll agree, but on the heavy, accented parts of the bar, then let them be resolved easily and gently.
Here he spells out the composing technique that his few surviving sketches imply: he worked out the continuity of a piece largely in terms of unbroken melody and bass line (with an almost obsessive preference for the two in contrary motion), then added the inner voices, textures, and instrumental colors. No doubt in practice the process was rougher, less linear than this tidy model; but Brahms’s lifelong efficiency as a composer shows his methods to be direct and habitual.
In the celebrated man Henschel discovered the humility too, the unaffected awe before the giants. Brahms’s modesty became more pronounced as he grew older, and sensed that his work had reached a plateau he was not likely to rise above.
I … confess that it gives me the keenest pleasure if a song, an adagio, or anything of mine has turned out particularly well. How must those gods, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, have felt, whose daily bread it was to write things like the St. Matthew Passion, Don Giovanni, Fidelio, the Ninth Symphony! What I can’t understand is how people like myself can be vain. As much as we men … are above the creeping things of this earth, so these gods are above us.
Most of the time, after the morning’s struggle with the page, Brahms wanted to talk anything but shop. That summer the two men took to the ocean