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In eternal hands

And they use it

As they please.

Let that man fear them doubly

Whom once they exalted!…

The rulers turn away

Their blessing-granting eyes

From entire generations,

And refuse to recognize in the grandson His ancestor’s Quietly speaking features,

Which they once loved.

Thus sang the Fates;

In caverns of night

The exile, an old man,

Listens to their songs,

Remembers his children and grandchildren

And shakes his head.

And so sang Johannes, a man once exalted by fate, named almost a god, now nearing fifty calling himself an exile, and watching his culture fall to pieces. When he said to George Henschel, “As much as we men … are above the creeping things of the earth, so these gods are above us!” the gods he spoke of were his personal ones, his real religion: Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and the others. Now he approached his age with the gods of the earth vanished, and the ones in the heavens silent and unapproachable.

The searing introduction that begins Gesang der Parzen might be called a distorted echo of the joyful, elevated, Handelian tone of the Triumphlied. Perhaps here Brahms takes back the Triumphlied’s forthright exaltation of victory and empire: the patriotic work is in D major, the Parzen in D minor. Brahms generally called it Parzenlied for short—the Song of Triumph found its negation in the Song of Fate.

The opening harmonies are among the most unsettled Brahms ever wrote, not revealing the central tonality of D until the third measure; there is scarcely a solid harmonic resolution in the piece. The beautiful but sorrowful conclusion, its harmonies drifting free of any definable tonality (an evocation of mankind with no foundation left), became a favorite passage of Webern and Schoenberg. (There is a general difference in Brahms’s and Wagner’s means of obscuring tonality: at least from Tristan on, Wagner tends to do it with more dissonant harmonies—mainly ninth chords, diminished and half-diminished sevenths—Brahms with triads changing in unconventional ways. Sometimes his metric instability also works to unsettle the tonal sense.)

Billroth complained about the dissonance and ambiguity of the beginning: “Hanslick … will probably get a shock in the first few bars.… You will, of course, have your conscious and unconscious grounds … to emphasize these abnormal hardnesses of the Parzen, but our modern ears are sometimes pained by it.” To that Brahms offered another of his few glimpses into the workshop: “Think back for a moment to the minor chord [in the third bar]. Think of how the modulation from then on would be without any effect, and also quite restless, as if one were searching for something, unless one had heard this progression before and very much emphasized!”53

He means that the dissonant and unsettled are keys to this work, and that to begin with stability would have created the wrong impression. Clara, orthodox as she tended to be about such matters, knew exactly what he was getting at: “Words fail me to tell you the joy I have had from the piece—the gloomy beauty of its harmonies. The progression in the second bar, of which Billroth speaks … is precisely what stirs me most.”54 For the “gloomy beauty” she is probably thinking also of the chorus part, especially the first entrance on “Let the race of man fear the gods!,” another of Brahms’s dactylic bardic chants.

To Brahms the musical evocation of fate required minor keys, simple inexorable rhythms, and the kind of pounding kettledrums that here accompany the entrance of the choir. That evocation rings throughout Gesang der Parzen. Even within the usually abstract and Olympian voice of the mature Brahms, and despite the quiet resignation of the ending, the work is an evocation of universal despair—and Brahms’s despair, who had no other children than music: the old man listens to the songs of the fates and remembers his children and grandchildren, and shakes his head in the caverns of night.

In the Alto Rhapsody, die Wüste was the wasteland of a solitary and exile. Now Brahms had come