Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [304]
The very idea of ending a heroic, monumental work like this might have seemed unthinkable if Brahms had not done it here, with incomparable grace. Fragments of melody from the whole symphony seem to gather until they return us to where we began: with the opening melody of the work, Schumann’s theme. Now, though, it is resolved into its true nature as a conclusion, in a gentle F major that flutters downward to its resolution, and slips into silence. The winds that began the symphony by stepping away from stability into uncertainty now end the piece in a pure, long-sustained F major chord. It is the transformation of Schumann’s theme from searching and heroic, major wrenched to minor, to the peaceful valediction that is the abstract but no less moving “meaning” of this symphony.
Carrying Eduard Hanslick’s half-formed conception of music further, American philosopher Suzanne Langer said that music works like a symbol, but an “unconsummated” one: it strikes our consciousness full of symbolic import but does not represent anything specific in the way language does. “Music is ‘significant form,’ ” Langer writes, “and its significance is that of a symbol, a highly articulated sensuous object, which … can express the forms of vital experience which language is peculiarly unfit to convey. Feeling, life, motion and emotion constitute its import.”13 In this sense, music echoes primordial dynamic shapes of emotion, sensation, movement, and experience. In the nineteenth century, this was what Walter Pater was thinking of when he wrote that in its elusiveness, its virtual meaningfulness without words or stories or images, “Music is the art to which all other arts aspire.”
Brahms’s Third Symphony can stand as a demonstration of these conceptions, how music can “mean” in the abstract. For Brahms the man it may also stand for his withdrawal behind the mask of music. Whatever Schumann’s theme meant to him, if anything in particular, he no longer felt obliged to share it. What inspired his work was his business here, not ours.
The Third reveals something else as well. A paradox of Brahms is that he functioned within the contexts of musical genres and of concert life as they existed in his time, yet composed as he lived, a loner in company. “Brahms’s symphonies,” Dahlhaus writes, are “directed not at the bourgeois public as a whole but primarily at the individual listener, at the ‘subject’ immersed in his feelings and thoughts, and are thus perceived … as though they were chamber music.… A Brahms symphony is virtually a musical attestation of the fact that each member of a crowd … is nevertheless entirely on his own.”14 As Langer implies, the music speaks to each listener in that private self, her yearnings, his aloneness—each person’s meanings.
FOR BRAHMS AS A COMPOSER, the trouble with the Third Symphony was that from its premiere by Hans Richter and the Vienna Philharmonic on December 2, 1883, and in subsequent performances all over Europe, it received full-throated acclaim. (At the Vienna premiere there had been the usual demonstration by the Wagner Club, but it was shouted down.) Critic after critic declared this symphony the best thing he had ever done.15 Despite the relief and pleasure at that, for one still at work it is a discomfiting situation. After thirty years of unrelenting labor and profound achievement Brahms suddenly found that the unthinkable had happened: for the first time since the Requiem he had conquered audiences and critics immediately with a major work, and therefore the stakes had risen.
That realization likely came over him slowly. As was his habit, in the wake of finishing a big project Brahms