Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [314]
Jenner wrote, “When he discussed a song … the first thing to be examined was whether the musical form fully corresponded to the text.” Whenever possible one should use strophic form—setting each verse of the poem to the same melody, like a folk song. “At those points where language inserts punctuation, the musical phrase has cadences.” And he should model his instrumental works on the old masters: said Brahms, “If Beethoven goes from C major to E major, you do the same; that’s how I used to do it myself.” He repeated to Jenner what he had told Henschel: “ ‘When ideas come to you, go for a walk; then you’ll discover that the thing you thought was a complete idea was actually only the beginning of one.’ Again and again he would impress upon me that I should mistrust my own ideas.”59 In other words, mistrust raw inspiration. All the same, as he once reminded Jenner, “Have I ever offered you my compositions as a model?”
Probably most bewildering to his protégés was to discover the depth of Brahms’s obsession with Wagner. Once when Richard Heuberger declared Wagner responsible for sowing confusion in young minds—something Brahms had said often enough himself—the rebuttal came quick: “Nonsense, the misunderstood Wagner has done that to them; the ones who are misled by him understand nothing of the real Wagner. Wagner is one of the clearest heads that ever lived in this world!”60 (Surely he exaggerated for effect.) As to Hanslick’s eternal naysaying, Brahms observed that the critic had “absolutely no ear, absolutely no understanding for Wagner’s work. Hanslick is old and this whole artistic approach is a foreign language to him.”61 When Hanslick made one of his occasional mild objections in print to a Brahms work, Brahms joked to Heuberger that the critic’s misunderstanding “puts me in the very good company of Richard Wagner.”62 He even expressed pleasant memories of Wagner’s endless monologues at parties, and as for the infamous personality: “Wagner’s thick-headed conflict-seeking character was necessary to create such a work as Die Meistersinger.”63
It appears, implausible as it sounds, that Brahms deliberately pushed his young admirers toward his late adversary, to get from that source what they could. In the long view he perceived Wagner as upholding the same essential principles as his own. To Heuberger, however, he added this caveat: he had personally heard Wagner tell some of his disciples, “You must work in another direction than me.”64
Through it all, Heuberger did not fail to notice that Brahms never expressed enthusiasm for Wagner in public, never tried to mitigate Hanslick’s fury. Nor, even if he occasionally tweaked Heinrich von Herzogenberg or Robert Fuchs for being too Brahmsian, did he ever insist on his disciples working in a significantly different direction than his own. In fact, the force of his personality tended to fix young composers in the orbit of his music and his principles. Brahms considered those creative and technical principles not his own at all. They were the eternal, sacred road of the gods: melody and harmony reined by immutable laws of counterpoint and form.
As Brahms kept faith with those unchanging laws, the world changed around him, and science contributed to that change. Among the epochal studies of the time, which had an abiding influence on music, was the work of Hermann von Helmholtz that established the modern science of acoustics. In his 1862 book On the Sensations of Tone, As a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music, Helmholtz attacked the dogmas of Western musical theory:
At every step we encounter historical and national difference of taste.… What degree of roughness a hearer is inclined to endure as a means of musical expression depends on taste and